World Happiness Report Highlights the Importance of Everyday Kindness

Do you live in a kind community, a kind society, a kind country?

This may be a fraught question for some of us today, as we see evidence of unkindness (and worse) in the news at every turn. But according to the World Happiness Report 2025, how benevolent our society is—and, separately, how benevolent we think our society is—matters for everyone’s well-being.

The World Happiness Report draws from the annual Gallup World Poll, which surveys around 1,000 people per country. The happiest countries are ranked according to residents’ average life satisfaction: how they would evaluate their life as a whole on a scale of 0–10, from the worst possible to the best possible.

This year, the United States fell slightly from #23 to #24 out of nearly 150 countries, just below Germany and the U.K. The happiest countries were Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

“This year, for the first time, none of the large industrial powers ranked in the top 20,” write John F. Helliwell and his coauthors, noting that Western industrial countries have generally become less happy since 2010. So which countries have become happier and why? To find out, read on.

The happiest and helpiest countries

In addition to the overall rankings, this year’s World Happiness Report also ranked countries in six other categories related to kindness and generosity. The first three were based on how many people gave money to charity, volunteered, or helped a stranger in the last month—actual kindness behaviors. The other three were based on people’s predictions (from 2019) about the benevolence of others: whether a wallet they lost would be returned by a neighbor, a stranger, or a police officer.

According to the researchers, what we expect our neighbors to do after finding a wallet represents how we feel about our local social context, and people who think a neighbor would return it also tend to say they have someone to count on in life. Our predictions for strangers reflect our feelings about the broader social fabric, and they’re linked to our sense of social trust. Our expectations of police officers, a proxy for our public institutions, vary the most between countries.

While the U.S. is currently the 24th happiest country in the world, it ranks higher on all these measures of actual and expected kindness—except for two. The country is #12 in donating and helping strangers, #15 in volunteering, and #17 in expecting neighbors to turn in a lost wallet. But Americans are more wary of police and especially of strangers, ranking #25 in expecting police to track down a wallet’s owner, and #52 for strangers.

Meanwhile, Nordic residents, who are some of the happiest, are also among the most likely to believe that misplacing a wallet won’t end in cancelling your credit card and getting a new ID. Here are the top five countries for each form of kindness:

• Donating: Indonesia, Myanmar, Ukraine, U.K., Iceland
• Volunteering: Indonesia, Liberia, Kenya, Tajikistan, Nigeria
• Helping a stranger: Jamaica, Liberia, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Sierra Leone
• Expecting a neighbor to return a wallet: Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Austria
• Expecting a stranger to return a wallet: Norway, Iran, Algeria, Netherlands, Finland
• Expecting police to return a wallet: Norway, Finland, Germany, Austria, New Zealand

The researchers note that these different forms of benevolence can interact and play off each other. For example, they observed that countries with strong social support nets (such as paid parental leave, universal health care, and social assistance programs) may have less need for donating and volunteering—while, at the same time, citizens tend to trust others in the wallet test. In places where people trust the police less, like Jamaica, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, there is a strong culture of helping strangers—much higher than in places like the U.S.

How kind societies make us happy

After COVID-19 began, the World Happiness Report found a pandemic of kindness—an increase in donating, volunteering, and helping strangers in every region of the world. Although there was a decline in these activities from 2023 to 2024, kindness (by these metrics) is still about 10% higher than pre-pandemic. Helping strangers—the most common of the three forms of kindness in most places—is still 18% higher.

This year’s report finds that countries where more people donate, volunteer, and help strangers are happier countries. But it might come as a surprise that how kind we think our communities are—in this case, whether they’d return a lost wallet—matters twice as much.

In other words, believing we can trust those around us to treat us well has a significant impact on our well-being. As Helliwell and his team write:

Believing that others would return a wallet predicts a larger boost to life satisfaction than a doubling of income. Believing that your lost wallet would very likely be returned is accompanied by life satisfaction that is higher by more than three-quarters of a point on the 0–10 scale. This effect is almost twice as large as being unemployed. It is also higher than the negative effects of comparably measured expected harms from mental health issues or violent crime.

Perhaps this offers a clue to the disillusionment and distress many Americans are experiencing today about their fellow citizens.

Expected kindness also seems to matter for happiness inequality, the gap between the happiest and least happy in a given country. When people see others as fair and helpful, other research finds, they’re more resilient to stressors like unemployment, divorce, health issues, discrimination, and unsafe streets. A kinder society tends to benefit people who are struggling the most, the most. 

Can we change our perceptions?

There is evil, violence, and hatred in our society today, no doubt. It’s also possible that as our brains focus on that, they are failing to see some of the good.

For example, research consistently finds that we’re too pessimistic about the kindness of others. Across 40 countries, in experiments where wallets were “lost” for science, 1.8 times more were returned than people expected. In Toronto, a full 80% were returned, almost 3.5 times as many as Torontonians would have guessed. In 20 North American cities, two-thirds of wallets found their way back to their researcher-owners.

“People may be made needlessly unhappy by their unwarranted pessimism,” write Helliwell and his coauthors.

If we focus on the good and the kindness in others, this research suggests, it might help us feel better (which, it’s also worth noting, may help us take action against the evil and cruelty that does exist). For example, one new study found that university students underestimated how empathic their peers were. But once they were alerted to this potential misunderstanding—and told how much other students want to help others who are down and meet new friends—they were more likely to connect with others and build larger networks at school.

Returning a lost wallet is a small action, one that we might not even think matters that much, except maybe to the person who dropped it. But in this report, it represents something more fundamental about whether we can count on those around us, near and far. It’s a reminder that even as we try to push for larger changes in our societies, our small actions can broadcast to our neighbors that they are safe and cared for—which always matters.