Happiness & Public Policy

The famous 1978 paper by Brickman, Coates & Janoff-Bulmann on paraplegics and lottery winners created a sort of conventional wisdom around a very strong view of adaptation or reversion back to an ex ante hedonic “set-point” after an big external positive or negative hedonic shock. The new conventional wisdom is that some but generally not all big hedonic gains and losses dissipate due to adaptation. Here’s a good summary of recent work from Diener and Oishi:

In 1978 Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman presented evidence from paraplegics and lottery winners to offer empirical support for the idea that adaptation brings us all back down to hedonic neutrality, irrespective of how good or bad the event was originally experienced. It should be noted, however, that in a closer inspection, the evidence of Brickman et al. for adaptation was mixed (i.e., paraplegics were not as happy as others). Our recent studies offer stronger support for adaptation, as well as the modifications that must be made to the original theory. First, it appears that people adapt over time, but not always completely back to the point where they started. For instance, we found that both widowhood (Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener, 2003) and unemployment (Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener, 2004) led to lower levels of life satisfaction even many years after the event. Although people showed adaptation over time after the event occurred, they had not adapted completely back to their former levels of life satisfaction even after five years. Despite the fact that people may not adapt to all conditions, we have found that they adapt to the smaller rewards and setbacks of everyday life (Suh, Diener, & Fujita, 1996).

A couple recent papers by Andrew Oswald and friends speaks directly to the old conventional wisdom. In this paper, Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee “provide longitudinal evidence that individuals who become disabled go on to exhibit recovery in mental wellbeing. Adaptation to severe disability, however, is shown to be incomplete.” And in this paper, on medium-sized lottery winners, Oswald and Jonathan Gardner

offer new evidence by using longitudinal data on a random sample of Britons who receive medium-sized lottery wins of between £1000 and £120,000 (that is, up to approximately U.S. $200,000). When compared to two control groups — one with no wins and the other with small wins — these individuals go on eventually to exhibit significantly better psychological health. Two years after a lottery win, the average measured improvement in mental wellbeing is 1.4 GHQ points.

The GHQ is a measure of general psychological well-being that ranges from 0 (best) to 36 (worst). Healthy individuals score from 10-13. To put the result from the lottery study in perspective, about the worst possible thing that can happen to you in terms of psychological well-being is the death of a spouse. The average loss in GHQ points from such a devastating loss is 5 GHQ points. So, the size of the positive effect of winning a medium-sized lottery is about 1/3 of the negative effect of losing a spouse. I’d call that significant.

They conclude:

The paper’s main result — that a windfall is followed eventually by a significant improvement in mental health — contrasts with standard interpretations of the work of Brickman et al (1978). An advantage of the present study is that we follow the same individuals through time and do not have to rely on cross-section comparisons.

Better research methods are consistently showing that adaptation is not complete, and that persisting gains in a number of kinds of psychological well-being flow from gains in material well-being.