Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)
Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.
But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. The scientists explore the “experience-stretching hypothesis,” an idea first proposed by Daniel Gilbert. He explains “experience-stretching” with the following anecdote:
I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling…Doesn’t it seem reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than a two.
What does experience-stretching have to do with money and happiness? The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.
The study itself is straightforward. The psychologists gathered 351 adult employees of the University of Liège, from custodial staff to senior administrators, for an online survey. (I should note that it remains unclear whether happiness and other aspects of well-being can be meaningfully measured with a multiple choice test. So caveats apply.) The scientists primed the subjects by showing them a stack of Euro bills before asking them a bunch of questions which attempted to capture their “savoring ability.” Here’s how the savoring test worked:
Participants are asked to imagine finishing an important task (contentment), spending a romantic weekend away (joy), or discovering an amazing waterfall while hiking (awe). Each scenario is followed by eight possible reactions, including the four savoring strategies referred to in the introduction (i.e., displaying positive emotions, staying present, anticipating or reminiscing about the event, and telling other people about the experience). Participants are required to select the response or responses that best characterize what their typical behavior in each situation would be, and receive 1 point for each savoring strategy selected.
Interestingly, the scientists found that people in the wealth condition – they’d been primed with all those Euros – had significantly lower savoring scores. This suggests that simply looking at money makes us less interested in relishing the minor pleasures of life. Furthermore, subjects who made more money in real life – the scientists asked all subjects for their monthly income – scored significantly lower on the savoring test. A subsequent experiment duplicated this effect among Canadian students, who spent less time savoring a chocolate bar after being shown a picture of Canadian dollars. The psychologists end on a bleak note:
Taken together, our findings provide evidence for the provocative notion that having access to the best things in life may actually undermine one's ability to reap enjoyment from life's small pleasures. Our research demonstrates that a simple reminder of wealth produces the same deleterious effects as actual wealth on an individual's ability to savor, suggesting that perceived access to pleasurable experiences may be sufficient to impair everyday savoring. In other words, one need not actually visit the pyramids of Egypt or spend a week at the legendary Banff spas in Canada for one's savoring ability to be impaired"”simply knowing that these peak experiences are readily available may increase one's tendency to take the small pleasures of daily life for granted.
This makes me think of the Amish. From a certain perspective, the Amish live without a lot of the stuff most of us consider essential. They don’t use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quiet permanence to hefty bank accounts. The end result, however, is a happiness boom. When asked to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, the Amish are as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. There are, of course, many ways to explain the contentment of the Amish. (The community has strong ties, plenty of religious faith and stable families, all of which reliably correlate with high levels of well-being.) But I can’t help wonder if part of their happiness is related to experience-stretching. They don’t fret about getting the latest iPhone, or eating at the posh new restaurant, or buying the au courant handbag. The end result, perhaps, is that the Amish are better able to enjoy what really matters, which is all the stuff money can’t buy.
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OH! First one here! Sad to see you leave SciBlogs, but I like Wired too. And all it takes, for me, is a new bookmark…
“… as satisfied with their lives as members of Forbes 400″? ok but the theme is that money â? happiness. the underlying theme is that obsession is inherently unsatisfying (ask any person w/ Obsessive compulsive disorder). Wealth addiction should be treated like OCD.
You say the assumption that “money equals pleasure” is “why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo.”
I disagree with that premise. I think for many people, money equals power. I suppose you can argue that power is only useful insomuch as it brings pleasure. To me that smacks of reductio ad absurdum. Power helps you find a mate and create a family. Power increases your access to health care, thus prolonging life. Power means you can influence and shape the world according to your ethics or whims.
Power means things, but power does not equal pleasure. Neither does money.
To live fully in a place, all your life, you kept aiming smaller and smaller in attention to detail. Working in the fields, there are times when I go totally without thought. Not one idea crosses my mind, though my senses are alert to all around me. Should a crow fly over, I mark it in all its details, but I do not seek analogy for its blackness. I know it is a type of nothing, not metaphoric. A thing unto itself without comparison. I believe those moments to be the root of my new mein. You would not know it on me for I suspect it is somehow akin to contentment. from Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier
I don’t think this is a case of money making people unhappy. This seems more like an example of how a person’s expectations tend to align with their resources, experiences, and lifestyle. While both groups appear to be equally happy, I don’t think that the Forbes 400 members would be eager to trade places with the Amish, and vice versa.
(Typo: “prefer a quite permanence” -> “prefer a quiet permanence”)
Compare to drugs. The first rush is so great. After that, it takes more and more, and there’s less and less thrill. The bar has been raised.
Beyond food, shelter, clothing, marketers are constantly creating new ‘needs’… so we can keep chasing the carrot. The more we indulge desire, the more there’s no end to it. Discovering satisfaction – the ability to appreciate all we already have – is revolutionary.
I believe that income vs. contentment increases operate on an exponential scale instead of a linear one when it comes to this. . Ex: For people who make $100k/year to feel much of a difference, they’d probably have to start making $500k/year, etc. . -Especially, as the overhead of having a more extravagant lifestyle is sort-of a stealth quality that expands more-than-1st-expected as you change states. . . -which is all completely moot when it comes to quality of Personal life; there’s no direct relationship between wealth/income and someone’s goodness. . ->Many people behave like xenophobic tribesmen wading through the outskirts of a big leper colony when it comes to anyone even 1 iota different than what their ingrained ethos says is “correct”.
In the experiment, an image of money cues a perspective which then colors evaluations of the events that follow. This kind of thing goes on all day, every day: the brain picks up on a stimulus that its history has made salient, which arouses a set of associations, values, etc., and these form the framework within which subsequent stimuli are seen until some new stimulus–or thought–arouses a different set of associations. If we practice paying attention to these shifts in perspective, and to the history that has shaped them, we can get some insight into how we’ve been programmed. Wealthy people are programmed by their wealth and the environment it buys, the Amish are programmed by their religious values; popular culture and advertising do a job on the rest of us. The awareness of this process becomes a factor in our further evolution, and may make us a little less like the ball in the pinball machine.
Welcome to Wired, Jonah. The brain is where we live, but most people take it for granted. Hopefully you’ll change that.
“Experience-stretching” sounds a lot like plain old diminishing marginal returns…
I find it hard to believe that an isolated incident such as viewing cash before given choices isn’t skewing the choices in a biased manner. Like if you are talking with someone and a TV is playing over their shoulder, you would have a natural tendency to direct your attention to the TV, even if the conversation was deep. Your attention was diverted and made biased, and therefore you are “savoring” the thing that provides the most stimuli. That study seems flawed. Without the cash on the table, I want to see how they view the same choices – which would be unbiased and less “forced”.
Contentment and happiness are 2 very different things, and “savoring” is ever more different than those. I made $400k last year, and have 4 brothers that made from $15k to $70k. But to compare our happiness levels would be difficult due to differing life circumstances and personality traits – I wouldn’t say the brother making the least was the most “happy”, although he may be the most “content” (less responsibilities and nearer to core family), nor would I say that the brother that is the most active and has the best sense of humor is the most content, even if most would view him as the most “happy”). I do know that the three brothers that make the least all hate their jobs, and constantly wish to work or live somewhere else, while the two of us that make more absolutely love our jobs and what we do. But I think you can be happy without being content, and vice-versa.
And I want to see a study that shows that those in extreme poverty are “happy”. Struggling to pay bills or eat doesn’t make you happy. I’ve been to enough 3rd world countries to know that happiness is an opportunity, while contentment is accepting your fate. Those in a 3rd world situation would probably react the same way with the cash present, since their “opportunity” at having some $ would be extremely distracting. But Amish contentment is because of life based on positive teamwork – it has nothing to do with cash, so they would test different with cash present, since it means squat to them.
Basically, all this makes the idea of studying “money buying happiness” to be pointless unless each given situation, personality, and income level can be assessed as well. Say an MMPI along with the savoring scores and job evaluation (more than just income level, since that says nothing about job quality). Otherwise, all this says very little.
more of anything is as numbing as being deprived of it. Happiness, money, food, things, success…. we become immune after a while and need more and more and more….
It would also be interesting for research to consider the money patterns we inherit from our ancestry. If our roots are related to the feudal system where we were the surfs working for a land owner, do we naturally feel better with a lot less. Conversly perhaps the descendants of landowners have an entitlement gene where they are just feeling normal with a certain amount of money. I agree that the proposition may be more that just the money. We may also be resonating with money being equal to power, success or our vital life force. It’s never really about the money.
Lots to think about!
Carolyn Winter
I like your article, however I am somehow confused at how you linked the happiness of the Amish only to experience stretching when its as clear as sunshine that its the stable interhuman interactions that give them their elevated happiness levels. Isn’t it all we work for, so that we can spend a fun time with our friends or spend the money buying mom the one necklace she always wanted or give that homeless man a sandwhich or feed the street dogs. Money gives you power to make your loved ones happy, and thats all we want internally, with the advent of modern ideas of induviduality we as a species are de-evolving, going back to the roots we left ones.
um. the wisdom of biggie says it all: mo’ money, mo’ problems
I think robofoto pretty much nailed it for me, but I’ll add this: Happiness is the result of what you bring into a situation. If you are a perpetually negative person then nothing will make you happy.
Its like those Lotto horror stories where people who had no clue to begin with, completely derail their lives after getting money dropped in their laps.
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