The most famous sentence from the 1978 lottery study is broadly accurate: 22 major winners did not report significantly greater current happiness than 22 people in a control group.
The next sentence often added to the story is much less secure. The study did not show those winners becoming happier, gradually adapting and finally returning to the level where each had started. It could not, because the researchers never measured their happiness before the win.
This is one small historical study, not settled consensus. Its result deserves to be reported. So do the limits that separate what the researchers found from the “money changes nothing” parable built around it.
The interviews covered less than a month to 18 months
Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman published “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The original 1978 paper says the winners had known about their prizes for periods ranging from less than one month to 18 months.
Describing that span as one to 18 months is a reasonable headline shorthand, but the paper’s lower bound was actually below one full month. The distinction is small in ordinary language and important in research design. Someone in the first weeks after a jackpot and someone 18 months beyond it may be experiencing very different stages of excitement, disruption and adjustment.
The study pooled those winners for its principal group comparison. It did not contain enough people at each time point to trace a dependable month-by-month curve. Nor was it designed as a sequence of interviews in which the same winner could be followed from the initial news into a later routine.
Twenty-two winners came from a list of 197
The researchers obtained a list of 197 major winners from the Illinois State Lottery. They selected possible interviewees primarily by prize size, preferring larger wins, while also considering whether winners lived near one another so interviewers could reduce travel.
The team attempted 42 winner interviews. Twenty people could not be reached or declined, leaving 22 participants and a response rate of 52 percent. Seven had won $1 million, six had won $400,000, two had won $300,000, four had won $100,000 and three had won $50,000.
For comparison, the researchers drew names from telephone books covering approximately the same city areas. They tried to contact 58 people and enrolled 22, a 41-percent response rate. The groups were similar on the background characteristics the study recorded, although that cannot establish that they were alike on unmeasured traits or on happiness before the lottery.
This was not random assignment. No researcher decided who would receive a fortune, and winner participation was selective. The study had the advantage of examining a rare real-world event, but it inherited the uncertainty that comes with a small, partly self-selected sample.
The winners scored 4.00 and controls 3.82
Participants rated how happy they felt at the present stage of life on a scale from zero to five. The winner group averaged 4.00. Controls averaged 3.82. The statistical test did not find a significant difference between them.
“No greater happiness” refers to that null result. It does not mean every winner gave the same answer as a matched control, nor that the two sample averages were literally equal. The winners’ average was 0.18 points higher. With only 22 people in each group and variation among individual ratings, that gap was not large enough to distinguish confidently from sampling noise.
A non-significant difference is not proof that the true effect is zero. A small study can fail to detect an effect that exists, especially if it is modest or if experiences vary widely. The appropriate conclusion is narrow: this interview study did not find persuasive evidence that its winners were happier than its controls at the time they were asked.
The paper also asked about past happiness and expected happiness in a couple of years. Here too, winners and controls were not statistically distinguishable. Yet the winners’ “past” scores were memories reported after winning, not measurements collected before the event. Memory can be reconstructed through present circumstances, which makes retrospective ratings an uncertain stand-in for a real baseline.
A return to baseline requires observing a return
Hedonic adaptation describes a process. A major event changes experience, its emotional impact diminishes, and wellbeing moves toward an earlier level. Showing that sequence requires measurements across time.
The 1978 study provided one post-win snapshot of each person. Even if every winner had exactly the same average happiness as the control group, several histories could produce that result. They might have risen sharply and adapted. They might still have been above their own starting levels. Their happiness may never have changed. Or winners may have differed from the people in the control group before the lottery.
Without pre-win scores, those possibilities cannot be separated. Without repeated post-win scores, the pace and completeness of adaptation cannot be observed. A control-group comparison answers “How did these groups report feeling when interviewed?” It does not answer “How did each winner’s happiness change from where it began?”
This limitation was not hidden by the original authors. They described the project as preliminary and called for a larger longitudinal study. The stronger baseline story accumulated later as the paper became a compact illustration of the “hedonic treadmill.”
That broader theory has itself become more conditional. A 2006 review by Ed Diener, Richard Lucas and Christie Scollon argued that people have different wellbeing set points, that the set point can change, and that adaptation varies between events and individuals. It also stressed that pleasant emotion, unpleasant emotion and life satisfaction can move differently within the same person.
Ordinary pleasures produced a second finding
The study’s most intriguing result may not be the happiness score at all. Participants rated the pleasure they expected from seven ordinary experiences: talking with a friend, watching television, eating breakfast, hearing a funny joke, receiving a compliment, reading a magazine and buying clothes.
Lottery winners averaged 3.33 on this mundane-pleasure measure, compared with 3.82 among controls. The difference was statistically significant. Brickman and colleagues proposed a contrast effect: once the jackpot had become an extreme reference point, ordinary events could feel less intense by comparison.
They also considered whether people who buy lottery tickets were simply different to begin with. In a second study of 86 local residents, ticket buyers did not generally rate ordinary pleasures lower than non-buyers, and making the lottery salient during the interview did not reproduce the winner pattern.
That follow-up made the contrast explanation more credible, but it did not convert the first study into a before-and-after experiment. The researchers never observed breakfast, conversation or compliments becoming less pleasurable within the same winners. An unmeasured difference between winners who participated and controls could still contribute.
There is also a measurement issue. The questions asked people to estimate how pleasant hypothetical everyday events would be. They did not sample feelings while participants actually ate breakfast or spoke with friends. Expected pleasure, remembered pleasure and experience in the moment overlap, but they are not identical.
Larger lottery studies found a more divided answer
Later work has made the relationship between windfalls and wellbeing less slogan-friendly. Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and David Cesarini examined 3,362 Swedish lottery players, using random variation in prize amounts among otherwise comparable players. Their preregistered 2020 study in The Review of Economic Studies surveyed people five to 22 years after the relevant lottery events.
Larger prizes produced sustained increases in overall life satisfaction, with no evidence that the effect faded over more than a decade. Greater satisfaction with personal finances appeared to explain an important part of the gain. The estimated effects on happiness and mental health were substantially smaller.
That separation matters. Life satisfaction asks people to evaluate how their life is going. Happiness questions tend to lean more toward feeling. A jackpot can ease financial constraints and improve a person’s evaluation of life without producing a similarly large change in everyday emotional tone.
A 2021 analysis of Singapore lottery data raised another concern. People who win tend, on average, to have bought more tickets, and ticket spending is often unobserved. The authors argued that this “lottery-ticket bias” can push estimated benefits downward. After accounting for spending, winnings predicted higher happiness and life satisfaction roughly a year later, with gains apparently persisting into the following year.
Neither later study recreates the Illinois experiment. The countries, lotteries, measures and time horizons differ. Their value is not that they deliver one final verdict. They show that a 1978 null result should not be expanded into the universal proposition that windfalls cannot alter wellbeing.
“Happiness” was never just one number
The old study is often treated as if it measured a single thing called happiness and found that money could not move it. The paper itself was already more complicated. Current happiness, recalled past happiness, expected future happiness and mundane pleasure were separate measures, and they did not all produce the same pattern.
ScienceBlog has previously examined how common wellbeing questions can yield different pictures even when they sound interchangeable. It has also reported research suggesting that continually trying to maximize happiness may alter later behavior. Both stories point to the same measurement discipline: a result depends on what question was asked, over what period, and with which comparison.
The 1978 paper remains important because it challenged an intuition that a large prize must translate cleanly into greater happiness. Its small sample and one-time design do not erase that contribution. They define it.
Twenty-two winners reported happiness scores that were not reliably higher than those of 22 controls. That is an interesting result. Whether each winner had climbed, fallen or returned to a personal starting point is a different question, and the study did not contain the earlier measurements needed to answer it.