Why Lottery Winnings Don’t Always Lead To Happiness
Why Lottery Winnings Don’t Always Lead To Happiness
Shirin Ali | July 27, 2022
Story at a glance
Winning the lottery may increase a person’s life satisfaction and remain that way for decades to come.
An increase in happiness isn’t as certain, with research showing lottery winners showing little to no improvement there.
Researchers say happiness is subjective and is interpreted differently from person to person.
Receiving a massive influx of cash may seem like instant gratification but research has shown that winning a lottery may increase life satisfaction but may not impact general happiness.
The odds of winning a Mega Millions jackpot is one in 303 million — while the odds of winning at least $1 million are about 1 in 12.6 million.
For the lucky few who do manage to snag a winning ticket, they will likely experience an increase in life satisfaction that can persist for over a decade, with no evidence of that decreasing over time.
However, the effect on a person’s happiness and mental health after winning a lottery is more mixed, with research showing increases are usually smaller and not statistically significant.
Those are findings that researchers from New York University and Stockholm University in Sweden came to after studying over 400 people who had won lotteries in Sweden from 1998 to 2011.
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“We find that winning large sums of money strongly affects how content you are with your personal finances. But it does not affect how you feel about other aspects of life, such as your health, or your relationships with friends and family,” said Erik Lindqvist, one of the researchers behind the study.
Lindqvist’s team found clear evidence that wealth improves people’s evaluation of their lives as a whole— suggesting that improved financial circumstances is an important component behind increasing people’s life satisfaction.
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