Remember the familiar and motivational sayings that “money can’t buy happiness“? A scientific study has come out to deny it. According to research published in the PNAS magazine, money can buy happiness, for at least 6 months, in households that do not exceed 100,000 dollars a year in the United States.
So goes the study
The organization responsible for the study was TED and the money was provided by two anonymous millionaires. The people who received the money had to spend it all in three months and record what they felt on a monthly basis. A control group of 100 people without donations also recorded their views.
The researchers measured happiness by having people rate their satisfaction with their lives on a scale of 1 to 7 and the frequency with which they experienced positive feelings, such as happiness, and negative feelings, such as sadness, on a scale of 1 to 5.
The 20 people who received $10,000 reported higher levels of happiness than those who did not. The curious thing is that these people even reported the same values up to three months after the experiment.
Of course, there were people who were given the money and had an annual income greater than 123 thousand dollars. For this, the amount donated did not change their ways of life.
It has to do with the country
Study participants came from three low-income countries (Brazil, Indonesia, and Kenya) and high-income countries (Australia, Canada, UK, and US). People in the first countries to receive the money were three times as happy as those who received it from high-income countries.
