幸福生活的七大秘诀

秘诀3：中奖不会立刻让人幸福 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.
        近期研究中最惊人的发现之一显示：中奖赢得1000英镑（或更多的钱）不会立刻让你感到幸福。相反，中奖者需要2年的时间，才能开始享受自己的奖金。这与劳动所得对幸福感的影响形成了鲜明对比：加薪往往会给一个人的幸福感带来一些立竿见影的改善（同样，其效果并不像人们想象的那么明显）。但为什么要用2年时间才能感觉到中奖的喜悦呢？一种假设是，虽然传统经济理论通常认为只要是钱，就没什么两样，但事实上，中奖赢得的1英镑与挣到的1英镑有所不同。
 
          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.
        我与经济学家安德鲁•奥斯瓦尔德(Andrew Oswald)和雷纳•温克尔曼(Rainer Winkelmann)在彩票中奖者中，对“滞后应得感”进行了新的研究。研究发现，挣得的收入被认为是本质上应得的，中奖得到的钱则不是。中奖者不会立刻认为这些钱是自己完全应得的，因为中奖会造成一种不必要的认知偏差——一个人头脑中存在两种矛盾想法的过程。中奖者认为：“这钱让我开心，但我不确信自己是否真的有权使用它们”。然而，随着时间的流逝，中奖者可以说服自己，让自己认为这钱是自己应得的。凭经验而论，认知偏差的逐步消失大约需要2年时间。有趣的是，我们在研究中还发现，在人们的心目中，通过不同方式获得的收入份量不同：人们对获赠和继承收入的看法，与对工资与中奖收入的看法截然不同。
 
       A pound is not just a pound.
      钱和钱也不是完全一样的。