用26亿条社交数据揭示美国城乡幸福感差异：农村更满意，城市更快乐。
Two Americas of Well-Being: Divergent Rural-Urban Patterns of Life Satisfaction and Happiness from 2.6 B Social Media Posts
- 基于社交媒体文本构建县一级幸福度指标，区分评价性与享乐性幸福感。
- 农村地区生活满意度更高，大城市幸福感在2020–2022年显著下降。
- 结果适用于政策分析与社会研究，为理解城乡差异提供新视角。
利用2014–2022年间26亿条地理标记的社交媒体帖子，结合微调的生成式语言模型，我们构建了美国各县的生活满意度与幸福感指标。研究发现明显的城乡悖论：农村县份表达更高的生活满意度，而城市县份表现出更大的幸福感。通过将两者视为主观幸福感的不同层面——评价性与享乐性，我们揭示其分别映射于地理、政治与时间维度。共和党倾向地区在评价性满意度上更高，但幸福感的党派差异在主要都市区外基本消失，表明政治影响具有情境依赖性。时间冲击主导享乐性层面：2020–2022年幸福感急剧下滑，而生活满意度变化较小。这些模式在逻辑回归与普通最小二乘法中均稳健，且符合福祉理论。结果作为社交媒体人群的关联性发现，表明大规模语言指标可化解关于城乡差异的矛盾结论，通过区分幸福感类型，为传统调查提供透明、可复现的补充。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Using 2.6 billion geolocated social-media posts (2014-2022) and a fine-tuned generative language model, we construct county-level indicators of life satisfaction and happiness for the United States. We document an apparent rural-urban paradox: rural counties express higher life satisfaction while urban counties exhibit greater happiness. We reconcile this by treating the two as distinct layers of subjective well-being, evaluative vs. hedonic, showing that each maps differently onto place, politics, and time. Republican-leaning areas appear more satisfied in evaluative terms, but partisan gaps in happiness largely flatten outside major metros, indicating context-dependent political effects. Temporal shocks dominate the hedonic layer: happiness falls sharply during 2020-2022, whereas life satisfaction moves more modestly. These patterns are robust across logistic and OLS specifications and align with well-being theory. Interpreted as associations for the population of social-media posts, the results show that large-scale, language-based indicators can resolve conflicting findings about the rural-urban divide by distinguishing the type of well-being expressed, offering a transparent, reproducible complement to traditional surveys.
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