Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?

Abstract

Adaptation level theory suggests that both contrast and habituation will operate to prevent the winning of a fortune from elevating happiness as much as might be expected. Contrast with the peak experience of winning should lessen the impact of ordinary pleasures, while habituation should eventually reduce the value of new pleasures made possible by winning. Study 1 compared a sample of 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and also with a group of 29 paralyzed accident victims who had been interviewed previously. As predicted, lottery winners were not happier than controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events. Study 2 indicated that these effects were not due to preexisting differences between people who buy or do not buy lottery tickets or between interviews that made or did not make the lottery salient. Paraplegics also demonstrated a contrast effect, not by enhancing minor pleasures but by idealizing their past, which did not help their present happiness. Is Happiness Relative? The idea that happiness is relative is at least as old as the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers of ancient Greece. It is also a solution to a number of intriguing puzzles in modern social science. American soldiers in World War II with a high school education or better had greater chances of being promoted but were less happy with their promo-We wish to thank the following students who provided valuable assistance in collecting data for the first study:

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Impact of spinal cord injury on self-perceived pre- and postmorbid cognitive, emotional and physical functioning

“…Our findings are consistent with the results of some previous studies that have evaluated function in these same areas at various time points following SCI. 2,[4][5][6][9][10][11][12]16 In addition, this study provides information on the person's current functional status and a comparison with their perception of function in these same domains before injury, a comparison that has not been made in previous studies.…”

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Explaining quality of life with crisis theory

“…In addition to crisis theory, a number of other theoretical frameworks may be useful in explaining adaptation processes, including judgment theories such as Helson's adaptation level theory (Helson, 1964;De Haes and Van Knippenberg, 1985;Brickman et al, 1978;Parducci, 1995) and social comparison theories (Festinger, 1954;Taylor and Lobel, 1989;Van der Zee et al, 1995); control theories (Powers, 1978) such as the self-regulation theory (Carver and Scheier, 1982;Leventhal and Nerenz, 1983); discrepancy theories (Calman, 1984;Michalos, 1985); uncertainty in illness theory (Mishel 1988;Padilla et al, 1992); stresscoping theories (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984;Folkman, 1997); and response shift theories (Breetvelt and Van Dam, 1991;Howard et al, 1979;Golembiewski et al, 1976;Sprangers and Schwartz, 1999). While these theories vary widely in level of abstraction and breadth of coverage, they make important and convincing attempts to explain changes in perceived QL.…”