But when the researchers looked at how people’s answers were spread out, a different picture emerged. Here is the distribution of answers across the whole world:

Population-Weighted Distributions of Happiness, 2012-2015

World Happiness Report

The most common answer is five, dead in the middle. In different regions however, answers are distributed differently.

Population-Weighted Distributions of Happiness, by Region

World Happiness Report

The top five most equal countries when it comes to happiness are Bhutan, Comoros, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Iceland. (Iceland being the only one in the top 5 for both average happiness and equality.) The five most unequal countries are Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan. The United States is in 85th place.

The researchers also found that most countries are getting more unequal. Comparing the period between 2005and 2011 to the period between 2012 and 2015, “about a tenth [of countries] had significant reductions in happiness inequality, while more than half had significant increases,” the report reads. “The remaining one-third of countries showed no significant change.”

This isn’t a perfect measurement of a country’s well-being. For example, Afghanistan is the ninth most equal country, but the fourth-lowest in terms of overall happiness. The Afghans, it seems, are pretty equally unhappy.

Looking at the regional charts above, John Helliwell, a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia and one of the editors of the World Happiness Report, observed a couple different kind of inequalities.

“In Latin America and the Caribbean, well, everybody’s happy, but they’re not equally happy, there’s quite a spread among positive answers,” he says. “But you look on the other hand at the other region that’s very unequal, that’s the Middle East and North Africa, and you can see it’s got a whole lot of people down at the zero and a quite a lot of people up at the ten. So there are some very happy people and very unhappy people there.”

So happiness inequality, at least as measured here, is not a “tell-all measure,” Helliwell says. “You have to look a little further to find out what is the nature of the inequalities.”

This is one of the first times that anyone has attempted to measure happiness inequality or well-being inequality. One previous study, published in 2008, found that happiness inequality went down overall in the United States between 1972 and 2006. But it used a slightly different measure than the World Happiness Report, instead asking participants whether they were “very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy,” so it’s hard to directly compare the two. It’s also notable that the time period of this study ends just before the Great Recession.

There are a lot of remaining questions—for example, how closely does happiness inequality correlate with income inequality? Helliwell thinks income is one part of life satisfaction, but that there are many other factors that likely go into happiness inequality. In a separate paper on well-being inequality, Helliwell and his colleagues write, “A high inequality society … is one in which there are many people who achieve a life they rate very highly, and many others who are stuck in a life they are very much dissatisfied with. This could be because the former are rich, and the latter poor, but it could also be for any number of other reasons.”