Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? · Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? Philip Brickman and Dan Coates Northwestern University

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology1978, Vol. 36, No. 8, 917-927

Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?

Philip Brickman and Dan CoatesNorthwestern University

Ronnie Janoff-BulmanUniversity of Massachusetts

Adaptation level theory suggests that both contrast and habituation will operateto prevent the winning of a fortune from elevating happiness as much as mightbe expected. Contrast with the peak experience of winning should lessen theimpact of ordinary pleasures, while habituation should eventually reduce thevalue of new pleasures made possible by winning. Study 1 compared a sampleof 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and also with a group of 29paralyzed accident victims who had been interviewed previously. As predicted,lottery winners were not happier than controls and took significantly lesspleasure from a series of mundane events. Study 2 indicated that these effectswere not due to preexisting differences between people who buy or do not buylottery tickets or between interviews that made or did not make the lotterysalient. Paraplegics also demonstrated a contrast effect, not by enhancing minorpleasures but by idealizing their past, which did not help their present happiness.

Is Happiness Relative?

The idea that happiness is relative is atleast as old as the Stoic and Epicurean phi-losophers of ancient Greece. It is also a solu-tion to a number of intriguing puzzles inmodern social science. American soldiers inWorld War II with a high school educationor better had greater chances of being pro-moted but were less happy with their promo-

We wish to thank the following students who pro-vided valuable assistance in collecting data for thefirst study: Debbie Ahner, Lowry Alexander, MaryJo Barrett, Daryl Brandford, Dana Day, Pat Dennis,Susan Froikin, Frederick Garnett, Dana Gimbel,Rick Grossman, Elizabeth Guthridge, Jim Howard,Bob Hoyt, Aaron Janis, Janine Kushner, LeslieLevin, Rodney Martin, Dawson Moorer, PattiRiedle, Wendie Rose, Yamima Rubens, Eric Tep-litz, and Eileen Wise. We are also grateful to Col-leen Dudgeon, Dorothy Echols, Steve Rosenthal, IraShapiro, Kurt Walsh, and Rhonda Welfare for theirhelp with the follow-up study. Finally, we wish tothank Ralph Batch, Illinois State Lottery Superin-tendent, and Dennis Stone, Vice-President of Her-bert H. Rozoff Associates, for their friendly coop-eration.

Requests for reprints should be sent to PhilipBrickman, Department of Psychology, NorthwesternUniversity, Evanston, Illinois 60201.

tion chances. Merton and Kitt (19SO) evolvedthe notion of relative deprivation to explainthis fact, among others. The better educatedsoldiers saw themselves as doing poorly com-pared to their peers in civilian life or theirpeers who were already officers. Less welleducated soldiers, on the other hand, sawthemselves as reasonably well off compared tosimilar others in civilian life or their peers inthe service. Individuals in an experimentalgroup that was objectively worse off, becauseone member was disadvantaged, were moresatisfied than individuals in a group whereeveryone was equal or where one member wasadvantaged. Brickman (1975) predicted thisresult from the fact that in the first case,individuals would enhance the relative valueof their own outcome by comparing it withthe less fortunate other, whereas in the lattertwo cases, there would be no such compari-son to elevate their appreciation of theirstanding.

Curiously enough, however, the limits ofthe proposition that happiness is relative havenever been tested. If happiness were com-pletely relative, groups that had receivedextremes of good and bad fortune in life—winning a million dollars versus suffering a

Copyright 1978 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/78/3608-0917$00.75

917

918 P. BRICKMAN, D. COATES, AND R. JANOFF-BULMAN

crippling accident—should differ from oneanother in happiness much less than we mightexpect. The most general framework for con-sidering this possibility is adaptation leveltheory (Helson, 1964), whose application tothe pursuit of pleasure and questions of hap-piness has been developed by Brickman andCampbell (1971). The most general principleof adaptation level theory is that people'sjudgments of current levels of stimulationdepend upon whether this stimulation exceedsor falls short of the level of stimulation towhich their previous history has accustomedthem. Adaptation level theory offers twogeneral reasons for believing that recipientsof an extreme stroke of good fortune will notbe generally happier than persons who havenot been dealt such good fortune. The first iscontrast. The second is habituation.

Contrast and Habituation

Experiences that are salient or extreme andsimultaneously relevant to other experiencesserve as heavily weighted inputs for adapta-tion level (Eiser & Stroebe, 1972; Helson,1964). Winning a million dollars is both adistinctive event and an event that is relevantto many other life occurrences. Since it con-stitutes an extremely positive comparisonpoint, however, the thrill of winning the lot-tery should result in an upward shift in adap-tation level. Consequently, many ordinaryevents may seem less pleasurable, since theynow compare less favorably with past experi-ence. Thus, while winning $1 million canmake new pleasures available, it may alsomake old pleasures seem less enjoyable. Thatnew pleasures are offset by the compensatoryloss of old ones should in turn militate againstany general gain in happiness by lottery win-ners.

The second limit to good fortune is habitu-ation. Eventually, the thrill of winning thelottery will itself wear off. If all things arejudged by the extent to which they departfrom a baseline of past experience, graduallyeven the most positive events will cease tohave impact as they themselves are absorbedinto the new baseline against which furtherevents are judged. Thus, as lottery winnersbecome accustomed to the additional plea-

sures made possible by their new wealth, thesepleasures should be experienced as less in-tense and should no longer contribute verymuch to their general level of happiness. Insum, the effects of an extreme stroke of goodfortune should be weakened in the short runby a contrast effect that lessens the pleasurefound in mundane events and in the long runby a process of habituation -that erodes theimpact of the good fortune itself.

The same principles hold in reverse forgroups that surfer an extreme stroke of illfortune, like accidental paralysis. In theshort run, their unhappiness should be miti-gated by a contrast effect that enhances theimpact of mundane pleasures, which are nowcontrasted with the extreme negative anchorof the accident. In the long run, their unhap-piness should be mitigated by a process ofhabituation that erodes the impact of the ac-cident itself.

It was our purpose in this research to makea preliminary assessment of these proposi-tions. Study 1 consisted of short interviewswith three groups of people: a sample of lot-tery winners, a sample of paralyzed accidentvictims, and a sample of people who wereneither winners nor victims. Study 2 investi-gated the possibility that the results of Study1 were due 'to preexisting differences betweenpeople who buy lottery tickets and peoplewho do not or between interview contexts inwhich winning a lottery was more or lesssalient.

Study 1

MethodSamples

Accident victims. The sample of accident victimswas interviewed as part of an earlier study (see Bui-man & Wortman, 1977, for details). Eleven para-plegic and 18 quadraplegic respondents were drawnfrom the full-time patient population at a majorrehabilitation institute. Five other possible respon-dents were unavailable for interviews. Response ratewas thus 85%.

Lottery winners. The winners were selected froma list of 197 major winners in the Illinois StateLottery. Winners were selected to be interviewedprimarily on the basis of amount won, with largeramounts preferred. Proximity to other winners wasalso considered in the selection of this group, inorder to minimize traveling for the interviewers. In

IS HAPPINESS RELATIVE? 919

20 of the 42 attempted interviews, the potentialrespondent was either unattainable or unwilling, re-sulting in a 52% response rate. Among the 22 lot-tery winners who were interviewed, 7 won $1 million,6 won $400,000, 2 won $300,000, 4 won $100,000,and 3 won $50,000.

Controls. The names of 88 people who lived inapproximately the same areas of the city as thelottery winners were selected from the phone bookand used as the basic list from which the controlgroup was drawn. Contact was attempted with 58 ofthese individuals. The response rate was 41%, pro-viding a control group of 22 participants.

InterviewersAll of the paraplegic/quadraplegic respondents

were personally interviewed in a face-to-face situa-tion by a female graduate student. The winner andcontrol respondents were interviewed by 11 two-person teams of students. Three of these teams con-sisted of two males, three of a male and a female,and five of the teams were composed of two females.Each team interviewed two winners and two controlrespondents.

Five of the teams conducted interviews only overthe phone, whereas the remaining six teams tried forface-to-face interviews but settled for a phone inter-view if the respondent preferred this. Four of thecontrol respondents and 6 of the winners wereinterviewed face to face, and 18 control and 16winner participants were questioned over the phone.Past research (Janofsky, 1971; Rogers, 1976) hasindicated that results from telephone surveys arecomparable to results from face-to-face interviewing,and breakdown of our data found no differencesbetween the telephone and face-to-face samples.

ProcedureOnce the lists of winners and controls were com-

piled, letters were sent to all participants except twowinners whose names arrived too late. These lettersdescribed the study and the possibility that an inter-viewer would be phoning. This was done to givepeople who were not interested an advance oppor-tunity to refuse and to make the initial telephonecontacts easier. The letters sent to winners and con-trols differed in that winners were informed thatthe research was a study of lotteries, whereas thecontrol letters described the research as a study ofeveryday life. The control letter did not mentionlottery winners, in order to avoid instituting anunfavorable comparison for the controls. The letterto the winners did make this reference, since theserespondents were keenly aware of their special statusand would expect an interview to deal with it.Participants were promised the results of the studyif they were interested in them.

MeasuresAs general background, all respondents were asked

their age, occupation, race, religion, and level of

schooling. The lottery winner and accident victimgroups were then asked several open-ended ques-tions. Winners were first asked, "Has your life-style changed in any way since you won? How?"Winners and victims were asked, "Do you feel youin any way deserved what happened?" and also,"Do you ask yourself, 'Why me?' How do youanswer?" Respondents were also asked to rate howmuch credit or blame they assigned to themselvesfor their outcome and to divide 100% of the responsi-bility among four potentially causal factors: them-selves, others, the environment, and chance. Winnerswere asked to rate winning, and victims were askedto rate their accident, on a scale anchored by "thebest and worst things that could happen to you inyour lifetime."

For a measure of general happiness, respondentswere asked to rate how happy they were now (notat this moment, but at this stage of their life).They were also asked to rate how happy they werebefore winning (for the lottery group); before theaccident (for the victim group); or 6 months ago(for the control group). Finally, each group wasasked to rate how happy they expected to be ina couple of years.

For a measure of everyday pleasure, respondentswere asked to rate how pleasant they found each ofseven activities or events: talking with a friend,watching television, eating breakfast, hearing afunny joke, getting a compliment, reading a maga-zine, and buying clothes. The last item was addedspecifically for the lottery winner and controlgroups and was not asked of the accident victims.All ratings were made on 6-point scales rangingfrom 0 for "not at all" to 5 for "very much."

ResultsBackground Characteristics

For the most part, the different groupsused in this study were similar in back-ground. Men outnumbered women in eachcondition, with 63% of the winners, 55% ofthe controls, and 79% of the victims beingmales. Whites also held a consistent majorityacross groups, comprising 86% of the win-ners, 73% of the controls, and 72% of theparaplegics. The remainder of the winners(14%) and controls (27%) were black, aswere 24% of the victims. One handicappedrespondent was Latin American. About halfthe members of each group were Catholic(45% of winners, 50% of controls, and 48%of victims), and the rest were primarilyProtestant (50% of winners, 41% of con-trols, and 31^0 of victims). Five percent ofthe winners, 9% of controls, and 21% of theparaplegics practiced some other or no reli-gion.

920 P. BRICKMAN, D. COAXES, AND R. JANOFF-BULMAN

In all three groups, 45% of the participantshad finished their education with a highschool diploma. Thirty-two percent of thewinners, 18% of the controls, and 27% ofthe victims did not finish high school; 23%of the winners and controls and 21% of theparaplegics had some college training. Four-teen percent of the controls and 7% of thevictims had advanced graduate or profes-sional education. Most of the winners (63%)and controls (59%) held blue-collar jobs,and 23% of each of these groups consisted ofstudents, housewives, and others who weretechnically unemployed. The rest, 14% ofwinners and 18% of the controls, were inwhite-collar positions. The handicapped sam-ple was not asked for occupational informa-tion.

There were no significant differences amongthe study groups on any of these backgroundcharacteristics, but the paraplegic samplewas younger than the other two. The meanage for the handicapped group was 23 yearsold; it was 44 years for winners and 46 yearsfor controls, F ( 2 , 65) = 29.12, p < .001.

Life Changes

Although ,64% of the lottery winners gaveexamples of how their lives had been changed,only 23% were willing to say that their life-style in general had changed. The large ma-jority of the changes mentioned were posi-tive, including financial security, increasedleisure time, easier retirement, and generalcelebrity status. Negative effects of winning,if any, were always mentioned together withsome positive feature. The life changes facedby the victims were severe and clearly evi-dent. These formerly independent individualsnow found themselves in a state near physicalhelplessness, in wheelchairs or beds, with theirdays at the rehabilitation center filled withtherapy sessions.

In general, lottery winners rated winningthe lottery as a highly positive event, andparaplegics rated their accident as a highlynegative event, though neither outcome wasrated as extremely as might have been ex-pected. On a scale where 0 represented theworst possible thing that could happen in alifetime and 5 represented the best possible

thing, with 2.50 as a hypothetical neutralpoint, lottery winners rated winning as 3.78,and victims rated their accident as 1.28. Theratings of the two groups are, of course, sig-nificantly different, F ( l ,47)=37.31 , p<.001. It is especially interesting to note thatthe two ratings are roughly symmetric aroundthe mean, with winning the lottery beingabout as positive as the accident is negative.

In both the winner and victim groups, timepassed since the event was not significantlyrelated to either happiness or pleasure ratings.The failure to find any relationship may havebeen due to the fact that people who had justencountered the extreme outcome, or peoplewho had had years to adjust to it, were notrepresented in our sample. Only one of thewinners had been aware of his good fortunefor less than a month, and none of them hadpassed more than a year and a half withtheir new wealth. The victims had been spe-cifically selected so that the time elapsedsince the accident was never less than 1month or more than 1 year.

Everyday Pleasures and General Happiness

The mean happiness and pleasure ratingsof the various study groups are presented inTable 1. As the table shows, winners ratedthe seven ordinary activities as less pleasur-able than controls did, and this difference issignificant, F(l,42) - 7.05, p< .011. Acci-dent victims also tended to find the everydayevents less enjoyable than controls, but thedifference is not quite significant, F(l,44) =3.14, p < .083. The comparison between vic-tims and controls is based on only six plea-sure items, since victims were not asked oneof the questions. Also, two paraplegics werenot asked any pleasure questions, and threeskipped some of the items, so their responseswere unavailable for this analysis.

Lottery winners and controls were not sig-nificantly different in their ratings of howhappy they were now, how happy they werebefore winning (or, for controls, how happythey were 6 months ago), and how happythey expected to be in a couple of years. TheF values for present, past, and future happi-ness were .27, 1.43, and .02, respectively. Ac-cident victims and controls were significantly


Table 1Mean General Happiness and Mundane Pleasure Ratings

General happiness

Condition

Study 1WinnersControlsVictims

Past

3.773.324.41

Present

4.003.822.96

Future"

4.204.144.32

Mundanepleasure

3.333.823.48

Study 2BuyersNonbuyersLottery contextEveryday context

3.763.893.524.10

3.814.003.734.02

4.404.584.624.29

3.653.733.693.68

• In Study 1, 10 paraplegics, 3 winners, and 1 control did not answer the future happiness question. InStudy 2, 3 lottery context and 2 everyday context respondents did not answer this question.

different in their ratings of both past happi-ness, F( 1,47) = 12.23, p< .001, and presenthappiness, F(l ,47) = 7.16, p < .01, but notfuture happiness, F(l, 38) = .31. Table 1indicates that accident victims recalled theirpast as having been happier than did controls(which we may call a nostalgia effect), whileexperiencing their present as less happy thancontrols. It should be noted, however, thatthe paraplegic rating of present happiness isstill above the midpoint of the scale and thatthe accident victims did not appear nearly asunhappy as might have been expected. Since10 paraplegics refused to answer the ques-tion of future happiness (versus 3 winnersand 1 control), the results for this questionmust be viewed most cautiously. If refusalto answer represents apprehension, inclusionof these respondents would have lowered thevictim mean and perhaps the winner meanrelative to the control group.

Assignment of Responsibility

Winners saw chance as a more importantcause of their outcome than did victims.Winners assigned 71.4% of the cause tochance, whereas victims (who had been para-lyzed for a variety of different reasons) as-signed 33.6% of the cause to chance, F(l,43) = 13.36, p < .001. On the other hand, amajority of the winners (13) felt that theyin some way deserved what happened, where-

as only two of the accident victims felt theydeserved what happened. These proportionsare significantly different, \2(l) = 16.42,p < .01.

Either because they saw the outcome asmore a matter of chance or because the out-come was favorable, winners seemed less in-volved than victims with explaining why theoutcome had happened to them. Half of thelottery winner sample either did not ask ordid not answer the "why me" question,Whereas only one of the accident victims didnot ask and answer this question. This dif-ference between groups is significant, x2 (1) =15.08, p < .01.

Study 2

There are at least two major alternativeexplanations for the difference between lot-tery winners and controls that can be readilychecked with further data. The first is thatthe difference is not an effect of the lotterybut a general tendency for people who buylottery tickets to find less pleasure in theirlives than people who do not buy tickets.Indeed, a degree of dissatisfaction with mun-dane events could be the reason people buylottery tickets, rather than a result of win-ning the lottery. This could account for thedifference between the winners and controlsin Study 1, presuming the controls containedsignificantly fewer ticket buyers than the win-

922 P. BRJCKMAN, D. COATES, AND R. JANOFF-BULMAN

ners. On the other hand, Langer's (197S)finding that people are more willing to gam-ble when they feel confident suggests thatticket buyers could be more optimistic andconfident than nonbuyers. The first purposeof Study 2 was to assess any general differ-ences that might exist between people whobought or did not buy lottery tickets.

The second explanation is that the differ-ence is not a result of past connections ofrespondents to the lottery but of the degreeto which the idea of winning the lottery wasmade salient in the interview itself. The win-ners were clearly aware of the study's focuson the lottery, whereas the controls were onlytold that the study dealt with everyday life.Merely introducing the lottery as a contextfor the interview may induce people to takelottery winners as a reference group. If so,adaptation level theory (Brickman & Camp-bell, 1971) and social comparison (Thibaut& Kelley, 19S9) predict that the lottery con-text should cause people to attach less im-portance to mundane pleasures than theeveryday-life context. Thus, the lottery win-ner effect of Study 1 could be attributed tothe fact that winning the lottery was madesalient in the interview, rather than to thefact that winning the lottery was a continualand inescapable reference point for the win-ners. The second purpose of Study 2 was toassess the effects of mentioning the lottery inthe interview on respondents' self-ratings.

MethodSample

The names of 156 individuals living close to pastlottery winners were drawn from the phone book.Sixty-nine either could not be reached or refused toparticipate, giving a response rate of 56% and atotal sample of 86. Forty-four were assigned to thelottery cover-story condition and 42 to the everyday-life cover-story condition.

InterviewersAll participants were interviewed over the phone

by two-person teams composed of one male and onefemale. In all, there were seven interviewers—fourmales and three females. Each team talked with anequal number of participants in both the lottery andeveryday conditions, in a counterbalanced order. Allbut two interviews were tape recorded, with thepermission of participants, with one team memberoperating the tape recorder and taking notes while

the other asked the questions. Members took turnsin these two roles.

Procedure

Participants were randomly assigned to be senteither the same everyday-life letter as was sent tothe control group in Study 1 or a similar letter thatexplained the study as dealing with the Illinois StateLottery. In fact, all respondents were asked ques-tions about their participation in the lottery, butlottery condition respondents were asked thesequestions first, and everyday-life respondents wereasked these questions last, with no prior mention ofthe lottery.

MeasuresQuestions were identical to those asked of the

control group in Study 1, with the exception ofseveral additional questions about the lottery. Re-spondents were asked to indicate if and how oftenthey bought tickets, when their most recent pur-chase had been, and how much money they had won.

Results

Background Characteristics

Out of the total sample of 86 people, 59 ofthem, or 69%, had bought lottery tickets.Since these individuals were selected in thesame way as the original control group, thisbreakdown suggests that among the originalcontrols most people were probably ticketbuyers and therefore comparable in this wayto the lottery winners.

Buyers and nonbuyers shared fairly similarbackground characteristics. Forty-six percentof the buyers and 63% of the nonbuyers weremales, and the remainder in each group werefemales. Most buyers (86%) and nonbuyers(74%) were white; 9% of buyers and 22%of nonbuyers were black; and 5% of the buy-ers and 4% of the nonbuyers were LatinAmerican or Oriental. In terms of religiouspreference, 58% of the buyers and 33% ofthe nonbuyers were Catholic, with most ofthe remaining buyers (29%) and nonbuyers(56%) being Protestant. A few members ofeach group, 13% of buyers and 11% of non-buyers, practiced some other or no religion.

Forty-one percent of the buyers and 30%of the nonbuyers had finished high school;27% of the buyers and 11% of the nonbuy-ers had not reached this educational level.Most of the remaining participants reported


some college training (24% of buyers and44% of nonbuyers), and 8% of the buyersand 15% of the nonbuyers had some gradu-ate or professional education. These groupswere almost identical in their occupationallevels, with 44% of both groups in blue-col-lar jobs, approximately 23% of each samplein white-collar positions, and about 33% ineach case being technically unemployed. Themean age for buyers was 46 years old and fornonbuyers, 40 years old. There were no sig-nificant differences between these groups onany of these background measures.

Buyers and Nonbuyers

Besides sharing comparable backgrounds,buyers and nonbuyers were apparently quitesimilar in how happy they felt, as Table 1shows. The small differences between thesegroups in their happiness ratings are not sig-nificant: F(3, 82) = 1,03, for present happi-ness; F(3,82) = .42, for past happiness;and F(3, 77) = .72, for future happiness. Inaddition to the absence of main effects, therewere also no significant interactions betweenticket buying and type of cover story for anydependent measure.

Study participants were divided into groupsaccording to how often they bought tickets(more or less than once a month) and howrecently they had purchased a ticket (more orless than 6 months ago). Again, there wereno significant main effects or interactions onthe happiness or combined pleasure ratings.

Study 2 used the same methodology asStudy 1, selected participants in the samemanner, and employed twice as many sub-jects, but failed to find any differences likethose reported in Study 1. These results sug-gest, then, that among the kind of people whowere included in the initial study, whetherthey played the lottery had little relationshipto the satisfaction they reported. The resultsobtained in that study were therefore prob-ably not due to more nonplayers among thecontrols.

Lottery and Everyday-Life Context

Although the lottery and everyday-life coverstories resulted in no significant differences

on the scores of present happiness or thepleasure derived from the daily activities,there were significant differences in the rat-ings of past and future happiness. Partici-pants in the everyday-life cover-story condi-tion rated their past as happier than lotteryrespondents did, F(3,82) = 6.21, p < .015.The lottery group, on the other hand, ratedtheir future happiness higher than those inthe everyday group did, F(3, 77) = 4.16, p< .05 (see Table 1). Five respondents, threein the lottery condition and two in the every-day condition, did not answer the futurehappiness question. Perhaps, as was originallyanticipated in Study 1, telling people thatthey are involved with a project on the lotteryencourages them to compare themselves tolottery winners. In contrast to their image ofa big winner's life, their own past seemsrather unhappy. However, since such a com-parison does hold the promise that they alsocould be winners, they are more hopeful intheir future predictions.

In any case, these cover-story results donot substantially alter the interpretation ofthe findings from Study 1. Merely introducingthe lottery as a context for the interviewhad no impact on participants' views of theordinary pleasures they considered and didnot consistently raise or lower reported hap-piness. In light of the available evidence,then, it seems unlikely that either the buyer/non'buyer differences between the groups orthe different cover stories can explain theresults obtained in Study 1.

Discussion

Adaptation Level Interpretation

Although lottery winners felt very goodabout winning the lottery, they took lesspleasure than controls in a variety of ordi-nary events and were not in general happierthan controls. These results can be derivedfrom an adaptation level analysis of theeffects of a single extremely positive event(cf. Brickman, 1975; Parducci, 1968). Ini-tially, such an event may be expected to de-press ratings of related but less spectacularevents, by contrast. Over time, such an eventmay be expected to cease having any effect ongeneral happiness ratings, through habitua-


tion. It is certainly encouraging for adapta-tion level that the obtained pattern of re-sults is compatible with this analysis.

On the other hand, our data are sharplylimited by the fact that they were obtainedat a single point in time and do not trace outthe hypothetical temporal course of adapta-tion. When we broke down our sample bythe time that had elapsed since the lottery orthe accident, we found no changes in theirratings. Presumably, the present pattern ofresults was obtained because winning thelottery remained vivid enough to contrastwith more ordinary events but no longer sovivid as to elevate general happiness rat-ings. This interpretation would be vastlystrengthened, however, if our sample hadincluded both people in the critical days andweeks right after the event, for whom thesalience and relevance of the event should bemaximal, and people in the equally criticalmany years after the event, for whom habitu-ation should be complete. A larger study,preferably longitudinal, is needed to specifythe exact parameters that determine howadaptation level effects change over time.

The results for accident victims appear tobe less supportive of adaptation level theory.The accident victims did not tend to takemore pleasure in ordinary events and ratedthemselves significantly less happy in generalthan controls. In a curious way, however, theparaplegics did demonstrate the positive con-trast effect predicted by adaptation leveltheory. The events that become more posi-tive for them, however, were not the ordi-nary events of their present (as we ex-pected), but the ordinary events of their past.Paraplegics exhibited a strong nostalgia ef-fect, rating their past as much happier thandid controls. This result is not due to the agedifference between the paraplegic and controlsamples, since people in their 20s do not gen-erally rate their pasts as happier than peoplein their 40s (Andrews & Withey, 1976).Ironically, then, the paraplegics had just asstrong a positive anchor as the lottery win-ners, which worked to make current mundaneevents seem less pleasurable by contrast.Since their positive anchor, unlike that of thewinners, was now inaccessible to them, itmade no positive contribution toward general

happiness to offset the negative impact it hadon judgments of ordinary events. To the ex-tent that paraplegics could become or bemade less nostalgic for an idealized versionof their past, we might find them takingmore pleasure in the mundane events of theirpresent.

Alternative Explanations

A general alternative explanation to adap-tation level theory for the decreased satisfac-tion of the lottery winners is that good luckin a lottery may actually be more painfulthan pleasurable. Previous research suggeststhat sudden changes or extreme outcomes,even though positive, can be stress inducing(Dohrenwend & Dohrenwend, 1974; Rahe,1972; but see also Vinokur & Selzer, 1975).Furthermore, well-known stories such as thoseabout Faustus, King Midas, or the Sorcerer'sApprentice warn us that having our dreamsfulfilled can create more problems than aresolved. Finally, popular press articles (Royko,1973; Safran, 1974) suggest that the socialrelationships of lottery winners may becomestrained. Friends who do not ask for moneymay shun the winner to avoid appearing towant money or simply to avoid social com-parison (Brickman & Bulman, 1977). If win-ning produces problems, it could under-standably be seen by winners as a mixedblessing.

But the winners in our study did not ap-pear to find their good fortune problematic.They rated winning very high in relation tothe best thing that could possibly happen tothem. They typically listed positive lifechanges as resulting from the windfall, suchas decreased worries and increased leisuretime. This suggests that winning lessened thestress and strain of their lives. Furthermore,winners did not rate social activities, suchas talking with a friend or receiving a com-pliment, as any less pleasurable than non-social ones, like reading a magazine or eatingbreakfast. We do not mean to suggest thatno social problems are created for winnersby their good fortune, or rather by other peo-ple's perception of their good fortune—anissue we will return to in a moment. How-ever, the decreased pleasure they take in cer-


tain ordinary events does not seem to resultfrom any general sense that winning the lot-tery was itself an unpleasant experience orat best a mixed blessing. The adaptationlevel explanation—that their peak experiencewith the lottery made more ordinary joyspale by comparison—remains the most plausi-ble interpretation.

A second possibility is that lottery winnersreported less pleasure in everyday events inorder to appear modest and minimize the im-portance of their success, as subjects havesometimes been found to do after laboratorysuccess (Schneider, 1969). However, if win-ners were trying to enlist sympathy or down-play their joy, we would have expected themto do it by mentioning negative features ofwinning rather than the very positive onesthey emphasized. There is nothing particu-larly boastful about claiming an ordinary de-gree of pleasure in eating breakfast or watch-ing television and, thus, nothing particularlymodest about denying the pleasurableness ofsuch events.

Finally, it is always possible that winningthe lottery changed the perspective peoplehave on everyday events without changing theactual pleasure they received from theseevents. The variable perspective model ofOstrom and Upshaw (1968) would argue thatthe lottery simply gave winners a new andmore extreme endpoint on their subjectivepleasure scale, It is the new endpoint, ratherthan the actual experience of winning, thatchanged their pleasure ratings.

Perspective theory has been developedand tested almost exclusively in the labora-tory, and at least some attempts to applythis model in the field have encountered diffi-culties (Kinder, Smith, & Gerard, 1976;Smith, Gerard, & Kinder, 1976; Upshaw,1976). More importantly, however, evi-dence available suggests that our resultswere not due to alterations in the partici-pants' pleasure perspectives. Winners typi-cally rated their financial windfalls as lessthan the best thing that could happen tothem. Interviews with the winners showedthat they often considered qualities like goodhealth or close social relationships to bemore satisfying than a large cash surplus.Further, when nonwinners were interviewed

in a lottery context, which would likely ex-tend their pleasure perspectives to includewinning a large sum of money, their generalsatisfaction ratings were no lower than thoseprovided by the everyday-context group.Similarly, most victims did not rate theirparalysis as the worst thing that could hap-pen to them and could imagine other morenegative outcomes (Bulman & Wortman,1977). While winning $1 million or en-countering a crippling accident may be themost extreme events participants have ac-tually endured, these occurrences do not ap-pear to be ultimate limits on the subjectiverange of pleasurable experiences that re-spondents considered in rating their happi-ness. The lower pleasure ratings of the win-ners and higher past-happiness scores of thevictims are probably therefore due to thecontrast with their previous extreme experi-ences rather than to alterations in their sub-jective scales.

Implications

The present study may be added to asmall but growing body of literature that re-quires us to take seriously the notion thathappiness is relative. There is evidence thatthe inhabitants of poorer cities (Schneider,197S), regions (Liu, 1973), or countries(Easterlin, 1973) are not less happy than theinhabitants of more favored places. There isresearch suggesting that the blind, the re-tarded, and the malformed are not lesshappy than other people (Cameron, 1972;Cameron, Titus, Kostin, & Kostin, 1973).There is the fact that "in the United States,the average level of happiness in 1970 wasnot much different from what it had been inthe late 1940's, though average income, afterallowance for taxes and inflation, could buy60% more" (Easterin, 1973, p. 7; see alsoGallup, 1977, for failure to find any consis-tent relationship between economic improve-ment and increased happiness). There are thefindings that sex, race, age, income, educa-tion, family life-cycle stage, and other demo-graphic classification variables accounted forrelatively little variance in general happinessin two independent national surveys (An-drews & Withey, 1976). Although high-status


people felt better off in certain domains (notall), they worried just as frequently as didlow-status people and wanted to make justas many changes in their lives.

This is not to say that there are no mean-ingful variations in people's judgments of thequality of life (Andrews & Withey, 1976;Campbell, Converse, & Rogers, 1976). Butwe know much less than we might ajboutthe dynamics of these variations. Apparentlyin consequence of this ignorance, we tend tooverestimate the magnitude, generality, andduration of other people's feelings. Throughoverlooking compensatory contrast effects, weoverestimate the overall magnitude and gen-erality of the positive or negative feelinggenerated by an event. Through overlookinghabituation effects, we overestimate the gen-eral duration of feeling generated by anevent. Perhaps because observers see themomentary elation or despair of an actor asmore extreme and more enduring than it is,they make inferences about the actor's dispo-sition that the actor finds quite unwarranted(Jones & Nisbett, 1971). This calls to mindDeutsch's (1960) demonstration of the "pa-thetic fallacy" in observers, who see actorsas more distressed by their misfortune thanthe actors see themselves—a fact also re-ported by Andrews and Withey (1976) andvividly if unwittingly demonstrated by Rubin(1976).

If observers overestimate the extent towhich winning a lottery or being crippledaffects the psychological state of participants,this fact itself can have serious consequences.Others may cut off interaction with partici-pants, either to avoid potentially embarras-sing social comparison (Brickman & Bulman,1977) or simply to avoid having to respond towhat they expect are extremes of happinessor despair. This tendency for others to re-duce interaction can in turn make it harderon people who have experienced such ex-treme events to evolve a new adaptation totheir social environment (Coates & Wortman,in press). If observers could be made awarethat severe outcomes do not have as greatan impact as might be expected, as the re-sults of the present study show, they mightfind it less threatening to interact with otherswho have experienced such outcomes.

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Received September 15, 1977 •

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Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? · Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? Philip Brickman and Dan Coates Northwestern University