A great deal of research came to a conclusion you might have already guessed: The more money you have, the happier you will be.
In 2018, you may have come across a study that, in its succinct summary, says money makes you happier, up to a point. However, according to this study, when you earn a salary of around $60-75,000 in the US, your happiness reaches a plateau and earning more does not affect your emotional health. author of a more recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Matthew A. Killingsworth decided to repeat and refine this experiment with fine-tuned methodology to see if the findings were true.
The first study, Track Your Happiness received income data and happiness scores from the app. Participants were asked to rate how happily they remembered how they felt in a recent period, which Killingsworth believed was less than ideal.
In the new study, ” , which requires people to accurately remember how they felt at various moments in the past, and then correctly combine those memories into a single prediction. This is a vulnerable approach to memory errors and judgmental biases.“.
This leaves open the possibility that, despite its extreme relevance to remembered emotions, income has little or no relation to the actual experienced well-being of people living their lives. Remembered emotions can also bring about forms of noise or prejudice that artificially mute their relationship to income, such that actual experienced well-being may have a stronger relationship to income.
For the new study, Killingsworth sought to obtain data that removed the potential bias that memory introduces. The new research using the same app provides users throughout the day with ” how are you feeling right now?” and asked them ” very bad” to ” very good“. Also on a scale ranging from “not at all” to “extreme” How satisfied are you with your life in general?” was also asked.
Matthew A. Killingsworth/PNASThe research, collecting data from 33,391 employees living in the United States, found that the relationship between income and happiness levels was highly linear in terms of both perceived well-being (depending on how they felt when asked throughout the day) and life satisfaction.
The study was a quantitative one, but Killingsworth offered a number of explanations for why this relationship between income, well-being, and life satisfaction exists. ” One possibility is that people spend money to reduce pain and increase enjoyment, and marginal dollars are distributed differently against these ends depending on one’s income.” and continued: ” Compared with variation in incomes above $80,000, larger incomes below $80,000 were more strongly associated with lower negative emotions, consistent with the possibility that a low-to-middle-income transition may be particularly helpful in avoiding (or alleviating) causes of suffering.”
So, the more disposable income you have, the more money you can spend to feel less bad (or, from a less negative point of view, happier). The worse news for people who can’t make huge amounts of money is that research hasn’t found a cutoff point for the relationship between money and well-being.
Killingsworth” Nor was there an income threshold from which felt and evaluative welfare were separated; instead, higher incomes were associated with both feeling better momentarily and being more satisfied with life overall” and added: ” While there is a point where money loses its power to improve well-being, current results suggest that this point may be higher than previously thought.“
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