The DOI matches its Crossref record; 35 of the 35 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction
Abstract
Does money buy happiness, or does happiness come indirectly from the higher rank in society that money brings? We tested a rank-income hypothesis, according to which people gain utility from the ranked position of their income within a comparison group. The rank hypothesis contrasts with traditional reference-income hypotheses, which suggest that utility from income depends on comparison to a social reference-group norm. We found that the ranked position of an individual’s income predicts general life satisfaction, whereas absolute income and reference income have no effect. Furthermore, individuals weight upward comparisons more heavily than downward comparisons. According to the rank hypothesis, income and utility are not directly linked: Increasing an individual’s income will increase his or her utility only if ranked position also increases and will necessarily reduce the utility of others who will lose rank.
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Cites
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Relative Income, Happiness, and Utility: An Explanation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles
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Will raising the incomes of all increase the happiness of all?
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Satisfaction and comparison income
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Cited by
Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: How the rich are different from the poor.
Kraus, M. W., Piff, P. K., Mendoza-Denton, R., Rheinschmidt, M. L., & Keltner, D. (2012) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/a0028756 · Cited by 1,397
Relative Deprivation: A Theoretical and Meta-Analytic Review
Smith, H. J., Pettigrew, T. F., Pippin, G. M., & Bialosiewicz, S. (2012) · Personality and Social Psychology Review · doi:10.1177/1088868311430825 · Cited by 1,255
Is the desire for status a fundamental human motive? A review of the empirical literature.
Anderson, C., Hildreth, J. A. D., & Howland, L. (2015) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/a0038781 · Cited by 1,133
The neurobiology of rewards and values in social decision making
Ruff, C. C., & Fehr, E. (2014) · Nature reviews. Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn3776 · Cited by 716
Chater, N., & Loewenstein, G. (2023) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x22002023 · Cited by 710
Metadata
- Authors
- Boyce, C. J., Brown, G. D. A., & Moore, S. C.
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2010-02-18
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 471-475
- ISSN
- 0956-7976 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-9280
- OpenAlex
- W2126944594
- Cited by
- 649
- References
- 35
- FWCI
- 27.35
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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