Breakfast. A funny joke. A compliment. Talking with a friend. These were among the small pleasures at the centre of one of psychology’s most famous studies of good fortune.
In 1978, Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman reported that 22 major lottery winners were no happier than 22 people in a comparison group. More intriguingly, the winners gave lower ratings to a short list of ordinary experiences. The result is often retold as though a jackpot reliably makes everyday life go grey.
The finding is worth a closer look, especially because a much larger study of Swedish lottery players later complicated it. This is one small, historical study, not settled consensus, and the attractive explanation in the headline goes further than the research design could prove.
What the 1978 study actually measured
The original Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper drew its winners from a list of 197 major winners in the Illinois State Lottery. The researchers attempted 42 interviews and completed 22, a response rate of 52 per cent. Seven participants had won $1 million; the others had won between $50,000 and $400,000.
The comparison group also contained 22 people, selected through phone-book listings in roughly the same areas as the winners. A third group consisted of 29 people who had become paraplegic or quadriplegic after accidents and had been interviewed for an earlier project. That third comparison made the paper memorable, although the lottery result can be understood without turning radically different lives into a tidy symmetry.
Participants rated their happiness at the current stage of life on a scale from zero to five. They also rated seven everyday experiences: talking with a friend, watching television, eating breakfast, hearing a funny joke, receiving a compliment, reading a magazine and buying clothes.
The winners’ average current-happiness score was 4.00, compared with 3.82 among controls. Statistically, the groups were not distinguishable on that measure. For ordinary pleasures, the averages moved in the other direction: 3.33 among winners and 3.82 among controls, a difference the researchers reported as statistically significant.
Why an extraordinary event might alter the scale
Brickman and his colleagues interpreted the pattern through adaptation-level theory. The basic idea is that an experience is judged partly against the range of experiences that surrounds it. After the intensity of a large win, breakfast and television may register as less striking by contrast. As the new wealth becomes familiar, meanwhile, the initial excitement may lose force.
That is the basis for saying the extraordinary reward made ordinary life feel smaller. It is a plausible interpretation of the ratings, and the authors considered alternative explanations. In a second study of 86 local residents, they found no evidence that lottery-ticket buyers generally enjoyed mundane events less than non-buyers, or that simply mentioning a lottery during an interview produced the same pattern.
Still, the researchers did not measure the winners before and after their jackpots. They met each person at one point in time. They therefore could not observe everyday pleasure declining within the same individual, nor could they map the proposed process of excitement, contrast and adaptation.
The limits are larger than the legend suggests
The authors were unusually plain about this problem. Their winners had known about the prize for periods ranging from less than a month to no more than 18 months, and the sample included neither many people in the first days after winning nor anyone living with the result years later. They called for a larger longitudinal study.
There were other constraints. The sample was tiny, selection was partly based on prize size and travel convenience, nearly half of the winners approached did not participate, and controls came from phone books rather than the same lottery. Most winner and control interviews happened by telephone, while some were conducted face to face. The pleasure measure was a seven-item rating exercise, not a diary of feelings as everyday life unfolded.
This matters because “no happier” can easily be misread. It means the researchers did not detect a statistically reliable difference in this sample. It does not establish that the two groups were identical, that money has no effect on wellbeing, or that every winner had returned to a fixed emotional baseline.
I recently looked at the wider idea of hedonic adaptation. The 1978 paper remains a vivid starting point for that discussion. Its size and design make it a poor final word.
Swedish lottery data produced a more complicated answer
Four decades later, economists Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and David Cesarini studied 3,362 Swedish lottery players. Their peer-reviewed paper, published in The Review of Economic Studies in 2020, used differences in randomly assigned prizes within groups of comparable players. Participants were surveyed between five and 22 years after the relevant lottery event, and the main analysis had been registered in advance.
The Swedish study found sustained gains in overall life satisfaction among people who received larger prizes. Those gains showed no evidence of fading over more than a decade, with improved satisfaction about personal finances appearing to explain much of the result.
Yet the estimated effects on happiness and mental health were smaller and were not statistically distinguishable from zero. That may sound like the Illinois finding repeated at scale, but the measures and conclusions are different. The Swedish researchers could make a stronger causal claim about wealth and life satisfaction. They did not repeat the old seven-item test of breakfast, jokes and magazines, so their work neither confirms nor overturns the claim about ordinary pleasures.
Happiness and life satisfaction are not interchangeable
The contrast between the two studies becomes clearer once wellbeing is separated into different questions. A person can judge life more favourably because bills are manageable, work is optional or the future feels secure, without laughing more often on an ordinary Tuesday. Conversely, a warm afternoon may feel good without changing an assessment of life as a whole.
The Swedish team called these evaluative and affective dimensions. Their results suggest that extra wealth may have a more durable effect on how people evaluate their circumstances than on the frequency of positive feelings. The 1978 study used a broad current-happiness question alongside ratings of specific mundane events, capturing yet another slice of experience.
This distinction protects the subject from two equally easy slogans. Money is not emotionally magical, and it is not irrelevant. A windfall can materially improve financial conditions and satisfaction with life even if it does not make every breakfast taste better.
What the famous finding still gives us
The old lottery study survives because its central image is so recognisable. Human judgement uses contrast. A meal can seem modest after a feast; a quiet weekend can feel flat after an extraordinary trip. It is reasonable to ask whether a jackpot could change the scale against which smaller pleasures are noticed.
What the evidence allows is narrower. In one small Illinois sample, major winners rated ordinary events less favourably than local controls, while reporting similar current happiness. The researchers proposed contrast with the win as the best explanation, but they did not observe pleasure shrinking over time. Later Swedish evidence showed that lottery wealth can raise life satisfaction for many years, while exerting a weaker influence on day-to-day happiness.
The most revealing part of the 1978 paper is therefore not a verdict on wealth. It is the gap between a changed life and a changed moment. A bank balance, an assessment of life and the pleasure of breakfast can all move differently, even when we use one word, happiness, for all three.