Investigating the way individuals conceptualize happiness, i.e., their beliefs about what constitutes a happy life, represents an important aspect of understanding subjective well-being because such beliefs don’t just reflect their judgments but also influence their experienced happiness. Previous studies that have focused on this phenomenon have identified three main orientations to happiness, namely those aimed at living a life of pleasure, meaning or engagement. Given that the factors that contribute to the development of such orientations are still not well known, within the present study conducted on a sample of 415 participants we aimed at investigating the role of religiousness, ideology and moral foundations that include harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity in developing the mentioned orientations to happiness. The obtained results identified foundations of ingroup/loyalty and authority/respect, as well as liberal ideology and younger age as statistically significant predictors of orientation towards a life of pleasure. Moral foundations of harm/care, ingroup/loyalty and purity/sanctity, together with liberal ideology predicted orientation towards engagement, whereas harm/care and religiousness predicted orientation towards meaning. The obtained results indicate that individuals’ fundamental moral, religious and social beliefs and values contribute to their beliefs regarding ways of obtaining happiness, and indicate a need for future investigations into the relationships among values, orientations to happiness and well-being.

ideology, moral foundations, orientations to happiness, religiousness, subjective well-being