Quoidbach, J., Wood, A. M., &Hansenne, M. (2009). Back to the future: The effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety.

The ability to project oneself into the future has previously been found to be related to happiness and anxiety. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the causal effect of deliberate mental time travel (MTT) on happiness and anxiety. More specifically, we address whether purposely engaging in positive, negative, or neutral future MTT would lead to different levels of happiness and anxiety. Results show a significant increase of happiness for subjects in the positive condition after 2 weeks but no changes in the negative or neutral condition. Additionally, while positive or negative MTT had no effect on anxiety, engaging in neutral MTT seems to significantly reduce stress over 15 days. These findings suggest that positive future MTT is not just a consequence of happiness and might be related to well-being in a causal fashion and provide a new approach in happiness boosting and stress-reducing activities.

 

 

Quoidbach, J., Wood, A. M., &Hansenne, M. (2009). Back to the future: The effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(5), 349-355.

https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760902992365

 

Van Boven, L., &Gilovich, T. (2003). To Do or to Have? That Is the Question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1193-1202.

Do experiences make people happier than material possessions? In two surveys, respondents from various demographic groups indicated that experiential purchases-those made with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience–made them happier than material purchases. In a follow-up laboratory experiment, participants experienced more positive feelings after pondering an experiential purchase than after pondering a material purchase. In another experiment, participants were more likely to anticipate that experiences would make them happier than material possessions after adopting a temporally distant, versus a temporally proximate, perspective. The discussion focuses on evidence that experiences make people happier because they are more open to positive reinterpretations, are a more meaningful part of one’s identity, and contribute more to successful social relationships.

 

 

Van Boven, L., &Gilovich, T. (2003). To Do or to Have? That Is the Question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1193-1202.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.6.1193

 

 

Nicolao, L., Irwin, J. R., &Goodman, J. K. (2009). Happiness for sale: Do experiential purchases make consumers happier than material purchases?. Journal of consumer research, 36(2), 188-198.

Previous theories have suggested that consumers will be happier if they spend their money on experiences such as travel as opposed to material possessions such as automobiles. We test this experience recommendation and show that it may be misleading in its general form. Valence of the outcome significantly moderates differences in respondents’ reported retrospective happiness with material versus experiential purchases. For purchases that turned out positively, experiential purchases lead to more happiness than do material purchases, as the experience recommendation suggests. However, for purchases that turned out negatively, experiences have no benefit over (and, for some types of consumers, induce significantly less happiness than) material possessions. We provide evidence that this purchase type by valence interaction is driven by the fact that consumers adapt more slowly to experiential purchases than to material purchases, leading to both greater happiness and greater unhappiness for experiential purchases.

 

 

Nicolao, L., Irwin, J. R., &Goodman, J. K. (2009). Happiness for sale: Do experiential purchases make consumers happier than material purchases?. Journal of consumer research, 36(2), 188-198.

https://doi.org/10.1086/597049

 

 

DeLeire, T., &Kalil, A. (2010). Does consumption buy happiness? Evidence from the United States. International Review of Economics, 57(2), 163-176.

We examine the association between various components of consumption expenditure and happiness in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative sample of older Americans. We find that only one component of consumption is positively related to happiness—leisure consumption. In contrast, consumption of durables, charity, personal care, food, health care, vehicles, and housing are not significantly associated with happiness. Second, we find that leisure consumption is associated with higher levels of happiness partially through its effect on social connectedness, as indexed by measures of loneliness and embeddedness in social networks. On one hand, these results counter the conventional wisdom that “material goods can’t buy happiness.” One the other hand, they underscore the importance of social goods and social connectedness in the production of happiness.

 

 

DeLeire, T., &Kalil, A. (2010). Does consumption buy happiness? Evidence from the United States. International Review of Economics, 57(2), 163-176.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-010-0093-6

 

 

Van Boven, L., Campbell, M. C., &Gilovich, T. (2010). Stigmatizing materialism: On stereotypes and impressions of materialistic and experiential pursuits.

Five studies examined the stigmatization of materialism. Participants expressed negative stereotypes of materialistic people, considering them to be more selfish and self-centered than experiential people (Study 1). Participants also viewed materialistic pursuits as more extrinsically motivated than experiential pursuits (Study 2). These stereotypes led respondents from varied demographic backgrounds to form less favorable impressions of individuals who were associated with prototypically materialistic versus experiential purchases, a result that was statistically mediated by impressions that materialistic purchases were more extrinsically motivated (Study 3). These differential impressions are primarily attributable to the denigration of materialistic people rather than the admiration of experiential people (Study 4). The stigmatization of materialism led participants to like less and enjoy interacting less with their conversation partners when discussing materialistic rather than experiential purchases (Study 5). The authors discuss these findings’ implications for self-perception, accurate social perception, and well-being.

 

 

Van Boven, L., Campbell, M. C., &Gilovich, T. (2010). Stigmatizing materialism: On stereotypes and impressions of materialistic and experiential pursuits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(4), 551-563.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210362790

 

 

Carter, T. J., &Gilovich, T. (2012). I am what I do, not what I have: The differential centrality of experiential and material purchases to the self.

What kinds of purchases do the most to make us happy? Previous research (Carter & Gilovich, 2010; Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003) indicates that experiences, such as vacations and concerts, are more likely to do so than material possessions, such as clothes and electronic gadgets. The present research was designed to explore 1 potential explanation for this result, namely, that experiences tend to be more closely associated with the self than possessions. The authors first show that people tend to think of their experiential purchases as more connected to the self than their possessions. Compared with their material purchases, participants drew their experiential purchases physically closer to the self (Study 1), were more likely to mention them when telling their life story (Study 2), and felt that a purchase described in terms of its experiential, rather than its material, qualities would overlap more with their sense of who they are (Study 4). Participants also felt that knowing a person’s experiential purchases, compared with their material purchases, would yield greater insight into that person’s true self (Studies 3A–3C). The authors then show that the tendency to cling more closely to cherished experiential memories is connected to the greater satisfaction people derive from experiences than possessions (Study 5).

 

 

Carter, T. J., &Gilovich, T. (2012). I am what I do, not what I have: The differential centrality of experiential and material purchases to the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(6), 1304-1317.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0027407 

 

 

Ashraf, N., Karlan, D., &Yin, W. (2010). Female empowerment: Impact of a commitment savings product in the Philippines. World development, 38(3), 333-344.

Female “empowerment” has increasingly become a policy goal, both as an end to itself and as a means to achieving other development goals. Microfinance in particular has often been argued, but not without controversy, to be a tool for empowering women. Here, using a randomized controlled trial, we examine whether access to and marketing of an individually held commitment savings product lead to an increase in female decision-making power within the household. We find positive impacts, particularly for women who have below median decision-making power in the baseline, and we find this leads to a shift toward female-oriented durables goods purchased in the household.

 

 

Ashraf, N., Karlan, D., &Yin, W. (2010). Female empowerment: Impact of a commitment savings product in the Philippines. World development, 38(3), 333-344.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2009.05.010

 

 

Soman, D., &Liu, M. W. (2011). Debiasing or rebiasing? Moderating the illusion of delayed incentives.Journal of Economic Psychology, 32(3), 307-316.

This paper studies corrective strategies for the illusion of delayed incentives (Soman, 1998), the phenomena that money-for-effort transactions that are unattractive in the present appear attractive when they are in the future. This illusion occurs because future effort is discounted more heavily than future monetary outcomes. In this research, we show that this bias of differential discounting can be corrected by asking consumers to perform effort at the time of decision-making. We further outline three explanations for why this intervention attenuates the illusion of delayed incentives, and discuss whether these explanations constitute a debiasing effect or a rebiasing effect (Larrick, 2004). We report the results of two laboratory experiments and discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

 

 

Soman, D., &Liu, M. W. (2011). Debiasing or rebiasing? Moderating the illusion of delayed incentives.Journal of Economic Psychology, 32(3), 307-316.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2010.12.005

 

 

Dunn, E. W., Wilson, T. D., &Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Location, location, location: The misprediction of satisfaction in housing lotteries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(11), 1421-1432.

People tend to overestimate the emotional consequences of future life events, exhibiting an impact bias. The authors replicated the impact bias in a real-life context in which undergraduates were randomly assigned to dormitories (or “houses”). Participants appeared to focus on the wrong factors when imagining their future happiness in the houses. They placed far greater weight on highly variable physical features than on less variable social features in predicting their future happiness in each house, despite accurately recognizing that social features were more important than physical features when asked explicitly about the determinants of happiness. In Experiment 2, we found that this discrepancy emerged in part because participants exhibited an isolation effect, focusing too much on factors that distinguished between houses and not enough on factors that varied only slightly, such as social features.



Dunn, E. W., Wilson, T. D., &Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Location, location, location: The misprediction of satisfaction in housing lotteries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29(11), 1421-1432.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203256867

 

 

Bucchianeri, G. W. (2011). The American Dream or the American Delusion? The Private and External Benefits of Homeownership for Women. working paper, University of Pennsylvania.

This paper uses a unique data set with housing consumption, well-being measures and time use patterns to explore the implications of homeownership. After controlling for income, housing quality and health, female homeowners are not better off than renters by a variety of measures, both global and situational. Instead, they derive significantly more pain from their house and home – comparable to the unadjusted increase from a doubling in home value. Differences in financial security, health, self-esteem, perceived control, stress level cannot account for the well-being results. One potential mechanism is time use differences: female homeowners tend to spend less time on enjoyable activities, such as active leisure.

 

 

Bucchianeri, G. W. (2011). The American Dream or the American Delusion? The Private and External Benefits of Homeownership for Women. working paper, University of Pennsylvania.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1877163