Abstract
Based on previous theoretical models, the present research investigated three different psychological constructs (religious belief, trust in government, and the experience of personal control) as moderators of the link between country’s economic growth (i.e., Gross Domestic Product) and income inequality (i.e., Gini) on health, happiness, and life satisfaction. Using a large cross-national data set (N = 490,579), we found that personal control predicted health, happiness, and life satisfaction above and beyond reliance on God and trust in government. Religious belief predicted greater health and buffered the negative effect of income inequality on health only in wealthy economies, but yielded negative correlations with health in poor economies. The associations between personal control and trust in government with well-being outcomes were consistently positive across different levels of countries’ GDP and Gini. Further, personal control also served a compensatory function by buffering the negative effect of income inequality in wealthy economies.
Highlights
Using data from 104 countries, we found that across all levels of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gini citizens who experience greater personal control are more likely to be healthy, happy, and have greater life satisfaction
The important finding about the interaction of personal control and country’s GDP and Gini was that, for both cases when GDP is high or low, increase in personal control is associated with decrease in the well-being gap created by income inequality
This might not be the case for poor economies because of limited opportunities, making it difficult for even those who have more personal control to overcome inequality
Summary
Statistical‐ ly, we aimed to test whether personal control yields independent predictive value for well-being outcomes once we controlled for the variance in well-being explained by belief in God and trust in government To pursue this question, the present research revisited the roles of religious belief, trust in government, and personal control, including all three in the same model that predicted citizens’ well-being around the world. It is arguably possible that personal control might be important only in countries that are more well-resourced and where resources are distributed more because only in those places can individuals afford personal control (through access to those resources) to make their lives better These above-mentioned perspectives proposed that the means of personal control in Western, individualistic countries, or richer and fairer countries, would be higher than other countries that do not fit into those categories. We predicted that personal control would correlate more strongly with well-being outcomes at lower levels of GDP and higher levels of inequality
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