Abstract
Does spending time in beautiful settings boost people’s happiness? The answer to this question has long remained elusive due to a paucity of large-scale data on environmental aesthetics and individual happiness. Here, we draw on two novel datasets: first, individual happiness data from the smartphone app, Mappiness, and second, crowdsourced ratings of the “scenicness” of photographs taken across England from the online game Scenic-Or-Not. We find that individuals are happier in more scenic locations, even when we account for a range of factors such as the activity the individual was engaged in at the time, weather conditions and the income of local inhabitants. Crucially, this relationship holds not only in natural environments, but in built-up areas too, even after controlling for the presence of green space. Our results provide evidence that the aesthetics of the environments that policymakers choose to build or demolish may have consequences for our everyday wellbeing.
Highlights
Areas of great natural beauty have long been considered to be locations in which one might hope to feel a greater sense of happiness
We aggregate the scenicness data to the level of Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA)
We choose the level of LSOA for our analysis as this is the smallest area for which we have data on other environmental factors which we wish to take into account, such as percentage of green space and whether an area is urban, suburban or rural
Summary
Areas of great natural beauty have long been considered to be locations in which one might hope to feel a greater sense of happiness. Limitations in measuring subjective wellbeing have largely been due to the resources required to administer a survey to establish how happy an individual is In experimental situations, this constraint has normally resulted in only one or two measurements being taken, for a restricted number of participants[1,2,9]. Where major survey initiatives have facilitated the collection of subjective wellbeing data for thousands of participants, questionnaires have usually been administered at most once a year[4,5]. Such approaches have not enabled researchers to measure the fluctuations in happiness that may occur as individuals experience a range of environments during their everyday life.
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