It’s hard to believe, but if I set you up to find a dime and then ask you how happy your life was over the last year, you’re quite likely to report being happier than you would have if you hadn’t found the dime.

Odd, isn’t it?

I read about this little finding, which comes from the 1980s, while going through Dan Ariely’s research articles that make up the basis for this Predictably Irrational book. Schooler, Ariely and Loewenstein describe other findings that are related:

Although individuals may have some global sense of their overall degree of well-being, there is also considerable evidence that reports of global happiness can be powerfully influenced by the situational context in which individuals are queried. A famous example of the difficulty of judging one’s global happiness comes from the research of Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1998), who asked some college students how many times they had gone out on a date in the last month, then how happy they had been overall. Other students were asked the same questions but in the reverse order. For those asked about dates first, the correlation between the two items was 0.66; for those asked about happiness first, the correlation was close to zero. These results suggest that instead of recalling their hedonic state over the last month, the students seemed to be looking more for objective cues about whether their last month had been good or bad and attempted to judge their happiness based on those cues. When the information about dates was activated, it played a more prominent role int these evaluations. Additional studies have demonstrated that individuals’ general assessment of their happiness can be similarly biased by a number of other situational factors including, the current weather (Schwarz and Clore, 1983), finding a dime (Schwarz, 1987), and the outcome of soccer games (Schwarz et al., 1987).

SOURCE: Schooler, Jonathan W.; Ariely, Dan; and Loewenstein, George. 2003. “The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness can be Self-Defeating.” In The Psychology of Economic Decisions, I. Brocas and J. Carrillo, eds. (Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press) [image-based PDF]

There’s a lot for hidden high potentials to consider with this, and with the material in the rest of the article. Here’s a couple of starting points.
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