Well-Being Depends on Social Comparison: Hierarchical Models of Twitter Language Suggest That Richer Neighbors Make You Less Happy.

ABSTRACT: Psychological research has shown that subjective well-being is sensitive to social comparison effects; individuals report decreased happiness when their neighbors earn more than they do. In this work, we use Twitter language to estimate the well-being of users, and model both individual and neighborhood income using hierarchical modeling across counties in the United States (US). We show that language-based estimates from a sample of 5.8 million Twitter users replicate results obtained from large-scale well-being surveys - relatively richer neighbors leads to lower well-being, even when controlling for absolute income. Furthermore, predicting individual-level happiness using hierarchical models (i.e., individuals within their communities) out-predicts standard baselines. We also explore la

SUBMITTER: Giorgi S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10099468 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature