Thoughts of Wealth May be Harmful to Happiness
The saying, “you can’t buy happiness” is an age-old bit of wisdom aimed at encouraging people to savor life’s little pleasures, but researchers might be pushing a new saying like “money can ruin happiness” after analyzing the results of recent studies on wealth and feelings of happiness and well being.
According to the research, simply viewing an image of money appears to impede the brain’s ability to feel happiness and satisfaction and impairs the enjoyment of small pleasures. Two experiments attempted to investigate the connection between money and a sense of well being, and both concluded that wealth minimizes our ability to savor life’s experiences.
In the first experiment, 351 employees of Belgium’s University of Liege were divided into two study groups and given instructions to answer a questionnaire on income, happiness and desire for wealth. The questionnaires were the same, but one group answer them with a photograph of stack euro bills in plain sight, while the other group viewed a blurred, unrecognizable image.
The study determined that subjects with higher incomes who viewed the photograph of the stack money reported notably lower ability to savor happy experiences and emotions when compared to the group that viewed the blurred image, even when those responders had lower incomes. Overall, the researchers were able to establish a link between wealth and the ability to savor positive emotions and pleasures.
A second study was conducted on the money-happiness connection, and researchers used 40 volunteers at the University of British Columbia to test the theory that savoring is diminished by wealth. Participants were asked to complete questionnaires with an image on an adjacent page of either a photo of Canadian money or a neutral image. Participants were informed that the images were from an “unrelated study.” After completing the study, the participants were asked to eat a piece of chocolate and then complete a follow-up questionnaire.
The crux of the study was the time taken by each participant to eat the piece of chocolate, which was considered a positive experience with a likelihood of being savored. Hidden observers clocked the time taken to eat the treat and recorded any positive emotions participants might have displayed while doing so.