I don’t think any of this is comparable across all of the US or the other countries due to extremely large differences in quality of life for different socioeconomic classes.

Maybe comparing each decile by country would be a meaningful comparison, if even possible.

American exceptionalism probably affects this quite a bit, I would imagine, in terms of biasing US residents to overestimate their own happiness because of a skewed understanding of what the rest of the world is like by contrast

> overestimate their own happiness

?

How can you overestimate your own happiness? Either you happy or you aren’t.

In my experience, comparing yourself to others, regardless of circumstances, only leads to unhappiness.

> How can you overestimate your own happiness? Either you happy or you aren’t.

Wishful thinking for one:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking

E.g., how many people are "happy" in abusive relationships?

Yeah anyone working for FANG probably also an example

It's actually pretty common and one of the hurdles of getting comparable data.

An anectode from an Amartya Sen book: Uneducated women in rural India, when asked anout their health status, effectively said everything is fine. After getting access to better healthcare and health education, self reported health scores went down. Classic case of unknown unknowns: The women didn't know that live actually could be better than what they experienced so far.

The same is true for this discussion: I'd wager that thanks to Hollywood and world news coverage, the average citizen of a small EU country like Norway has (or at least thinks they have) deeper knowledge of live in the US than the average US person about live in Norway. So the Norwegian, when asked about their own happiness, can position themselves in context of this knowledge.