Hope a lottery win will make you happy forever? Think again, evidence suggests a big payout won’t make that much of a difference. Tom Stafford explains why.
One way of accounting for this is to assume that lottery winners get used to their new level of wealth, and simply adjust back to a baseline level of happiness – something called the “hedonic treadmill”. Another explanation is that our happiness depends on how we feel relative to our peers. If you win the lottery you may feel richer than your neighbours, and think that moving to a mansion in a new neighbourhood would make you happy, but then you look out of the window and realise that all your new friends live in bigger mansions.
Both of these phenomena undoubtedly play a role, but the deeper mystery is why we’re so bad at knowing what will give us true satisfaction in the first place.
Part of the problem is that happiness isn’t a quality like height, weight or income that can be easily measured and given a number (whatever psychologists try and pretend). Happiness is a complex, nebulous state that is fed by transient simple pleasures, as well as the more sustained rewards of activities that only make sense from a perspective of years or decades. So, perhaps it isn’t surprising that we sometimes have trouble acting in a way that will bring us the most happiness. Imperfect memories and imaginations mean that our moment-to-moment choices don’t always reflect our long-term interests.
It even seems like the very act of trying to measuring it can distract us from what might make us most happy. An important study by Christopher Hsee of the Chicago School of Business and colleagues showed how this could happen.