The Emotionless Society

“All work and no play" may have indeed made us a dull society. — CheeTung Leong, CEO and Co-Founder, EngageRocket, Singapore

Singapore is one of the most admired countries in the world—so admired, some countries aspire to be just like it. Global leaders admit to using Singapore’s journey as the blueprint for their own countries, including Kazakhstan’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

The admiration for Singapore might be because its success is so easy to quantify. And a great deal of that success is just economics. When it comes to money, Singapore is rich—ranking in the top 10 of GDP per capita, regardless of whether you look at purchasing power parity or nominal GDP.

But wealth is not the only reason Singapore is so revered.

Singapore is fourth in the world for life expectancy (83.6 years) and tied for 11th for human development, according to the HDI 2019 ranking. It also has an unusually strong jobs market, according to traditional employment metrics. Unemployment has not exceeded 6% in over 20 years of tracking. This is remarkable considering 5% is what many economists consider the natural rate of unemployment (or “full employment”).

Singapore is also one of the safest places in the world. If you have ever walked down the city’s streets late at night, you can feel it. And the data substantiate that feeling.

In 2021, nearly all Singaporeans (95%) said they feel safe walking alone at night. While that number is high, it is not unusual for Singapore. Gallup has been asking this question since 2006, and every year, over 85% of Singaporeans say they feel safe walking alone at night. Singapore has ranked No. 1 globally on this metric 11 times in the history of our tracking.

The country is not only rich, healthy, well-educated, and safe—the city even sparkles. First-time visitors are struck by the city’s cleanliness. Driving from the Changi Singapore Airport to the city, you cannot help but notice how clean the streets are and how perfectly manicured the trees and bushes are. It feels like everything is perfect in Singapore.

But is it?

In early 2012, I flew to Singapore to join my colleagues for a presentation to a large group of government officials. The government wanted to learn more about what Gallup knows about happiness in the country.

Before the meeting, I looked at our 2011 data for Singapore. Almost all our data corroborated the conventional wisdom—everything was perfect.

We asked Singaporeans whether children had the opportunity to learn and grow and if they felt like children were treated with respect. Almost everyone in the country agreed, and Singapore ranked among the highest in the world on both metrics.

Singaporeans also trust their government. In fact, the Singapore government received some of the highest confidence ratings globally. And less than 10% of Singaporeans felt like corruption was widespread in the government.

Even when we ask questions on basic numeracy, Singaporeans show how smart they are compared with the rest of the world. We once asked, “Do you think 10% is bigger than one out of 10, the same as one in 10, or smaller than one in 10?” (The correct answer is, of course, they are the same.) Only 40% of people globally get it right. In Singapore, 76% get it right, ranking it ninth out of the 141 countries we tested.

But while almost everything looked perfect in Singapore, one thing did not—the way Singaporeans responded to Gallup’s life experience questions.

Before we look at how Singaporeans live life, let’s look at how they see life. About one-third (34%) of Singaporeans rated their lives high enough to be considered thriving in 2011. The global average that year was 24%. Considering Singapore outperforms the world in almost everything, it is no surprise that it also exceeded the global average for thriving.

But now, look at how Singaporeans live life. Here is the Positive Experience Index trend in Singapore from 2006-2011.

The dramatic drop is not the only surprise. Globally, out of the 148 countries we measured in 2011, Singapore ranked dead last.

This decline made me wonder: If positive emotions are plummeting, then negative emotions must be skyrocketing. If people are not having fun, then they must be angry, sad, worried, or at least stressed? Right?

Apparently not. Here is the Negative Experience Index trend in Singapore from 2006-2011.

I should have known better. Norman Bradburn’s research (as I mentioned in Chapter Four) found just how unrelated positive and negative experiences can be. You can feel a lot of positive and negative emotions, but you can also feel very little of any of these emotions—which is apparently what happened in Singapore in 2011.

This finding caused us to rethink how we report our data entirely. We typically report two rankings: one that ranks the countries with the highest positive emotions and one that ranks the countries with the highest negative emotions. But what if we combined them? This would allow us to see which countries are most likely to report a lot of emotions, regardless of whether those emotions are positive or negative.

The country that expressed the most emotions that year was the Philippines. People in the Philippines were the most likely to tell us that they felt a lot of enjoyment, laughed and smiled a lot, felt rested, and felt a lot of anger, stress, and sadness. Latin America dominated the rest of the list, which also included the U.S. and Canada.

But the country that was least likely to express any emotions? Singapore.

When we first launched these results in 2012, they went viral. The findings were covered on the front page of The Straits Times for three days in a row, including a scathing dissent written by former Senior Minister of State for Law and Education Indranee Rajah.

Social media also erupted. “That [poll] is a lie,” commented one person. Another posted several videos on YouTube of a day in the life of an “Emotionless Singaporean,” which simply followed a Singaporean with an expressionless look on his face around Singapore.

Critics of the findings said the underlying methodology was flawed. Maybe they’re right. When someone conducts a survey and says in the fine print, “The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points with a confidence interval of 95%,” that means that one out of 20 times, the data point may fall outside that range.

But were the results also wrong the year before that? And how about the year before that? In 2010, Singapore ranked 93out of 120 countries for positive emotions, and in 2009, 87 out of 115 countries. 2011 was not an outlier—the scores were low for three straight years.

If the data are accurate, why did Singapore have such an emotions deficit? Here are three possible explanations:

First, a society that relentlessly pursues money does so at the expense of everything that makes life worth living.

Singapore was under British control for over a century and then, in the 1960s, was briefly part of Malaysia. That ended on August 9, 1965, and Singapore became independent.

Although independent, the country was struggling by every objective indicator. Most Singaporeans were unemployed, and GDP per capita was low. Singapore had limited natural resources, and the international community had no interest in helping the country.

Under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew, the country turned to its most valuable resource—its people. Lee’s original strategy focused on manufacturing and bringing in foreign investment. It worked. From 1966-1973, the country experienced double-digit economic growth annually. Singapore continued to invest in its people, and the country went from poor to rich in a matter of decades. Nominal GDP per capita increased from $320 in 1960 to almost $60,000 in 2019—PPP GDP per capita was $100,000.

Some believe that the country’s work ethic to escape poverty may have become too deeply engrained in the culture. For example, Singaporeans openly talk about the “Five Cs” culture, which stands for your cash, car, credit card, condominium, and country club membership. The concept is so well-known, it even has its own Wikipedia page.

Did “All work and no play,” in the words of Singapore native CheeTung Leong, cause Singapore to be a dull society?

Bobby Kennedy and Bhutan’s Fourth Dragon King would have thought so. They believed that the overzealous pursuit of money causes people to lose sight of what really matters in life. There is merit to this famous observation, but it does not appear to apply to Singapore. Singaporeans work hard, but working hard does not necessarily make people miserable. Miserable work makes people miserable. This leads to the second potential reason for the 2011 emotions deficit.

Singapore was unrivaled when it comes to misery in the workplace.

Singapore’s work ethic is famous. In 2015, Singaporeans worked more hours per week (45.6 hours) than any other developed city in the world except for Hong Kong (50.1 hours). Millennials work even longer. Singaporean millennials worked more hours than millennials in every other country except India (and they were tied with Chinese and Mexican millennials), according to a 2016 report by ManpowerGroup.

Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower has actively worked to address this issue and is making progress. But is the number of hours that Singaporeans work what is taking the life out of Singapore? Or is it what happens during those working hours?

In 2011, there was no workplace more emotionally detached than Singapore. Only 2% of Singaporean workers were engaged and thriving in their jobs—the lowest in the world.

Singaporeans not only worked among the most hours in the world, they also had among the highest workforce participation rates. So, everyone worked, everyone worked a lot, and everyone hated their work. That could make any society numb.

But here is a problem. Hating your job decreases your positive emotions, but it increases your negative emotions. Positive emotions were extremely low in Singapore, but so were negative emotions. If workplace misery was a contributing factor, it was only contributing to lower positive experiences.

This brings us to the third potential reason for the emotions deficit: Singaporeans excel in something else globally—modesty.

According to Singaporean psychiatrist Adrian Wang, “We’re less inclined to make a big show of how we feel. It may be because we’re a bit more conservative and tend to keep things to ourselves. But when we’re warmed up, we can be quite expressive—take a look at our National Day celebrations.”

People in many rich Asian societies rate their lives lower than you might think, considering their countries’ wealth. Take Japan, for example. In the 2020 World Happiness Report, Japan ranked 58 out of 158 countries. That put Japan below Costa Rica, Mexico, and Guatemala. Japan’s GDP per capita is roughly 10 times larger than Guatemala’s. Yet, Guatemalans rate their lives higher than the Japanese.

Researchers have established that, for cultural reasons, Latin Americans are more expressive in reporting how their lives are going. On the other hand, Asians appear to exhibit more modesty when rating many things, especially their lives.

This modesty is often attributed to many Asian societies’ embrace of collectivism, which stresses the importance of the community. As a result, self-ratings are humble because collectivist cultures focus less on the individual and more on society. This may explain why Singaporeans and people in other Asian societies give higher ratings on societal matters, such as how children are treated or how institutions are performing.

By the way, we cannot minimize the positive ratings of Latin Americans. Latin Americans find a way to experience more fun in life than the rest of the world despite having less money. We should celebrate this and try to understand it more deeply because the world has a lot to gain from whatever they have figured out.

To better understand these cultural differences, Gallup began a project with the Japan-based Well-being for Planet Earth Foundation. The project’s objective is to develop a more all-encompassing metric for happiness for the entire world. As of this writing, we are in the field testing to see if we can build statistics for concepts such as balance and harmony. Our research is still in the early stages.

But Is it Cultural?

If the results in Singapore were strictly cultural, how did Singapore reverse the trend on positive emotions?

Singapore went from ranking dead last on the Positive Experience Index in 2011 to 67th in 2012. In 2014, it climbed to 14th, and ever since, Singapore has remained in the top quartile for the world.

So What Happened?

Curiously, the only other indicator that improved during this time was worker engagement. From 2011 to 2012, engagement improved seven points (to 9%); in 2015, it increased to 16%, putting Singapore 100 spots higher in the global rankings. The sudden increase might make you wonder if something happened nationally. We know that managers are consistently the most significant influence in worker engagement, but the sudden increase in Singapore may have resulted from government action.

The Singapore government has recently enacted legislation to curb abusive workplace practices. For example, workers covered by the Employment Act can work a maximum of 44 hours a week. They also cannot work more than 12 hours per day or more than 72 hours of overtime per month. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong also reduced the country’s workweek from five-and-a-half days to five days. Working hours have indeed declined consistently since 2010, according to Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower.

But national policy alone will not fix Singapore’s workplace woes. Gallup knows that the adage “People join companies but leave managers” is true and is supported by data. Seventy percent of a person’s emotional attachment to work is determined by who their manager is. Pick a bad manager, and no matter how good national policy is, workers will still be miserable.

Singapore’s workforce development strategies have been shifting toward improving engagement since 2011—including moving away from tenure-based progression to performance-based development. This alone could account for rising engagement because it implies that managers are more effectively supporting Singapore’s workers. For example, in 2015, Singaporeans were significantly more likely to say that they have opportunities to do what they do best at work and that there is someone at work who encourages their development.

Better workplaces may not be the only reason Singapore’s positive emotions increased. When Gallup first reported Singapore’s 2011 emotions data, it went so viral that everyone heard about it. Its ubiquity may have even influenced the survey results. When we conducted interviews the following year, Singaporean respondents told us during the survey, “I know what this survey is about.”

Private sector organizations even ran campaigns featuring the findings—promoting how great and how happy Singapore is. Advertisements ran in newspapers, on billboards, and in movie theaters. Since those campaigns, Singapore’s scores have remained unusually high for positive emotions and very low for negative emotions.

So, did Singaporeans’ emotions truly improve, or was everyone simply trying to boost Singapore’s score on the index?

Singapore has figured out the secret to success for almost everything. If the country indeed meaningfully improved positive emotions, the world would benefit greatly from knowing what Singapore did.

‍Editor's Note: This excerpt is from Jon Clifton's new book “Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed.” Republished with permission.