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This is discussed ad nauseam whenever new happiness indices are published.

I agree with you, and guess most people would. These surveys likely have linguistic and cultural nuances that I imagine are extremely hard to normalize for.

You lie in “are you ok?” interactions because you are talking with someone and there’s all kinds of considerations like “don’t want to lose face” and “don’t want to bother them”. You can be as candid as you want in an anonymous survey.

Same thing goes for customer support satisfaction ratings - in some countries people will rate every interaction 5/5 unless something went horrendously wrong, in others something would have to be unusually good to get more than a 3-4 out of 5.

Don't measure people across regions via these sort of metrics.