Scientists studied 200 people who were given $10,000. The result was key: they were ‘ happy ‘ compared to those who did not receive.
Remember the familiar and motivational sayings that ‘ money doesn’t buy happiness ‘? A scientific study has come out to deny it.
According to research published in the journal PNAS , money can buy happiness, for at least 6 months, in households that do not exceed 100 thousand dollars a year in the United States.
So was the study
The organization responsible for the study was TED and the money was provided by two anonymous millionaires.
The people who received the money had to spend it all in three months and record what they felt monthly. A control group of 100 people without donations also recorded their opinions.
The researchers measured happiness by having people rate how satisfied they were with their lives on a scale of 1 to 7 and how often they experienced positive feelings, such as happiness , and negative feelings, such as sadness, on a scale of 1. to 5.
The 20 people who received $10,000 reported higher levels of happiness than those who did not.
The curious thing is that these people even reported the same values up to three months after the experiment.
Of course, there were people who were given the money and had annual incomes greater than 123 thousand dollars. For this, the amount donated did not change their ways of life.
It has to do with the country
Study participants came from three low-income countries (Brazil, Indonesia, and Kenya) and high-income countries (Australia, Canada, UK, and US).
People in the first countries to receive the money were three times as happy as those who received it from high-income countries.
“Ten thousand dollars in certain parts of the world can really buy you a lot,” said study co-author Ryan Dwyer, who conducted the research as a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia. “Some people spent a lot of money paying off their mortgage or doing a big renovation on their house.”
Previous research indicates that lottery winnings increase people’s life satisfaction.