幸福生活的七大秘訣

秘訣3：中獎不會立刻讓人幸福 Winning the lottery won’t make you instantly happy

         One of the most surprising findings in recent research shows that a lottery win of £1,000 or more won’t immediately make you happy. Instead, it takes two years before winners enjoy their money. This is in stark contrast to the effect of earned incomes on happiness: an increase in salary often leads to some immediate improvement (again, not as much as one would think) in a person’s happiness. But why does the joy from a lottery win take two years to arrive? One hypothesis is that, while traditional economic theories typically assume that a pound is a pound is a pound, the reality is that one pound won is not the same as one pound earned.
        近期研究中最驚人的發(fā)現(xiàn)之一顯示：中獎贏得1000英鎊（或更多的錢）不會立刻讓你感到幸福。相反，中獎者需要2年的時間，才能開始享受自己的獎金。這與勞動所得對幸福感的影響形成了鮮明對比：加薪往往會給一個人的幸福感帶來一些立竿見影的改善（同樣，其效果并不像人們想象的那么明顯）。但為什么要用2年時間才能感覺到中獎的喜悅呢？一種假設是，雖然傳統(tǒng)經濟理論通常認為只要是錢，就沒什么兩樣，但事實上，中獎贏得的1英鎊與掙到的1英鎊有所不同。
 
          From new research on “lagged deservingness” among lottery winners that I undertook with economists Andrew Oswald and Rainer Winkelmann, earned income is regarded as money that is intrinsically deserved. Lottery income isn’t. The winner doesn’t immediately think that she is fully deserving of the money because winning the lottery creates a form of unwanted cognitive dissonance – the process associated with holding two contradictory ideas in one’s head. The winner thinks: “I’m happy about the money, but I’m not sure whether I’m really entitled to it.” Through time, however, the lottery winner can persuade herself that she deserves the money. Empirically speaking, this slow erosion of cognitive dissonance takes approximately two years to complete. Interestingly, we also found in our study that people weigh differently the various incomes that accrue to them: gift income and inheritance income are viewed in a very different way to wage income and lottery income.
        我與經濟學家安德魯•奧斯瓦爾德(Andrew Oswald)和雷納•溫克爾曼(Rainer Winkelmann)在彩票中獎者中，對“滯后應得感”進行了新的研究。研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，掙得的收入被認為是本質上應得的，中獎得到的錢則不是。中獎者不會立刻認為這些錢是自己完全應得的，因為中獎會造成一種不必要的認知偏差——一個人頭腦中存在兩種矛盾想法的過程。中獎者認為：“這錢讓我開心，但我不確信自己是否真的有權使用它們”。然而，隨著時間的流逝，中獎者可以說服自己，讓自己認為這錢是自己應得的。憑經驗而論，認知偏差的逐步消失大約需要2年時間。有趣的是，我們在研究中還發(fā)現(xiàn)，在人們的心目中，通過不同方式獲得的收入份量不同：人們對獲贈和繼承收入的看法，與對工資與中獎收入的看法截然不同。
 
       A pound is not just a pound.
      錢和錢也不是完全一樣的。