Differentiating balance and harmony through natural language analysis: a cross-national exploration of two understudied wellbeing-related concepts

Abstract

Although the concepts of balance and harmony are increasingly appreciated as important in research on wellbeing, their precise meaning is often vague or unclear. This paper aims to elucidate these ideas by exploring responses by 15,275 people across 154 nations to two open-ended questions embedded after the online VIA Inventory of Strengths. What does balance mean to you? and What does harmony mean to you?, together with an item on which people prefer. Strikingly, while harmony was analysed as more positively valenced, people tended to prefer balance. This is perhaps because, using differential language-based analyses, we found people interpret harmony as mostly about relationships working well in synchrony, whereas balance seems to convey proportionality across most life domains, and hence may have more applicability and impact. The paper offers suggestions for future work on these topics, such as exploration of the relevance of culture and economics.