The American dream is a self-oriented one. Fulfilling it means getting everything you want out of life. But it is not necessarily a call to live selfishly. It is a call to sanctify what you can achieve and desire—to ennoble the pursuit of happiness.
This way of understanding happiness—getting what you want—is hardly unique to America; it's more or less common in what Mohsen Joshanloo, a psychologist at Keimyung University, in South Korea, calls "individualist countries." In Canada, Australia, and many "Western European cultures," he says, people tend to believe internal efforts and "pleasure-seeking" lead to happiness. This individualistic way of conceiving a happy life isn't culturally universal, of course, he says. There's another predominant way to understand happiness and how to attain it. People in "collectivist countries," such as Japan, India, Thailand, and in many Middle Eastern and African cultures, says Joshanloo, tend to regard community and tradition as happiness' source.
In a recent study, Joshanloo wanted to find out if people's conception of happiness—as hedonistic or community grounded—could affect their level of happiness. So he and his colleague Aaron Jarden, a senior lecturer at Auckland University of Technology, asked nearly 7,000 people, across 19…
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