World Happiness Report 2026

John F. Helliwell; Richard Layard; Jeffrey D. Sachs; Jan-Emmanuel De Neve; Lara B. Aknin; Shun Wang

World Happiness Report 2026

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?

Chapter 1 Executive summary: happiness and social media
Chapter 2 International evidence on happiness and social media
Chapter 3 Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level
Chapter 4 Translating scientific evidence into effective policies for health and technology requires care
Chapter 5 Adolescent life satisfaction and social media use: gender differences in an international dataset
Chapter 6 Social media, wasting time, and product traps
Chapter 7 Problematic social media use and adolescent wellbeing: the role of family socioeconomic status across 43 countries
Chapter 8 Internet use, social media, and wellbeing: the role of trust, social connections, and emotional bonds
Chapter 9 Social media use and wellbeing in the Middle East and North Africa

Appendices & Data

Statement of Competing Interests
Data for Figure 2.1
Chapter 2 Statistical Appendix
Chapter 3 Appendix
Chapter 4 Appendix
Chapter 7 Appendix
Chapter 8 Appendix
Chapter 9 Appendix
To access data from the Gallup World Poll, please see our data-sharing page.

Editors

John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Lara B. Aknin, and Shun Wang

Citation

Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2026). World Happiness Report 2026. University of Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre.

ISBN

979-8-2513794-7-1