> PISA test scores and levels of student competition are consistently negative, and levels of student co-operation enter positively. It is interesting to note how, at the macro level, we find that average academic performance is negatively related to students’ SWB, while earlier studies focusing on the link between individual performance and individual life satisfaction usually report a positive link (see Bücker et al., 2018, for a meta study). Note that this is not a contradiction. At the individual level, a student can improve her SWB by performing better in school than her peers. However, at the macro level, overall academic performance and competition within schools increase learning intensity and school-related stress for each student, reducing SWB for the group as a whole. We therefore argue that the intensity of education—which increases with the level of economic development—is very likely to be the mechanism behind our findings.

All work and no play...?