Cassie Mogilner, a professor of marketing at the University of Pensylvania writes,
"When I surveyed a sample of 127 American university students about their feelings related to money, "happiness" was the most frequently cited emotion. This reflects the common assumption that money is critical for pursuit of the American Dream and individuals' inalienable right to be happy."
In a way, this common assumption makes sense:
"Work is necessary to pay the bills and contributes to an individual's sense of productivity and self-esteem".
To a certain extent, money is necessary to obtain those things in life which make us happy. It also aparently helps us cope with social rejection.
However, it must also be acknowledged that earning money - for most of us - requires us to work. And earning more money often means working longer hours; longer hours away from home that must be subtracted from the time we have left to spend with friends, family and our romantic partners. Of course this time we spend - or don't spend - maintaining relationships with loved ones, also figure in how happy we are.
Indeed, there seems to be a trade-off between time and money, and how they both appear in the equation of what makes people happy. This trade-off is certainly worth considering, when thinking about happiness. For example, keeping the time-dimension of happiness in mind helps one make better sense of a lot of empirical data:
"For instance, research exploring national allocations of time reveals that as wealth in the United States has increased, so has the number of hours Americans spend working, and happiness levels have remained unchanged. In contrast, in response to economic gains, Europeans have decreased the number of hours spent at work, and happiness levels in Europe have increased."
Considering the relation between time and money might also help understand a popularly discussed observation by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who explains a trend in national happiness surveys which shows that happiness increases with money up to a certain point, but looses significant correlation as wealth increases beyond a certain point. Once you have enough money it seems, chasing after more money won't make you happier. Possibly, because from a certain point onward the additional happiness that money provides is less than the happiness your loose by having less quality time for yourself.
Similarly, there is a host of research suggesting that the happiness-increasing power of money depends crucially on what you do with your money. Simply being able to bay a lot of things is not enough to make us happy, but money that is spent on enhancing positive experiences - e.g. time spent on vacation with friends - seems more wisely spent, as far as happiness is concerned.
For the little we know about the recipe to happiness, it seems clear that money is not the only ingredient (actually in some cases it may even make us less happy), and also that time and money are both important because of how they interact.
Therefore it is a fairly surprising observation to make that the combined influence of both time and money has been investigated relatively seldom in happiness research; especially compared to the more common approach of investigating only the isolated relation between happiness and money. Yet it is possibly not such a great surprise that an investigation of how the money-time trade-off is related to happiness would appear especially attractive to a happiness researcher with a background in microeconomic theory, a discipline in which the idea of trade-offs is ubiquitous.
In this sense, Professor Mogilner, whose research will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, seems a great candidate to research the relation between happiness, money and time:
In a series of field and laboratory experiments Mogilner aims to investigate a special aspect of the money-time-happiness link; namely the effect that merely thinking about money, compared to thinking about time, has on people's choices; choices that ultimately shape our experience of happiness. In particular, the published experiments
"tested whether directing attention to time (vs. money) can improve Americans'pursuit of happiness by driving individuals to allocate their time in happier ways-with loved ones, rather than working".
In the first experiment, participants were primed with either a neutral control concept, or the concepts of "time" or "money", using a common word-unscrambling task. I.e. each of the participants was treated in such a way that exactly one of the concepts (time, money, neutral) were particularly present in their mind. After the priming participants were asked to indicate the degree to which they intended to participate in a number of every-day-life activities such as "having sex" (yes, it's an EVERY-day activity!), "commuting", "working", or "socializing" within the next 24 hours. A separate group of participants were also asked the degree to which they thought "the typical American" would intend to engage in these same activities.
The results of this study, which controlled for differences in gender, age, marriage status and parent status, are nicely illustrated in the figure below:
"The results revealed that compared with the neutral prime, the time prime increased participants' intentions to socialize and engage in intimate relations (socially connecting activities that are associated with the highest levels of happiness), whereas the money prime reduced participants' intentions to engage in these activities. However, compared with the neutral prime, the time prime reduced participants' intentions to spend time working and commuting (activities associated with the least happiness), whereas the money prime increased participants' intentions to work."
Interestingly, the priming had no effect on how people thought about how "the typical American" would be spending his/her time. Also, as further survey information revealed, the priming had no effect on how people thought these different activities related to happiness.
A second study by Mogilner, which aimed to generalize the findings from her first study to a subject pool of low-income Americans, replicated the effect of time on activity choices. Low-income participants, primed with the concept of "time" stated intentions to spend significantly more time socializing and having sex (less time commuting and working), than did low-income participants who received a neutral time. The money-prime failed to replicate the results from study 1 in a statistically significant manner; possibly, because people with very little money, are not as effectively primed with the concept, since they think about (possibly worry) about money more regularly than medium and high-income Americans. But this is speculation.
Not simply speculation, are the results from yet another of Professor Mogilner's studies, which was set to discovre whether thinking about money vs thinking about time not only changes how people intend go about their activities, but whether it also changes how people actually do go about them. For this Mogliner repeated the above experiment with a little practical twist:
This time, participants were rewarded with a Café' gift card for participating in the priming part of the experiment. They were then left - Café gift-card in hand - at the said Café to do as they please, while an incognito experimenter secretly observed and coded their behavior.
"The observer, unaware of participants' randomly assigned condition, recorded the number of minutes each participant spent socializing (i.e., talking with another person at the cafe, talking on a cellular phone, or texting [spending time on facebook etc.]) and doing work (i.e., reading or working on a laptop). [...] Upon exiting the cafe, participants were presented with a second questionnaire in which they reported on 5-point scales the extent to which they felt happy and satisfied".
