How do you think your level of happiness would change if you won the lottery? What about if you were paralyzed? Justify your answers

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Have you ever wondered if you won the lottery, would your problems mostly go away, and you would be happy for the rest of your life? A classic study by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman sought the answer to this question. They looked at lottery winners and paralyzed victims of accidents to investigate the effects of extreme changes in fortune, both positive and negative, and whether these changes would result in long-term changes in happiness. The investigators demonstrated hedonic adaptation for the lottery winners in finding that after winning the lottery (one participant won the lottery less than a month before the study was conducted, but the rest won it within a range of 1 month to a year and a half prior to the study), in spite of their good fortune, they astoundingly later had roughly the same levels of happiness as the non-winner controls in the study.

Further, those selected for the study because they were paralyzed with spinal cord injuries (for 1 month to 1 year prior to the study) reported happiness scores above the mid-level (neutral zone). Though this study is often cited as evidence for hedonic adaptation, it should be noted that the hedonic adaptation effect was most pronounced for the lottery winners and less so for those who were accident victims. In fact, even though time had passed for adaptation, the paralyzed participants still "rated themselves significantly less happy in general than controls."