World Happiness Report 2026
Lara Aknin, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, John Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D. Sachs and Shun Wang
In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than 15 years ago. Over the same period, social media use has greatly increased. Many people blame social media for this fall in happiness, but does this hypothesis stand the test of rigorous scientific analysis?
19 March 2026
The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.
This publication comes under the following theme: Causes and effects of wellbeing