Data Science Lab, Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
The Alan Turing Institute, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London, NW1 2DB, UK.
Sci Rep. 2019 Mar 14;9(1):4498. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-40854-6.
Does spending time in beautiful settings boost people's happiness? The answer to this question has long remained elusive due to a paucity of large-scale data on environmental aesthetics and individual happiness. Here, we draw on two novel datasets: first, individual happiness data from the smartphone app, Mappiness, and second, crowdsourced ratings of the "scenicness" of photographs taken across England from the online game Scenic-Or-Not. We find that individuals are happier in more scenic locations, even when we account for a range of factors such as the activity the individual was engaged in at the time, weather conditions and the income of local inhabitants. Crucially, this relationship holds not only in natural environments, but in built-up areas too, even after controlling for the presence of green space. Our results provide evidence that the aesthetics of the environments that policymakers choose to build or demolish may have consequences for our everyday wellbeing.
置身美丽的环境是否能提升人们的幸福感？由于缺乏关于环境美学和个人幸福感的大规模数据，这个问题的答案长期以来一直难以捉摸。在这里，我们利用了两个新的数据集：一是来自智能手机应用 Mappiness 的个人幸福感数据，二是来自在线游戏 Scenic-Or-Not 的在英格兰各地拍摄的照片的“风景优美度”众包评分。我们发现，即使考虑到个人当时从事的活动、天气条件和当地居民的收入等一系列因素，人们在风景更优美的地方会更快乐。至关重要的是，这种关系不仅存在于自然环境中，也存在于建成区，即使在控制了绿地存在的情况下也是如此。我们的研究结果表明，决策者选择建造或拆除的环境的美学可能会对我们的日常幸福感产生影响。
