Public spaces and happiness: Evidence from a large-scale field experiment

This study examines the relationships between public spaces, immediate environment and momentary subjective wellbeing (M-SWB). The empirical findings are based on a unique dataset collected from tens of thousands of students in Singapore. The students wore a sensor for one week, and happy moments were captured as well as geospatial an environmental data throughout the country. This is a large-scale in-the-wild user study. The findings provide weak empirical evidence that visiting parks and community centers increase the probability of experiencing M-SWB compared with commercial areas. In line with previous studies, proximity to natural influencers such as green-, blue spaces or reservoirs was found to be not statistically significant. On the other hand, immediate noise levels and air temperature were strongly associated with M-SWB. The unique contribution of the paper is the estimation of place-, environment-, and personal-effects on momentary happiness using nearly-real time data.