Does more money correlate with greater happiness?

Are people who earn more money happier in daily life? Though it seems like a straightforward question, research had previously returned contradictory findings, leaving uncertainty about its answer.

Foundational work published in 2010 from Princeton University's Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton had found that day-to-day happiness rose as annual income increased, but above $75,000 it leveled off and happiness plateaued. In contrast, work published in 2021 from the University of Pennsylvania's Matthew Killingsworth found that happiness rose steadily with income well beyond $75,000, without evidence of a plateau.

To reconcile the differences, the two paired up in what's known as an adversarial collaboration, joining forces with Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Barbara Mellers as arbiter. In a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, the trio shows that, on average, larger incomes are associated with ever-increasing levels of happiness. Zoom in, however, and the relationship becomes more complex, revealing that within that overall trend, an unhappy cohort within each income group shows a sharp rise in happiness up to $100,000 annually and then plateaus.

"In the simplest terms, this suggests that for most people larger incomes are associated with greater happiness," says Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Penn's Wharton School and lead paper author. "The exception is people who are financially well-off but unhappy. For instance, if you're rich and miserable, more money won't help. For everyone else, more money was associated with higher happiness to somewhat varying degrees."

Mellers digs into this last notion, noting that emotional well-being and income aren't connected by a single relationship. "The function differs for people with different levels of emotional well-being," she says. Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.

Joining forces The researchers began this combined effort recognizing that their previous work had drawn different conclusions. Kahneman's 2010 study showed a flattening pattern where Killingsworth's 2021 study did not. As its name suggests, an adversarial collaboration of this type -- a notion originated by Kahneman -- aims to solve scientific disputes or disagreements by bringing together the differing parties, along with a third-party mediator.

Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers focused on a new hypothesis that both a happy majority and an unhappy minority exist. For the former, they surmised, happiness keeps rising as more money comes in; the latter's happiness improves as income rises but only up to a certain income threshold, after which it progresses no further.

To test this new hypothesis, they looked for the flattening pattern in data from Killingworth's study, which he had collected through an app he created called Track Your Happiness. Several times a day, the app pings participants at random moments, asking a variety of questions including how they feel on a scale from "very good" to "very bad." Taking an average of the person's happiness and income, Killingsworth draws conclusions about how the two variables are linked.

A breakthrough in the new partnership came early on when the researchers realized that the 2010 data, which had revealed the happiness plateau, had actually been measuring unhappiness in particular rather than happiness in general. "It's easiest to understand with an example," Killingsworth says. Imagine a cognitive test for dementia that most healthy people pass easily. While such a test could detect the presence and severity of cognitive dysfunction, it wouldn't reveal much about general intelligence since most healthy people would receive the same perfect score.

"In the same way, the 2010 data showing a plateau in happiness had mostly perfect scores, so it tells us about the trend in the unhappy end of the happiness distribution, rather than the trend of happiness in general. Once you recognize that, the two seemingly contradictory findings aren't necessarily incompatible," Killingsworth says. "And what we found bore out that possibility in an incredibly beautiful way. When we looked at the happiness trend for unhappy people in the 2021 data, we found exactly the same pattern as was found in 2010; happiness rises relatively steeply with income and then plateaus."

"The two findings that seemed utterly contradictory actually result from data that are amazingly consistent," he says.

Implications of this work Drawing these conclusions would have been challenging had the two research teams not come together, says Mellers, who suggests there's no better way than adversarial collaborations to resolve scientific conflict.

"This kind of collaboration requires far greater self-discipline and precision in thought than the standard procedure," she says. "Collaborating with an adversary -- or even a non-adversary -- is not easy, but both parties are likelier to recognize the limits of their claims." Indeed, that's what happened, leading to a better understanding of the relationship between money and happiness.

And these findings have real-world implications, according to Killingsworth. For one, they could inform thinking about tax rates or how to compensate employees. And, of course, they matter to individuals as they navigate career choices or weigh a larger income against other priorities in life, Killingsworth says.

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Among ancient Mayas, cacao was not a food exclusive to the elite

It was the money that grew on trees.

Said to be a gift from the gods, cacao for the ancient Maya was considered sacred, used not only as currency, but in special ceremonies and religious rituals. It's the progenitor plant of chocolate, and notions of luxury are embedded in its lore.

The prevailing belief: Cacao was more available to, even controlled by, the society's very upper echelons, royalty. Past efforts to identify cacao in ceramics focused on highly decorative vessels associated with elite ceremonial contexts -- think ornate drinking vases -- leading to assumptions about how cacao was distributed and who could access it.

What about the farmers who grew cacao and the communities of people who lived amongst these orchards? What of the general populace?

A new study by UC Santa Barbara researchers Anabel Ford and Mattanjah de Vries asks these questions -- and answers them -- by examining cacao residues from ancient ceramics. Their results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrate that cacao was, in fact, accessible to the general populace and was used in celebrations at all levels of society.

"It had long been assumed that cacao for the Maya was an elite exclusive," said Ford, an anthropologist and director of the MesoAmerican Research Center at UC Santa Barbara, who for 40 years has been conducting research on the ancient Maya city of El Pilar. "We now know this is not the case. The imbibing of cacao was a luxury accessible to all. The importance is that it was a requirement of the rituals associated with it."

To test the exclusivity of cacao use, the work examines 54 archaeological ceramic sherds. Originating from El Pilar -- located between Belize and Guatemala -- the sherds can be traced to Late Classic period civic and residential contexts, representing a cross section of ancient Maya inhabitants. The study includes a chemical analysis of these sherds -- specifically of the biomarkers for cacao: caffeine, theobromine and theophylline.

"The discovery of chemical signatures of cacao made the investigation possible, but the main active ingredient, theobromine, it turns out is not sufficiently discrete to be certain of the cacao attribution," said Ford. "Mattanjah (de Vries) and his students, in their chemical research, encountered the possibility of detecting theophylline, a specific component of cacao that could not be confused with anything else. His work was not archaeological, but he saw the potential for an interdisciplinary project."

A distinguished professor and department chair of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, de Vries has long been studying how DNA bases -- the building blocks of life -- and similar molecules respond to UV light and, he said, whether UV light "could have played a role on an early Earth, in the way nature selected those building blocks from a primordial soup of many such compounds.

"At some point I realized that some of the compounds we had been studying in this origin of life chemistry project occur in cacao, and thus can serve as biomarkers for cacao," de Vries said. "Since we had already investigated the spectroscopy of these compounds in great detail, this presented an opportunity to apply that expertise to detection of these biomarkers for archaeology.

"We can find a needle in a haystack, provided we know what the needle looks like; in this case the target molecule was a certain biomarker for cacao," he added. "That ability is what made this analysis possible."

In their selection of ceramics to test, Ford and de Vries prioritized the vases from which cacao was likely drunk. They also tested bowls, jars and plates. All vessel types had evidence of cacao.

"This was a surprise at first," Ford said, "but giving thought to the presence and understanding of their uses, bowls would be good for mixing, jars would be right for warming the drink (a traditional cacao preparation) and plates appropriate for serving food with sauces that can contain cacao (such as mole poblano).

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On the origins of money: Ancient European hoards full of standardized bronze objects

 In the Early Bronze Age of Europe, ancient people used bronze objects as an early form of money, even going so far as to standardize the shape and weight of their currency, according to a study published January 20, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Maikel H. G. Kuijpers and Cătălin N. Popa of Leiden University, Netherlands.

Money is an important feature of modern human society. One key feature of money is standardization, but this can be difficult to identify in the archaeological record since ancient people had inexact forms of measurement compared with today. In this study, the authors assessed possible money from the Early Bronze Age of Central Europe, comparing the objects based on their perceived -- if not precise -- similarity.

The objects studied were made of bronze in shapes described as rings, ribs, and axe blades. The authors examined more than 5,000 such objects from more than 100 ancient hoards. They statistically compared the objects' weights using a psychology principle known as the Weber fraction, which quantifies the concept that, if objects are similar enough in mass, a human being weighing them by hand can't tell the difference.

They found that even though the objects' weights varied, around 70% of the rings were similar enough to have been indistinguishable by hand (averaging about 195 grams), as were subsets of the ribs and axe blades.

The authors suggest that this consistent similarity in shape and weight, along with the fact that these objects often occurred in hoards, are signs of their use as an early form of standardized currency. Later, in the Middle Bronze Age of Europe, more precise weighing tools appear in the archaeological record along with an increase in scrap bronze, pointing to a developed system of weighing.

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Money matters to happiness--perhaps more than previously thought

 What's the relationship between money and well-being? "It's one of the most studied questions in my field," says Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at Penn's Wharton School who studies human happiness. "I'm very curious about it. Other scientists are curious about it. Laypeople are curious about it. It's something everyone is navigating all the time."

To answer this question, Killingsworth collected 1.7 million data points from more than 33,000 participants who provided in-the-moment snapshots of their feelings during daily life. In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Killingsworth confirms that money does influence happiness and, contrary to previous influential research on the subject suggesting that this plateaus above $75,000, there was no dollar value at which it stopped mattering to an individual's well-being.

Killingsworth conducts much of his work using a technique called experience sampling, which asks people to repeatedly fill out short surveys at randomly selected moments during their day. "It tells us what's actually happening in people's real lives as they live them, in millions of moments as they work and chat and eat and watch TV."

Most previous studies of the money-happiness link focused on evaluative well-being, which encompasses overall satisfaction with life. But for this study, Killingsworth aimed to capture both evaluative and experienced well-being, the latter indicating how people feel in the moment.

Through an app he created called Track Your Happiness, people recorded this a few times each day, with check-in times randomized per participant. To measure experienced well-being, each check-in asked them, "How do you feel right now?" on a scale ranging from "very bad" to "very good." At least once during the process, participants also answered the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?" on a scale of "not at all" to "extremely." This measured evaluative well-being.

Secondary measures of experienced well-being included 12 specific feelings, five positive (confident, good, inspired, interested, and proud) and seven negative (afraid, angry, bad, bored, sad, stressed, and upset). Secondary measures of evaluative well-being included two other measures of life satisfaction collected on an intake survey.

"This process provided repeated snapshots of people's lives, which collectively gives us a composite image, a stop-motion movie of their lives," he says. In total, 33,391 employed, 18- to 65-year-olds in the United States provided 1,725,994 reports of experienced well-being. "Scientists often talk about trying to get a representative sample of the population," he adds. "I was trying to get a representative sample of the moments of people's lives."

Killingsworth then calculated the average level of well-being for each person and analyzed its relationship to people's income. In part, he was trying to confirm the findings of a 2010 paper that suggested that as people earn more money their well-being increases, but experienced well-being plateaus once annual household income hits $75,000.

"It's a compelling possibility, the idea that money stops mattering above that point, at least for how people actually feel moment to moment," he says. "But when I looked across a wide range of income levels, I found that all forms of well-being continued to rise with income. I don't see any sort of kink in the curve, an inflection point where money stops mattering. Instead, it keeps increasing."

Here, "income" refers to a concept known as log(income); rather than each dollar mattering the same to each person, each dollar starts to matter less the more a person earns. "We would expect two people earning $25,000 and $50,000, respectively, to have the same difference in well-being as two people earning $100,000 and $200,000, respectively. In other words, proportional differences in income matter the same to everyone."

Beyond that, Killingsworth's work also provides a deeper understanding of the link between income and happiness.

Higher earners are happier, in part, because of an increased sense of control over life, he says. "When you have more money, you have more choices about how to live your life. You can likely see this in the pandemic. People living paycheck to paycheck who lose their job might need to take the first available job to stay afloat, even if it's one they dislike. People with a financial cushion can wait for one that's a better fit. Across decisions big and small, having more money gives a person more choices and a greater sense of autonomy."

Yet it might be best not to define success in monetary terms, he says. "Although money might be good for happiness, I found that people who equated money and success were less happy than those who didn't. I also found that people who earned more money worked longer hours and felt more pressed for time."

Though the study does show that income matters beyond a previously believed threshold, Killingsworth also doesn't want the takeaway to enforce an idea that people should focus more on money. In fact, he found that, in actuality, income is only a modest determinant of happiness.

"If anything, people probably overemphasize money when they think about how well their life is going," says Killingsworth. "Yes, this is a factor that might matter in a way that we didn't fully realize before, but it's just one of many that people can control and ultimately, it's not one I'm terribly concerned people are undervaluing." Rather, he says he hopes this research can help move forward the conversation in an attempt to find what he calls the "equation for human happiness."

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Money can't buy love -- or friendship

While researchers have suggested that individuals who base their self-worth on their financial success often feel lonely in everyday life, a newly published study by the University at Buffalo and Harvard Business School has taken initial steps to better understand why this link exists.

"When people base their self-worth on financial success, they experience feelings of pressure and a lack of autonomy, which are associated with negative social outcomes," says Lora Park, an associate professor of psychology at UB and one of the paper's co-authors.

"Feeling that pressure to achieve financial goals means we're putting ourselves to work at the cost of spending time with loved ones, and it's that lack of time spent with people close to us that's associated with feeling lonely and disconnected," says Deborah Ward, a UB graduate student and adjunct faculty member at the UB's psychology department who led the research on a team that also included Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, Kristin Naragon-Gainey, at the University of Western Australia, and Han Young Jung, a former UB graduate student.

The findings, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, emphasize the role of social networks and personal relationships in maintaining good mental health and why people should preserve those connections, even in the face of obstacles or pursuing challenging goals.

"Depression and anxiety are tied to isolation, and we're certainly seeing this now with the difficulties we have connecting with friends during the COVID-19 pandemic," says Ward. "These social connections are important. We need them as humans in order to feel secure, to feel mentally healthy and happy. But much of what's required to achieve success in the financial domain comes at the expense of spending time with family and friends."

Ward says it's not financial success that's problematic or the desire for money that's leading to these associations.

At the center of this research is a concept psychologists identify as Financial Contingency of Self-Worth. When people's self-worth is contingent on money, they view their financial success as being tied to the core of who they are as a person. The degree to which they succeed financially relates to how they feel about themselves -- feeling good when they think they're doing well financially, but feeling worthless if they're feeling financially insecure.

The research involved more than 2,500 participants over five different studies that looked for relationships between financial contingency of self-worth and key variables, such as time spent with others, loneliness and social disconnection. This included a daily diary study that followed participants over a two-week period to assess how they were feeling over an extended time about the importance of money and time spent engaged in various social activities.

"We saw consistent associations between valuing money in terms of who you are and experiencing negative social outcomes in previous work, so this led us to ask the question of why these associations are present," says Ward. "We see these findings as further evidence that people who base their self-worth on money are likely to feel pressured to achieve financial success, which is tied to the quality of their relationships with others."

Ward says the current study represents the beginning of efforts to uncover the processes at work with Financial Contingency of Self-Worth.

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