Researchers say money does buy happiness for most people

Money does, in the vast majority of instances, buy happiness, at least according to a recent study.

Yet not everyone experiences happiness as their income increases, as per the paper authored by senior psychology fellow Matthew Killingsworth at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, and Barbara Mellers.

The study discovered that the unhappiest group of persons hit a ceiling at a salary of roughly $100,000, reports Business Insider.

The publication, which was released on 1 March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, made an effort to harmonise two pieces of earlier research with different findings by Killingsworth and Kahneman. Meller, another Wharton School graduate, served as an arbitrator.

In a significant 2010 study, Kahneman and Angus Deaton discovered that happiness rose continuously with income up to a certain level before plateauing.

According to the study's findings, mental wellness generally increased until a person earned between $60,000 and $90,000, at which point it leveled out. Their research was based on daily surveys of 1,000 Americans conducted by Gallup between 2008 and 2009.

In contrast, Killingsworth found in a report from 2021 that average happiness increased steadily with money. In other words, he found no happiness plateau which runs counter to Kahneman's findings. Killingsworth's findings were based on the levels of happiness that more than 33,000 Americans reported using a smartphone app.

Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers found the plateau only present among the 15% to 20% of persons who were the least pleased after analysing the data from the two earlier research, adds the Insider report.

Before "leveling out abruptly at $100,000 to a near-zero, statistically nonsignificant slope in the higher range of earnings," according to the study's authors, people's pleasure "rises quickly" in the lower income range.

The researchers concluded that at this stage, "the miseries that remain" — which include heartache, loss, and clinical depression — "are not relieved by high income."

Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers observed that among the general population, happiness "increases steadily" with income. After $100,000, happiness increases at an accelerated rate for the happiest 30% of people.

"In the low range of incomes, unhappy people gain more from increased income than happier people do," the researchers wrote. "In other words, the bottom of the happiness distribution rises much faster than the top in that range of incomes. The trend is reversed for higher incomes, where very happy people gain much more from increased income than unhappy people do."

Killingsworth, Kahneman, and Mellers noted, however, that the correlation between income and well-being was "weak, even if statistically robust."

In their 2010 paper, Kahneman and Deaton had found that an approximately fourfold difference in income had roughly the same effect on happiness as being a caregiver or having a weekend, twice the effect of being married, and less than a third as large as the effect of a headache.