Does Money Buy Happiness, Revisited

I enjoyed reading this two part series about the money-happiness link based on research by Dan Gilbert (the author of Stumbling on Happiness) and colleagues. 

The researchers put forth 8 principles for spending money wisely to increase happiness:

1. Buy more experiences and fewer material goods.  You won't adapt to experiences as quickly as you do things.  You'll be more likely to anticipate and revisit your memories of your experiences, providing enjoyment over a longer period of time.  You'll feel engaged while doing - "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind, and one of the benefits of experiences is that they keep us focused on the here and now." Experiences are also more likely to be shared with others, which is itself a source of happiness.

2. Use money to benefit others rather than yourself.  It influences social relationships positively and gives you the opportunity for positive self-presentation.

3. Buy many small pleasures rather than a few large ones.  You're less likely to adapt (due to novelty, surprise, variability, and uncertainty.)  Small pleasures are less suceptible to diminishing marginal utility.  Taking a large pleasure and breaking it up into pieces, separated by time, gives you more "bursts of delight" than having the entire experience at once.

4. Avoid extended warranties, generous return policies, and other forms of overpriced insurance.  You'll adapt to a negative experience (e.g., your camera breaking) quicker than you think you will.  Even if it's your own fault, the powers of rationalization, shifting blame, and other forms of motivated cognition will help minimize your feelings of regret.

5. Delay consumption.  Not only does it keep you out of financial trouble, the anticipation of your pleasure is itself a big source of happiness (and anticipation provides a bigger emotional bang than does reminiscence). It also alters your choices to things that provide more long-term well-being (e.g., a healthy snack rather than junk food) and creates a pleasurable kind of uncertainty. 

6. Consider how peripheral features of purchases affect your daily life (e.g., the maintenance requirements of owning a vacation home).  We usually construe these big purchases at a high level and do not think about the annoying concrete details. 

7. Beware of comparison shopping.  It often makes you focus on the attributes of a product that allow you to differentiate between the gazillion choices available rather than the attributes that really matter to you. The context you're in when shopping is not the context you're in when consuming; by the time you're using the product or having the experience, the other options will no longer have as much effect on your enjoyment.

8. Pay attention to the happiness of others - i.e., follow the wisdom of the crowd. Heed how other people enjoyed a particular product or experience and listen to the advice of others about what you seem to like. Other people can read a lot into your nonverbal signals of liking or disliking that are not apparent to you yourself.

There's a lot of good stuff here.  Where do you stand on these principles? 

I am good about buying experiences (e.g., bird trips) not things (e.g., matching furniture).

I sort of miss buying presents for other people (though the stress reduction during the holidays kind of offsets the loss of enjoyment).

I enjoy the weekly small pleasure of eating out for lunch with Robert.  It's a highlight of my week and I really look forward to it.  (I'm already looking forward to eating outside and drinking iced tea on Saturday, with projected sunny skies and 79 degrees.)

I think I delay purchasing too long, if anything.  I wish I could get better at delaying my consumption of yummy treats.

I have avoided the major hassles associated with things like home purchases and plan to do so for a while.

I'm more of a satisficer than a maximizer when it comes to purchases and do a rather limited amount of comparison shopping.  Of course, I have the advantage that Robert likes doing that sort of thing, so I deploy him to do comparison shopping for many things (most recently, health insurance). I certainly don't comparison shop after the fact, which some people do (e.g., my mom's best friend) and which seems crazy to me. 

I could do better in using the recommendations of others in making my purchases; to too great an extent, I believe that I'm a unique snowflake with idiosyncratic preferences (as most of us do - see, I'm not even unusual in that!).

One thing that really interests me is the way that uncertainty can lead to more happiness than certainty in some situations, even though ample research demonstrates that most people have a strong desire to achieve and maintain certainty.  (Certainty is considered one of the primary human motives that underlies many other particular motives; e.g., Kagan, 1972).  I've spent a lot of time with the (un)certainty literature for my thesis. 

However, I suspect that this effect depends upon the uncertainty being more along the lines of "Will we go to the awesome Thai restaurant or eat at the Italian place I love?" and not "Will my biopsy show this tumor as benign or malignant?"  I was a bit surprised during my long PhD application period that I was not more impatient about making a decision and gaining certainty about where I will be living for the next 5 years (bad forecasting on my part).  Once I had a good acceptance in hand, it was a matter of which good-to-wonderful program I'd be attending and not, like other anxious applicants, a matter of getting into a program (that I could afford, etc.) or not.  Before the wave function collapsed (if you will excuse a questionable quantum physics metaphor), I got to pseudo-experience-in-anticipation all of the possibilities, and that was kind of fun.