Lie to Me: Who Declared Finland the World’s Happiest Country?

Want to know how happy someone is? Ask them. Or watch how often they smile. But what if those two approaches give you completely different answers?

We chose the second approach and gathered observations of smiling from dozens of research sources. The ranking we produced bore little resemblance to the one in the famous World Happiness Report.

In the television series Lie to Me, Dr. Cal Lightman spotted discrepancies between what people said and what their faces showed. Lightman is fictional, but the character was inspired by psychologist Paul Ekman [1], one of the best-known researchers of emotional expressions. We decided to try a similar approach on entire countries rather than individual people.

Finland ranks first in the World Happiness Report 2026. Our experimental model of observed smiling placed it 114th out of 125 countries and territories. Egypt came first, although its position rests on just two groups of research sources. That does not necessarily mean Egyptians are happier than Finns. So why did the two rankings produce such different answers?

We began with an axiom: how often people smile spontaneously is the main directly observable sign of happiness as they experience it. Testing that idea across countries would require comparable observations, and there are very few. We decided to see what the existing research on smiling could tell us anyway.

Can a smile reveal happiness? Ekman’s research

In 1990, Paul Ekman, Richard Davidson and Wallace Friesen studied people’s facial expressions as they watched emotionally charged videos. They focused on the Duchenne smile, which engages muscles around the eyes as well as the mouth. The longer such a smile lasted, the happier participants rated themselves (correlation r = 0.59). Its association with amusement was stronger still (r = 0.70).

Watch people for long enough in comparable situations, and how often they produce certain kinds of smiles may reveal something about their emotional experience. But a smile is no foolproof test of sincerity: people can produce one deliberately, and a happy person need not smile all the time. Gardiner and colleagues [2] later found more modest associations between smiling frequency and overall self-rated happiness (r = 0.18 and 0.26 in two contexts).

Happiness on camera: 405,000 video recordings

In December 2025, researchers at Google Research asked a simple question: why rely on surveys alone when we can observe people smiling? They analyzed 405,448 short video recordings from 233 volunteers. A smartphone camera recorded each person’s face after the screen was unlocked, while they used the phone as usual. A neural network measured how intensely they smiled.

The smiles were weakest on Mondays and strongest on Sundays. That weekly rhythm closely matched changes in happiness reported by an independent US survey. The correlation was r = 0.92. Two very different measures, facial expressions and survey responses, traced remarkably similar patterns [3].

This was a correlation between averages for the seven days of the week, not a way to judge any one person’s happiness. Yet it showed that emotional behavior can be studied in everyday life without asking people how they feel. Could we compare entire countries through their smiles? There was a catch: those roughly 405,000 recordings came from just 233 volunteers. Comparing countries would require different sources altogether.

SOSI: A global smile ranking of 125 countries and territories

We assembled data from 24 groups of studies using different methods, examined how comparable they were and constructed 10,740 pairwise comparisons between countries and territories. The material ranged from reactions to advertising and social-media photographs to portraits of politicians and executives, plus observations of service workers and passers-by. In 19 groups, at least two countries or territories could be compared. We kept the weaker evidence but gave it less weight. No source was given zero weight.

We used the Bradley–Terry statistical model to bring the different studies into a single ranking. We called it SOSI (Synthetic Observed Smiling Index), our composite ranking of smiles across 125 countries and territories. We published the calculations and source materials in a report by The Null Institute [4].

The two rankings agreed in places, but diverged sharply overall: the United Kingdom came 6th in our smile index, the United States 8th, Canada 45th, Australia 46th, Finland 114th and Japan 122nd. Egypt ranked first, although its position came from only two source families: archival responses to advertising and selected photographs.

Change how much weight each source receives, and countries move up or down. That is why the chart shows not only each country’s position in our ranking, but also the range of positions produced by different source weights.

How to read the chart. First place is on the left, 125th on the right. The dot marks a country’s position in our ranking. The bar spans the middle 90% of positions obtained when the studies are weighted differently. This is not a population confidence interval.

For Finland, we drew on five groups of studies. In all 160 weighting schemes we tested, Finland never reached the top 30.

Even when people are alone, smiles don’t tell the whole story

Even if equally good data existed for every country, another question would remain: does the same frequency of smiles signify the same level of happiness? Perhaps different cultures express emotion in different ways. Talhelm, Oishi and Zhang [5] observed people walking alone on university campuses in the United States and China. In the US, 29.1% of passers-by smiled, compared with just 3% in China: a nearly tenfold difference.

This observation undermines the simplistic idea that Americans smile only for the benefit of the person they are talking to.

Even so, different methods sometimes picked up similar differences between countries: responses to advertising and Instagram photographs produced partly comparable patterns. Among 31 countries covered by both sources, Spearman’s correlation was 0.42 (p = 0.020; statistically significant). The two methods may be picking up a common signal. Whether that signal reflects happiness is still an open question.

One promising comparison is not enough to establish the reliability of the whole ranking. For 50 countries and territories, we had only one photographic source family suitable for comparison. We made 17 comparisons between independent groups of sources covering the same countries. The median rate at which they agreed about which country ranked higher was only 59.1%, insufficient grounds to call our composite table a reliable international measure of human happiness.

Smiles proved a much harder way to judge happiness than we had expected. Yet we remain convinced that the World Happiness Report ranking tells us even less about happiness itself.

Where are the world’s fastest runners? A survey has the answer

Suppose we want to find the country with the fastest runners. Instead of timing races, we survey people and ask: “How satisfied are you with your running fitness on a scale from zero to ten?”

We average the answers, draw up a ranking and publish the World’s Fastest Runners Report. The headlines proclaim: “Country with the world’s fastest runners revealed!” The prime minister of Lilliput proudly declares that his nation has the fastest runners on Earth. Yet we have not measured a single person’s speed.

The survey might be flawless. But satisfaction with one’s running fitness is not the same as running speed. The mistake is not in the calculation. It is in what we choose to call the result.

The word “happiness” in the World Happiness Report raises much the same question.

(If the runners example sounds contrived, consider a real one: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) notes [6] that people in Japan and South Korea rate their health relatively poorly, despite living longer than people in most OECD countries. Such self-assessments of health are also shaped by cultural norms and the wording of the response scale.)

The happiness no one asked about

The main ranking in WHR 2026 rests on answers to the “Cantril ladder” question. People imagine their best and worst possible lives and place their current life somewhere between zero and ten. The results of representative surveys are then averaged over three years. The word “happiness” does not appear in the question at all. The official FAQ makes this explicit [7].

We explored the difference between judging your life and feeling happy in Can a Country Make You Happier?. In our relocation calculator, we also explained why a country’s high ranking, by itself, cannot predict how happy someone will be after moving there. But that raises another question: why did the WHR authors choose the title they did?

The WHR authors tackle this question themselves. In Chapter 2 (Box 2.2) [8], they ask why the report is called the World Happiness Report when its primary focus is how people evaluate their lives, not how happy they feel. Their answer is that happiness has both an emotional and an evaluative meaning, and the latter is more useful for analyzing quality of life.

The wording is deliberate. The WHR authors use happiness in its evaluative sense, and there are scientific reasons for doing so. But when readers see the headline “Finland is once again the world’s happiest country”, they may assume that Finns experience joy more often than anyone else. The main WHR ranking does not test that. It compares people’s assessments of their lives. That distinction is easy to lose once the results become headlines.

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE

How a scientific ranking becomes a political slogan

On 20 March 2025, Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen posted on X:

The post itself tells us nothing about whether the minister knew how WHR calculates its rankings.

Money, happiness, and the United Arab Emirates

Why does the name of a ranking matter? Because rankings travel far beyond academic publications. Political leaders can point to a high position as evidence that their policies are working. In Finland, the ranking became the subject of a minister’s public post. In the United Arab Emirates, happiness has gone further: the government has built it into public policy and funded international research on the subject.

In December 2021, journalist Mara Hvistendahl reported in The Intercept [9] that the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, associated with WHR editor Jeffrey Sachs, had received millions of dollars from UAE-linked entities for research and international work on happiness and well-being. The investigation cited at least $3 million in funding; Sachs confirmed the funding amount to the journalist.

In 2016, the UAE appointed a minister of happiness. In 2017, the portfolio expanded to include well-being.

In WHR 2026, the UAE ranks 21st worldwide and first among Arab countries. On 24 March, the state news agency WAM [10] proudly reported the result.

But the agency got the explanation wrong. It listed GDP, life expectancy, freedom and other factors as reasons for the UAE’s high position. In reality, WHR uses those factors only to explain differences in outcomes. The ranking itself is calculated from people’s answers about their own lives.

Here the contrast is especially stark: the UAE places 21st in the World Happiness Report 2026, but 106th in our experimental index of observed smiles. For the UAE, our index draws on only two source families, so 106th place should not be taken as a reliable assessment of residents’ happiness. Even so, the difference shows how much the picture changes when “happiness” is defined and measured in another way.

The timeline matters: the World Happiness Report began in 2012, whereas most of the UAE-linked donations to SDSN, according to the investigation [9], came between 2017 and 2021.

Of the UAE donations listed, at least $1 million went to the Global Happiness Council, which issued recommendations on public policies for happiness [9]. Its 2019 report was presented at an international government summit in Dubai with the support of the UAE Prime Minister’s Office. The UAE was not merely using happiness to shape its own public image. It was also funding efforts to promote the subject internationally.

How reliable is our own ranking?

For a closer look at the evidence, the expandable note below explains which data we used, how we analyzed them, and where the method falls short.

Where measurement ends and branding begins

We set two approaches to happiness side by side and found a different problem with each. Our smile index does not yet allow reliable comparisons of how happy the populations of different countries are. The World Happiness Report measures life evaluations, yet in public discussion its results become claims about the happiness of entire nations. The UAE case shows how those claims can become part of a national image. We found no evidence, however, that the ranking itself was manipulated.

You can analyze millions of survey responses flawlessly. Give the result a grand but misleading name, though, and readers may misunderstand what was actually measured. The phrase “the world’s happiest country” promises more than Gallup’s central question can establish.

References

1. Ekman P., Davidson R. J., Friesen W. V. (1990). The Duchenne smile: emotional expression and brain physiology. II.
2. Gardiner et al. (2022). What happy people do: The behavioral correlates of happiness in everyday situations.
3. Poh M.-Z. et al. (2025). Smartphone monitoring of smiling as a behavioral proxy of well-being in everyday life. Google Research, arXiv preprint 2512.11905.
4. The Null Institute (2026). Can We Rank Countries by Smiling? An Audit of 125 Geographies and 24 Source Families.
5. Talhelm T., Oishi S., Zhang X. (2019). Who smiles while alone? Rates of smiling lower in China than U.S.
6. OECD (2025). Health at a Glance 2025: Self-rated health.
7. World Happiness Report. Frequently Asked Questions: How the rankings are calculated.
8. Helliwell et al. (2026). International evidence on happiness and social media, Chapter 2, World Happiness Report.
9. Hvistendahl M. (2021). The Intercept: Investigation of UAE funding for happiness research.
10. Emirates News Agency (WAM) (2026). UAE ranks first in Arab world and 21st globally in World Happiness Report.