Money and happiness .. How does science explain the relationship between them?

You really want to have a few million, and like other young people, you want to achieve your simple and acceptable dreams. You see that car there and say that your happiness will come true. You wish a respectable job with a steady income, but can it be a cause for happiness? At first glance, it may or may not be so, but discussion of such things has long been left to the facets of philosophy and meditation, and this prompts us to question the opinion of another important domain of knowledge, psychology.

How do we measure happiness?

Let us consider this interesting survey from Purdue University led by Andrew Gepp, PhD student in the Department of Psychology, which was published on February 14, 2018 from the journal Nature Human Behavior of the prestigious journal Nature in an attempt to answer an important question: It is known that happiness rates rise as the annual incomes of citizens increase, but the nature of the relationship between happiness and income is not clearly understood, so the question is whether that effect will continue permanently, or that it will reach a maximum , Can help clarify the shape of those To Aqh.

What distinguishes this study is the size and diversity of its sample size, which represents 2 1.7 million people from 164 countries around the world, from different economic, social and political levels, with a wide variation in the age of the testee starting from the 15th, with an attempt to study the impact of gender, But perhaps at that point in our journey together you will stop a bit to wonder seriously about happiness, where we can easily through statistical mechanisms to recognize data such as your gender, income, education, Age, and work of a person, and then enter it For our study and await the data, however, how can we measure the "happiness" of someone?

Here we need to get to know what we call the "tripartite model of subjective well-being" developed by Edward Diener, professor of psychology at Utah University and one of the founders of the Gullup test, The type of surveys for researchers in different universities. This theory describes the quality of people's lives by measuring three criteria. The first is the degree of satisfaction with your life. The cognitive side of the Deiner model represents the second and the third represent the emotional side, the positive and negative aspects of what we call emotional well-being "Affective Well-being".

The first criterion of this model expresses your satisfaction with several aspects of your life, such as work, marriage, health, as well as your wishes or future goals, and is measured by simple tests. For example, the test person is asked to imagine a ladder of ten Degrees, numbered from 1 to 10, the first of which expresses the worst possible quality of life, the tenth of the best quality possible, and then selects a degree from them to stand on it.

In terms of emotional well-being, positive side 6 expresses how people interact with their environment through positive actions. High-ranking people in this standard tend to be self-confident, enthusiastic and power-hungry, active and always alert, and those with high values On the negative side, they tend to deal with the world through guilt, sadness, nervousness, fear, disdain and disgust, and this aspect is measured by asking them which cases we have just introduced to them for more than a day.

The relationship between happiness and money is limited
Here, the results of Study 7 show that there is already a relationship between the annual income of individuals and the three Deiner criteria, quality of life, and negative and positive emotional wellbeing, but this relationship remains only positive up to a certain amount per capita. This amount varies considerably by country, but the average Is $ 95,000, or the equivalent of your currency, per year for quality-of-life tests, $ 75,000 for the negative situation, and $ 60,000 for the positive state of emotional well-being. After this limit the standards of the Deiner model begin to decline, Happiness is not always commensurate With the amount of money you get, but there is something like a turning point, the quality of your life begins to decline again and becomes less happy. This makes us curious. We have the right to ask why this happens. Is not it supposed to get a larger amount of money than we can buy more things and therefore, we become happier?

This question is still on the table. However, Pocket 8 and his colleagues in the study envision that there are several possible causes for the fall of the quality of life standards after the turning point. For example, getting very high entry requires very great effort, working daily for long hours, In order to reach that level, which in turn can have a negative impact on the quality of our lives. In addition, this huge amount of income is transforming the lifestyle into a more "physical" form, which may affect the shape of our feelings.

The quality of our lives may be reduced as social comparisons are high, or changes in our lives due to high incomes can lead to a decline in quality. For example, there are more children who need to be taught more money or have to live in neighborhoods where life requires payment. More monthly bills .. etc. Perhaps that is why most say that "happiness is not just money" are billionaires.

So it is not as we think, ideal wealth, although it is not at our disposal now, and perhaps not, but it has limits, which - for science - is not surprising in this research scope to say that there is a limit to the ideal amount that you can get, Was in the small size of the amount that reaches the individual to saturation in this study specifically, which fell under 40 thousand dollars in some countries, but let us clarify that these figures speak only in individual values, meaning that the presence of a family of five individuals means more, as well The cost of living in a country is different from that of the other country. I mean the price of a gas can be in one country Not equivalent to half of its price in another, for example, which may cause the fall of the general average.

But the diversity of the study results (between $ 35,000 in some areas and $ 130,000 in other regions) draws attention to another important idea: in rich countries the saturation point is far from above, and one of the reasons here could be the rise The intensity of social comparison between individuals is already high, which may drive the point of saturation up. On average, access to higher incomes leads to greater opportunities for greater degrees of happiness that poor countries have not originally imagined. Meditation, there is a relative nature in the relationship between money and happiness Dah, there is a group of people have got the same amount of happiness reached by another group of people four times the amount of annual money, so an important question!

On the other hand, this study points to several points that deserve some attention. For example, there are no clear gender differences in the need for women and men to a certain amount. In order to feel ideal satisfaction, women were slightly higher in their requirements (about $ 10,000 per year) But this is not a significant difference. The difference is clearly the difference in learning. Those who received poor education (only the first stages) were satisfied with $ 70,000 a year, while up to $ 115,000 with well-educated students.

A state of inadequacy

However, in the end, we can not easily say that this research pattern, although earlier studies have obtained close results, speaks in clear assertions. For example, the sample is always biased 9. Despite Gallup's concern to be a representative sample But can not easily get members of the higher socioeconomic groups to participate in this type of test. In addition, our inability to identify all factors influencing the experiments, or the form of causal relationships between their components, or even if any of the factors Their own reason is to deny, or confirm, the results we obtained without others.