Our subjective wellbeing is a mix of our personal and community wellbeing. One indication of their close relationship is the strong negative correlation between our own subjective wellbeing and the degree of subjective wellbeing inequality within our community. This negative relationship reflects our innate and socialized inequality aversion and holds regardless of whether the group is large as in the case of countries or small in the case of local neighbourhoods. While the country case has been well documented in the subjective wellbeing literature, the relationship between the local community distribution of subjective wellbeing and individual subjective wellbeing has received little attention. In this paper we demonstrate the sensitivity of individual life satisfaction to the distribution of life satisfaction within electoral wards in urban New Zealand and explore several possible behavioural drivers. We find that having social support and feeling a sense of community both reduce the negative effects of local subjective wellbeing inequality, while being less socially engaged exaggerates them. Our results highlight the potential that programmes aimed at reducing wellbeing inequalities within local communities might play in raising individual as well as average wellbeing.

我们的主观幸福感是个人幸福感和社区幸福感的结合。它们密切关系的一个迹象是我们自己的主观幸福感与我们社区内主观幸福感的不平等程度之间存在强烈的负相关。这种负面关系反映了我们与生俱来的社会化的不平等厌恶，无论该群体是国家的大群体还是当地社区的小群体，这种关系都成立。虽然在主观幸福感文献中已经很好地记录了乡村案例，但主观幸福感的当地社区分布与个人主观幸福感之间的关系却很少受到关注。在本文中，我们展示了个人生活满意度对新西兰城市选区内生活满意度分布的敏感性，并探讨了几种可能的行为驱动因素。我们发现拥有社会支持和社区感都可以减少当地主观幸福感不平等的负面影响，而较少参与社会则会夸大它们。我们的结果强调了旨在减少当地社区内幸福感不平等的计划在提高个人和平均幸福感方面可能发挥的潜力。