The Nordic countries of Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are regularly top scorers in world happiness rankings. These countries have placed in the top 10 of the World Happiness Report (WHR) every year since 2013 — so what's their secret? These five countries score well in all six of the things considered in the WHR: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption. But the WHR has noted that there might be another thing these countries have more of than others — trust. Trust is very important, says WHR editor John F. Helliwell, a former professor at the University of British Columbia. And he developed a study to test how community trust is linked to better well-being. In Helliwell's study, he looked at how likely people thought it would be for a lost wallet to be returned to them, and he compared this to their life satisfaction score from zero to 10. He found that those who expected their wallet to be returned had a higher life satisfaction score. "We find people are much, much happier if they feel they're in an environment where people are going to watch their back," Helliwell told Euro News. In a 2023 experiment by Reader's Digest, wallets were actually left for people to find in cities around the world. And where was a lost wallet most likely to be returned? In Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The WHR has noted that a high level of trust may be among the things that explain Nordic happiness. However, as Forbes has suggested, it may not be so much about big-smile "happiness" as quieter "contentment." Rather than always trying for something better, people in Scandinavian countries are more often content with what they have. As a result, few of them will say they are unhappy — which helps these countries do well in world happiness rankings.