Do people believe that you can have too much money? The relationship between hypothetical lottery wins and expected happiness. Tessa Haesevoets Kim Dierckx Alain Van Hiel. Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 17, No. 6, November 2022, pp. 1229-1254. https://journal.sjdm.org/22/220824/jdm220824.html
Abstract: Do people think that there is such a thing as too much money? The present research investigated this question in the context of hypothetical lottery wins. By employing a mental simulation approach, we were able to examine how people respond to increasing envisioned jackpot amounts, and whether there are individual differences in people’s reactions. Across five empirical studies (total N = 1,504), we consistently found that, overall, the relationship between imagined lottery wins and expected happiness is characterized by an inverted U-shaped curve, with expected happiness being highest around an envisioned win of roughly 10 million pounds. Both lower and higher envisioned wins reduced participants’ overall expected happiness. In addition to this overall pattern, we identified three clusters of participants who react differently to expected increases in wealth. These clusters mainly differed in terms of how soon the top of the expected happiness curve was reached, and if and when the curve started to drop. Finally, we also found some interesting cluster differences in terms of participants’ prosocial and proself motivations.
Keywords: hypothetical lottery wins; expected happiness; inverted U-curve; cluster analysis; individual differences
7 General Discussion
We started our paper with a quote attributed to Wallis Simpson,
“You can never be too rich or too thin.” Most people will recognize that
you can be too thin, and, as our results illustrate, many people also seem
to believe that you can be too rich. Across five studies, we consistently
found that, overall, the relationship between hypothetical lottery wins
and expected happiness is characterized by an inverted U-shaped pattern,
with the overall desired optimal lottery win being a jackpot amount of
approximately 10 million pounds. Considering that in our studies
participants were explicitly told that there was no upper boundary to the
amount of money that they could possibly win, it can be concluded that
this ‘overall’ optimum is situated at the rather low end of the continuum
(and considerably lower than the global jackpot average which is situated
around 29 million pounds; see Rodger, 2017). After this particular point,
the overall expected happiness curve started to drop, which illustrates
that, on average, the prospect of receiving too much money negatively
impacts people’s overall expected happiness.
Importantly, however, is that our cluster analyses revealed that this
general pattern is actually the mere mean tendency of distinct subgroups
of people reacting differently to expected increases in wealth, rather
than a uniform psychological reaction that is shared by all people. More
specifically, our pairwise comparison data revealed the existence of a
first cluster of participants (i.e., Cluster 1) who react according to the
‘more-is-better’ (non-satiation) logic. For these people, the
expected happiness curve continued to rise when the amount of money that
they supposedly won increased, and this even up until the highest included
monetary amount of 10 billion euro (in Study 4) and 1 trillion pounds (in
Study 5). So, for this type of people there does not seem to be a point of
satiation (although the results of Study 5 indicate that they do not
necessarily want to have “all the money in the world”). Conversely, the
responses of the other two identified clusters (i.e., Clusters 2 and 3)
were more in accordance with the ‘too-much-of-a-good-thing’
logic, as these participants expected to be more satisfied with the
intermediate wins than with the smallest and the largest envisaged wins.
So, for these types of people there is a point beyond which they
anticipate that more money will negatively affect their happiness; this
point was reached much sooner in the third cluster than in the second
cluster. And, at very high lottery amounts the curve of the third cluster
even plummeted towards the bottom of the expected happiness scale. This
latter finding suggests that this particular subgroup of people does not
seem to value money when it comes in great amounts, and even anticipates
that this will make them quite unhappy.
Ample prior studies have demonstrated that people fundamentally differ with
respect to their prosocial and proself tendencies (e.g., Au & Kwong,
2004; Bogaert el al., 2008; Van Lange, 2000). To contribute to this body
of research, as a third objective, we examined if and how the clusters
that could empirically be distinguished differed from each other in terms
of participants’ proself and prosocial motivations. Across our studies,
and in line with our expectations, we consistently found that the cluster
of participants for whom there is no satiation effect (i.e., Cluster 1,
which reacted according to the ‘more-is-better’ logic) is
generally more proself and less prosocially oriented than the
other two clusters which included participants for whom there is a point
after which expected happiness decreased (i.e., Clusters 2 and 3, which
reacted according to the ‘too-much-of-a-good-thing’ logic).
Interestingly, our discriminant analysis clarified that the three clusters
also differ in terms of more specific proself and prosocial
motives. In particular, we found that participants in Cluster 1 were more
greedy and also felt more entitled than those in Clusters 2 and 3, with
these differences being most pronounced between Cluster 1 and Cluster 3.
Furthermore, participants in Cluster 1 are not only driven more by these
two specific proself motivations, they are also less concerned about
fairness considerations and the welfare of others (which constitute two
specific prosocial motivations).
7.1 Strengths,
Limitations, and Future Research
An important strength of our work is that we collected data using a variety
of research methods, including both a between-subjects design (Study 2),
within-subjects designs (Studies 3 and 5), and pairwise comparisons
(Studies 4 and 5). The fact that we could replicate our key findings using
this divergence in methods and designs strengthens our confidence in the
robustness and generalizability of the reported findings. Yet, our
approach to employ hypothetical lottery scenarios also contains two
important constraints. First, because the lottery wins in our studies were
imagined, participants did not really experience the surprise of receiving
the message or actually using the money. Instead, they formed a mental
model of what they believed would happen. Secondly, lottery wins are a
windfall gain whereas other sources of wealth often have a strong link to
meritocracy (or at least the illusion of it). In this vein, Donnelly et
al. (2018) have shown that earned wealth is associated with greater
happiness than inherited wealth.
Although we found some interesting motivational differences between the
three emerging clusters, we did not consider all relevant motivational
traits and personality factors in our research. A first important
motivation that we did not consider in any of our studies is inequality
aversion. Given that lotteries by their nature increase inequality, this
concept might be particularly relevant to consider in future studies.
Another important personality factor that was not included in the present
research is the Honesty-Humility dimension of the HEXACO model (Hilbig &
Zettler, 2009), which specifically contains a facet called greed
avoidance. Low scorers on this trait want to enjoy and display wealth and
privilege, whereas high scorers are not especially motivated by monetary or
social-status considerations. In light of our research, it can be expected
that those whose reactions are in accordance with the
‘too-much-of-a-good thing’ logic (i.e., Clusters 2 and 3) will
score higher on inequality aversion and greed avoidance than those whose
reactions endorse the ‘more-is-better’ logic (i.e., Cluster 1),
but future research is needed to verify these claims.
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