Winning the lottery might make your life more comfortable, but it won’t lead to happiness. Thanks to an adaptation technique in the brain, lottery winners eventually return to their original levels of happiness and, in some cases, are less happy than they were before.
This was first demonstrated by Northwestern University’s Phillip Brickman and Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, a University of Massachusetts researcher in 1978. Their study compared self-reported values of pleasure on a day-to-day basis of (a) winners of the Illinois State Lottery (prizes ranged from $50,000 to $1 million) and (b) victims paralyzed in an accident. The average level of happiness lotto winners reported months after winning were about the same as the study’s control group, who didn’t recently come into a large sum of money.
Researchers concluded that people have a baseline level of happiness that they return to regardless of their circumstances. This phenomenon, dubbed “hedonic adaptation” by a 1971 study, caused the lotto winners to get used to their newfound levels of comfort and affluence. Here’s a description of it by the scientists themselves:
“Eventually, the thrill of winning the lottery will itself wear off. If all things are judged by the extent to which they depart from a baseline of past experience, gradually even the most positive events will cease to have impact as they themselves are absorbed into the new baseline against which further events are judged. Thus, as lottery winners become accustomed to the additional pleasures made possible by their new wealth, these pleasures should be experienced as less intense and should no longer contribute very much to their general level of happiness.”
Additional research has since substantiated the claim that negative emotions, such as anxiety, depression, or anger, don’t really get better with changes in wealth beyond a certain point.
Learn more about happiness and the lotto from people who have been there here. The video below, from ThinkTank, also explores this concept in detail and raises some interesting points.
—RealClearLife Staff
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