Happiness for Sale: The Effect of Money on Happiness

The following is a "Cliff Notes" version of our paper, to be published in next month's Journal of Economic and Sociological Theory of Advanced Study in Higher Education.


Introduction:

Can money buy happiness? Scholars have long debated the merits of such a proposition. Sipher and Jones (1956) found that the effect of money on happiness was weakly positive. Other studies, such as Dick and Johnson (2004); Willie and Cox (1996), have suggested that money's effect on happiness is spurious, at best.


Theory:

Since money is a type of currency used for the exchange of goods and services, it is suggested that an excess of money will lead to happiness.


Methods:

For our study, we conducted a series of lab experiments at a major university in the Northeast. The participants were male college students in an undergraduate sociology course. In all, there were 226 students who participated in our study.

Our research design was simple, but effective. We randomly assigned all 226 students into two groups (Group 1 and Group 2)


Group 1:

For Group 1, we brought 113 students into a room and told the students they would each receive $10,000 for simply signing their name on a sheet of paper. After signing their name, the participant was given $10,000 in cash and oral sex by one of our female graduate students. They were next presented with a happiness scale, The IJSMWISH Scale*** (See *** at the end of this post for scale).


Group 2:

For Group 2, we brought 113 students into a room and explained our process of random assignment. Further, we told participants in Group 2 that participants in Group 1 received $10,000 each and that participants in Group 2 would receive nothing. We also told participants in Group 2 that participants in Group 1 received oral sex from our female graduate students.

We then administered The IJSMWISH Scale to participants in Group 2.


Results:

There was a much stronger relationship between money and happiness in Group 1 than Group 2. Group 1 participants were more than ten times as likely to report high levels of happiness than participants in Group 2.


Discussion:

The results are reasonable to warrant the posited theoretical explanation. We hypothesized that, ceteris paribus, individuals would be happier after receiving $10,000 than before. We also hypothesized that, ceteris paribus, individuals would report lower levels of happiness after finding they were randomly placed in a group that did not receive $10,000. Our findings appeared to support these hypotheses.


Conclusion:

Our study suggests that money does, indeed, buy happiness.


Appendix:

The I Just Shot My Wad I'm So Happy (IJSMWISH) Scale.

On a scale of 1-5, with 1 being "not at all similar" and 5 being "very similar", how would you compare your happiness right now with your happiness at the climax of orgasm?

Limitations:


We thank numerous colleagues at both conferences and seminar presentations for their invaluable feedback.


One concern was our conceptualization of happiness, which we likened to orgasm. Some thought we were not distinguishing sufficiently between "happiness and pleasure". To us, though, there seems to be reasonable justification for likening happiness to sexual orgasm.


Sexual orgasm, particularly after a long period of "drought", is one of the most intensely pleasurable experiences known to the human species, and thus can be safely assumed to be a "happy event". In fact, many massage parlors we have studied (F & Uck, 2002) refer to "happy finishes", a colloquial term for orgasm.


Another concern consisted of our experiment itself. It was noted that participants in Group 1 received oral sex and participants in Group 2 did not. It might be that oral sex contributes independently of or interactively with receipt of money to produce happiness. Our model did not assess this possibility. However, we thought it important to, nevertheless, include oral sex in the experiments for methodological concerns -- namely, our use of the I Just Shot My Wad I'm So Happy scale.


As noted in the first limitation discussed, "orgasm" may be a poor or incomplete proxy for "happiness"; thus, we thought it important to include a manipulation whereby the participant would be induced to orgasm. This would help establish that happiness and orgasm are, in fact, loading on the same dimension. This was confirmed with the aid of confirmatory factor analysis.