A central question in happiness research is whether happiness is relative or absolute. Some believe that happiness depends on absolute wealth. Others hold that happiness depends only on a person’s wealth relative to others. This question carries important social implications. If happiness is relative, improving wealth from one generation to the next is just a zero-sum game and will not make the new generation happier. If happiness is absolute, however, it will.
Most research pertaining to this question examines overall happiness (life satisfaction) and yields mixed findings. The authors focus on a finer level than overall happiness and study specific hedonic experiences. They distinguish three types of consumer-relevant experiences: with money (monetary experience), with the acquisition of a good (acquisition experience), and during the consumption of the good (consumption experience).
Intuitively, these three types of experiences should be aligned because the purpose of money is to buy (acquire) goods and the purpose of goods is consumption. Yet the authors propose and find (in Studies 1 and 2) that monetary and acquisition experiences are relative but consumption is absolute. In Study 2, for example, participants were given and drank a cup of milk. The authors varied milk concentration and found that during the acquisition stage, happiness depended on relative concentration (whether a participant’s milk was more or less concentrated than his or her peers), but during the consumption stage, happiness depended on absolute concentration (how concentrated my milk was).
Besides separating consumption from money and acquisition, the authors distinguish two types of consumption experience. Type A experience (e.g., with ambient temperature) is inherently evaluable; people have an innate stable “scale” to know what level is pleasant/unpleasant. Type B experience (e.g., with the size of a diamond) is inherently inevaluable; people do not have such an innate evaluation scale.
The authors propose and find in both a lab study (Study 3) and a field study (Study 4) that Type A experience is absolute and Type B experience is relative. In Study 4, for example, they assess city dwellers’ happiness with room temperature (in winter) and jewelry value and find that room temperature has both a within-city effect (people with a warmer home temperature are happier) and a between-city effect (people living in cities with warmer home temperatures are happier), whereas jewelry value has only a within-city effect and no between-city effect. Because it is easy to engage in social comparison within a city but not between cities, the findings indicate that happiness with temperature (Type A) is absolute and happiness with jewelry (Type B) is relative. The key social implication of this research is that improving wealth across generations can increase happiness if the attention is focused on consumption rather than on money and acquisition and if wealth is invested in improving Type A rather than Type B variables.
Biography
Christopher K. Hsee is Theodore O. Yntema Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Marketing in the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. His research interests include consumer behavior, individual judgment and choice, emotion, happiness, behavioral economics, and cross-cultural psychology. He has published in psychology, marketing, and management journals. For more information, visit http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/christopher.hsee/vita/index.htm.
Yang Yang is a marketing student at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, she was a management student in the Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Her research interests include consumer behavior and subjective well-being.
Naihe Li is Associate Professor of Marketing at Shanghai Jiaotong University. His research interests include consumer behavior, Internet marketing, and quantitative analysis in marketing research.
Luxi Shen is a psychology student at Fudan University. Her research interests include social psychology and consumer behavior.
J Marketing Research, Volume 46, Number 3, June 2009
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