DOI: 10.1126/science.1129688
, 1908 (2006);312Science
, et al.Daniel Kahneman
Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion
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10.1126/science.1127891
PERSPECTIVE
Would You Be Happier If You Were
Richer? A Focusing Illusion
Daniel Kahneman,1
Alan B. Krueger,1,2
* David Schkade,3
Norbert Schwarz,4
Arthur A. Stone5
The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People
with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than
others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in
particularly enjoyable activities. Moreover, the effect of income on life satisfaction seems to be
transient. We argue that people exaggerate the contribution of income to happiness because they
focus, in part, on conventional achievements when evaluating their life or the lives of others.
M
ost people believe that they would be
happier if they were richer, but survey
evidence on subjective well-being is
largely inconsistent with that belief. Subjective
well-being is most commonly measured by asking
people, BAll things considered, how satisfied
are you with your life as a whole these
days?[ or BTaken all together, would you say
that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too
happy?[ Such questions elicit a global evaluation
of one_s life. An alternative method asks
people to report their feelings in real time,
which yields a measure of experienced affect
or happiness. Surveys in many countries conducted
over decades indicate that, on average,
reported global judgments of life satisfaction
or happiness have not changed much over the
last four decades, in spite of large increases in
real income per capita. Although reported life
satisfaction and household income are positively
correlated in a cross section of people at a
given time, increases in income have been found
to have mainly a transitory effect on individuals_
reported life satisfaction (1–3). Moreover, the
correlation between income and subjective wellbeing
is weaker when a measure of experienced
happiness is used instead of a global measure.
When people consider the impact of any
single factor on their well-being—not only
income—they are prone to exaggerate its importance.
We refer to this tendency as the focusing
illusion. Standard survey questions on life
satisfaction by which subjective well-being is
measured may induce a form of focusing illusion,
by drawing people_s attention to their relative
standing in the distribution of material well-being
and other circumstances. More importantly, the
focusing illusion may be a source of error in
significant decisions that people make (4).
Evidence for the focusing illusion comes
from diverse lines of research. For example,
Strack and colleagues (5) reported an experiment
in which students were asked: (i) BHow happy
are you with your life in general?[ and (ii)
BHow many dates did you have last month?[
The correlation between the answers to these
questions was –0.012 (not statistically different
from 0) when they were asked in the preceding
order, but the correlation rose to 0.66 when the
order was reversed with another sample of
students. The dating question evidently caused
that aspect of life to become salient and its
importance to be exaggerated when the respondents
encountered the more general question
about their happiness. Similar focusing effects
were observed when attention was first called to
respondents_ marriage (6) or health (7). One
conclusion from this research is that people do
not know how happy or satisfied they are with
their life in the way they know their height or
telephone number. The answers to global life
satisfaction questions are constructed only when
asked (8), and are, therefore, susceptible to the
focusing of attention on different aspects of life.
To test the focusing illusion regarding income,
we asked a sample of working women to estimate
the percentage of time that they had spent in a bad
mood in the preceding day. Respondents were
also asked to predict the percentage of time that
people with pairs of various life circumstances
(Table 1), such as high- and low-income, typically
spend in a bad mood. Predictions were
compared with the actual reports of mood provided
by respondents who met the relevant circumstances.
The predictions were biased in two
respects. First, the prevalence of bad mood was
Table 1. The focusing illusion: Exaggerating the effect of various circumstances on well-being. The
question posed was ‘‘Now we would like to know overall how you felt and what your mood was like
yesterday. Thinking only about yesterday, what percentage of the time were you: in a bad
mood____%, a little low or irritable____%, in a mildly pleasant mood____%, in a very good
mood____%." Bad mood reported here is the sum of the first two response categories. A parallel
question was then asked about yesterday at work. Bad mood at work was used for the supervision
and fringe benefits comparisons. Data are from (14). Reading down the Actual column, sample sizes
are 64, 59, 75, 237, 96, 211, 82, 221, respectively; reading down the Predicted column, sample sizes
are 83, 83, 84, 84, 83, 85, 85, 87, respectively. Predicted difference was significantly larger than actual
difference by a t test; see asterisks.
Variable Group
Percentage of time in a bad mood
Actual Predicted
Actual
difference
Predicted
difference
Household income G$20,000 32.0 57.7 12.2 32.0***
9$100,000 19.8 25.7
Woman over 40 years old Alone 21.4 41.1 –1.7 13.2***
Married 23.1 27.9
Supervision at work Definitely close 36.5 64.3 17.4 42.1***
Definitely not close 19.1 22.3
Fringe benefits No health insurance 26.6 49.7 4.5 30.5***
Excellent benefits 22.2 19.2
***P G 0.001.
1
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. 2
National
Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA 02138,
USA. 3
Rady School of Management, University of California,
San Diego, San Diego, CA 92093, USA. 4
Department
of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
48106, USA. 5
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY,
11794, USA.
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail:
akrueger@princeton.edu
L I F E C Y C L E S
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generally overestimated. Second, consistent with
the focusing illusion, the predicted prevalence of
a bad mood for people with undesirable circumstances
was grossly exaggerated.
The focusing illusion helps explain why the
results of well-being research are often counterintuitive.
The false intuitions likely arise from a
failure to recognize that people do not continuously
think about their circumstances, whether
positive or negative. Schkade and Kahneman (9)
noted that, BNothing in life is quite as important
as you think it is while you are thinking about
it.[ Individuals who have recently experienced a
significant life change (e.g., becoming disabled,
winning a lottery, or getting married) surely think
of their new circumstances many times each day,
but the allocation of attention eventually changes,
so that they spend most of their time attending to
and drawing pleasure or displeasure from experiences
such as having breakfast or watching
television (10). However, they are likely to be
reminded of their status when prompted to answer
a global judgment question such as, BHow
satisfied are you with your life these days?[
The correlation between household income
and reported general life satisfaction on a numeric
scale (i.e., global happiness as distinct from
experienced happiness over time) in U.S. samples
typically ranges from 0.15 to 0.30 (11). The
relation between global happiness and income
for 2004 with data from the General Social
Survey (GSS) is illustrated in Table 2. Those
with incomes over $90,000 were nearly twice as
likely to report being Bvery happy[ as those with
incomes below $20,000, although there is hardly
any difference between the highest income group
and those in the $50,000 to $89,999 bracket.
There are reasons to believe that the correlation
between income and judgments of life
satisfaction overstates the effect of income on
subjective well-being. First, increases in income
have mostly a transitory effect on individuals_
reported life satisfaction (2, 12). Second, large
increases in income for a given country over
time are not associated with increases in average
subjective well-being. Easterlin (1), for
example, found that the fivefold increase in real
income in Japan between 1958 and 1987 did
not coincide with an increase in the average
self-reported happiness level there. Third, although
average life satisfaction in countries
tends to rise with gross domestic product
(GDP) per capita at low levels of income, there
is little or no further increase in life satisfaction
once GDP per capita exceeds $12,000 (3).
Fourth, when subjective well-being is measured
from moment to moment—either by
querying people in real time with the Ecological
Momentary Assessment (EMA) technique
(13) or by asking them to recall their feelings
for each episode of the previous day with the
Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) (14)—
income is more weakly correlated with experienced
feelings such as momentary happiness
averaged over the course of the day (henceforth
called duration-weighted or experienced happiness)
than it is with a global judgment of life
satisfaction or overall happiness, or with a global
report of yesterday_s mood (Table 3) (15, 16).
This pattern is probably not a result of greater
noise in the duration-weighted happiness measure
than in life satisfaction (17). Other life circumstances,
such as marital status, also exhibit
a weaker correlation with duration-weighted
happiness than with global life satisfaction.
An analysis of EMA data also points to a
weak and sometimes perverse relation between
experienced affect and income. Specifically, we
examined EMA data from the Cornell WorkSite
Blood Pressure Study of 374 workers at 10
work sites, who were queried about their intensity
of various feelings on a 0 to 3 scale every 25
min or so during an entire workday (18). The
correlation between personal income and the
average happiness rating during the day was
just 0.01 (P 0 0.84), whereas family income
was significantly positively correlated with
ratings of angry/hostile (r 0 0.14), anxious/tense
(r 0 0.14), and excited (r 0 0.18). Thus, higher
income was associated with more intense negative
experienced emotions and greater arousal,
but not greater experienced happiness.
Why does income have such a weak effect
on subjective well-being? There are several explanations,
all of which may contribute to varying
degrees. First, Duesenberry (19), Easterlin
(2), Frank (20), and others have argued that
relative income rather than the level of income
affects well-being—earning more or less than
others looms larger than how much one earns.
Indeed, much evidence indicates that rank within
the income distribution influences life satisfaction
(21–23). As society grows richer, average
rank does not change, so the relative income
hypothesis could explain the stability of average
subjective well-being despite national
income growth. The importance placed on relative
income may also account for the stronger
correlation between income and global life
satisfaction than between income and experienced
affect, as life satisfaction questions probably
evoke a reflection on relative status that is
not present in moment-to-moment ratings of
affect. The relative income hypothesis cannot by
itself explain why a permanent increase in an
individual_s income has a transitory effect on her
well-being, as relative standing would increase.
However, the increase in relative standing can be
offset by changes in the reference group: After a
promotion, the new peers increasingly serve as a
reference point, making the improvement relative
to one_s previous peers less influential (24).
Second, Easterlin (1, 2) argues that individuals
adapt to material goods, and Scitovsky (25)
argues that material goods yield little joy for
Table 2. Distribution of self-reported global happiness by family income, 2004. The GSS question
posed was ‘‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you
are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?’’ Sample size was 1173 individuals.
Response
Percentage indicating global happiness at family income of
Under $20,000 $20,000–$49,999 $50,000–$89,999 $90,000 and over
Not too happy 17.2 13.0 7.7 5.3
Pretty happy 60.5 56.8 50.3 51.8
Very happy 22.2 30.2 41.9 42.9
Table 3. Correlations between selected life circumstances and subjective well-being measures. The
question posed was ‘‘We would like to know how you feel and what mood you are in when you are
at home. When you are at home, what percentage of the time are you in a bad mood____%, a
little low or irritable____%, in a mildly pleasant mood____%, in a very good mood____%." The
last two response categories were added together to obtain the percentage of time in a good mood.
Duration-weighted ‘‘happy’’ is the average of each person’s duration-weighted average rating of
the feeling happy over episodes of the day, where 0 refers to ‘‘not at all’’ and 6 refers to ‘‘very
much,’’ and each individual’s responses were weighted by the duration of the episode. Sample
consists of 740 women from Columbus, Ohio, who completed the DRM in May 2005 (16).
Characteristic
Life
satisfaction
Amount of day
in good mood (%)
Duration- weighted "happy"
Household income 0.32*** 0.20*** 0.06
Married 0.21*** 0.15*** 0.03
Years of education 0.16*** 0.13*** 0.03
Employed 0.14*** 0.12** 0.01
Body mass index –0.13*** –0.08* –0.06
*P G 0.05; **P G 0.01; ***P G 0.001.
SPECIALSECTION
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most individuals. Thus, increases in income,
which are expected to raise well-being by raising
consumption opportunities, may in fact have little
lasting effect because of hedonic adaptation or
because the consumption of material goods has
little effect on well-being above a certain level of
consumption (26). Moreover, people_s aspirations
adapt to their possibilities and the income that
people say they need to get along rises with income,
both in a cross section and over time (27).
Finally, we would propose another explanation:
As income rises, people_s time use does
not appear to shift toward activities that are
associated with improved affect. Subjective
well-being is connected to how people spend
their time. In a representative, nationwide sample,
people with greater income tend to devote
relatively more of their time to work, compulsory
nonwork activities (such as shopping and
childcare), and active leisure (such as exercise)
and less of their time to passive leisure activities
(such as watching TV) (Table 4). The activities
that higher-income individuals spend relatively
more of their time engaged in are associated with
no greater happiness, on average, but with
slightly higher tension and stress. The latter
finding might help explain why income is more
highly correlated with general life satisfaction
than with experienced happiness, as tension and
stress may accompany goal attainment, which in
turn contributes to judgments of life satisfaction
more than it does to experienced happiness.
The results in Table 4 also highlight the possible
role of the focusing illusion. When someone
reflects on how additional income would
change subjective well-being, they are probably
tempted to think about spending more time in
leisurely pursuits such as watching a largescreen
plasma TV or playing golf, but in reality
they should think of spending a lot more time
working and commuting and a lot less time
engaged in passive leisure (and perhaps a bit
more golf). By itself, this shift in time use is
unlikely to lead to much increase in experienced
happiness, although it could increase tension and
one_s sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.
Despite the weak relation between income and
global life satisfaction or experienced happiness,
many people are highly motivated to increase
their income. In some cases, this focusing illusion
may lead to a misallocation of time, from accepting
lengthy commutes (which are among the
worst moments of the day) to sacrificing time
spent socializing (which are among the best
moments of the day) (28, 29). An emphasis on
the role of attention helps to explain both why
many people seek high income—because their
predictions exaggerate the increase in happiness
due to the focusing illusion—and why the longterm
effect of income gains become relatively
small, because attention eventually shifts to less
novel aspects of daily life.
References and Notes
1. R. Easterlin, J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 27, 35 (1995).
2. R. Easterlin, ‘‘Building a better theory of well-being,’’
Discussion Paper No. 742, IZA, Bonn, Germany, 2003.
3. R. Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
(Penguin Press, London, 2005).
4. D. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (Knopf, New York,
2006).
5. F. Strack, L. Martin, N. Schwarz, Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 18,
429 (1988).
6. N. Schwarz, F. Strack, H. Mai, Public Opin. Q. 55, 3
(1991).
7. D. Smith, N. Schwarz, T. Roberts, P. Ubel, Qual. Res. 15,
621 (2006).
8. N. Schwarz, F. Strack, in Well-Being: The Foundations of
Hedonic Psychology, D. Kahneman, E. Diener,
N. Schwarz, Eds. (Russell Sage Foundation, New York,
1999), pp. 61–84.
9. D. Schkade, D. Kahneman, Psychol. Sci. 9, 340 (1998).
10. D. Kahneman, R. H. Thaler, J. Econ. Perspect. 20 (1), 221
(2006).
11. E. Diener, R. Biswas-Diener, Soc. Indic. Res. 57, 119 (2002).
12. B. Frey, A. Stutzer, Happiness and Economics: How the
Economy and Institutions Affect Well-Being (Princeton
Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 2002).
13. A. Stone, S. Shiffman, Ann. Behav. Med. 16, 199 (1994).
14. D. Kahneman, A. Krueger, D. Schkade, N. Schwarz,
A. Stone, Science 306, 1776 (2004).
15. In general, we find that the retrospective report of
mood on the previous day, which is a global evaluation,
shares variance both with the global measures of life
satisfaction and with disaggregated measures of emotional
experience at particular times.
16. D. Kahneman, D. Schkade, C. Fischler, A. Krueger, A. Krilla,
‘‘A study of well-being intwo cities,’’ Discussion Paper No. 53,
Center for Health and Wellbeing, Princeton, NJ, 2006.
17. We conducted a reliability study of the DRM that asked
the same questions of 229 women two weeks apart, and
found about the same two-week serial correlation in
duration-weighted happiness as in life satisfaction for
the respondents.
18. P. Schnall, J. Schwartz, P. Landsbergis, K. Warren,
T. Pickering, Psychosom. Med. 60, 697 (1998).
19. J. Duesenberry, Income, Saving, and the Theory of
Consumer Behavior (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA,
1949).
20. R. Frank, Luxury Fever (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton,
NJ, 1999).
21. A. Clark, A. Oswald, J. Public Econ. 61, 359 (1996).
22. A. Ferrer-i-Carbonell, J. Public Econ. 89, 997 (2005).
23. E. Luttmer, Q. J. Econ. 120, 963 (2005).
24. W. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice
(Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1966).
25. T. Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy (Oxford Univ. Press,
Oxford, 1976).
26. S. Frederick, G. Loewenstein, in Well-Being: The Foundations
of Hedonic Psychology, D. Kahneman, E. Diener,
N. Schwarz, Eds. (Russell Sage Foundation, New York,
1999), pp. 302–329.
27. B. Van Praag, P. Frijter, in Well-Being: The Foundations of
Hedonic Psychology, D. Kahneman, E. Diener,
N. Schwarz, Eds. (Russell Sage Foundation, New York,
1999), pp. 413–433.
28. See (31) for evidence on the misallocation of commuting
time and (14) on the hedonic experience of commuting
and socializing.
29. It goes without saying that happiness is not the only measure
of human welfare. Moreover, although income gains may not
contribute very much to experienced happiness or life
satisfaction, wealthier societies may well enjoy better health
care, safer and cleaner environments, cultural benefits and
other amenities that improve the quality of life.
30. ‘‘Time-use survey—First results announced by Bureau of
Labor Statistics,’’ U.S. Department of Labor, USDL
04-1797 (http://www.bls.gov/).
31. A. Stutzer, B. Frey, ‘‘Stress that doesn’t pay: The
commuting paradox,’’ Discussion Paper No. 127, IZA,
Bonn, Germany, 2004.
32. The authors thank M. Connolly, M. Fifer, and A. Krilla for
research assistance, and the Hewlett Foundation, the
National Institute on Aging, and Princeton University’s
Woodrow Wilson School and Center for Economic Policy
Studies for financial support.
10.1126/science.1129688
Table 4. How is time spent and do the activities bring happiness? Time
allocation is weighted-average percentage of the nonsleep day for each
sampled observation from the American Time-Use Survey (30). Weighted
average of weekday (5 out of 7) and weekend (2 out of 7) is presented.
Sample consists of 3917 men and 4944 women age 18 to 60. Last two rows
were computed by authors from a DRM survey of 810 women in Columbus,
Ohio, in May 2005; if multiple activities were performed during an episode,
the activity refers to the one that was selected as ‘‘most important.’’
Family income/Gender Active leisure Eating Passive leisure Compulsory Work and commute Other
Men Time allocation (%)
G$20,000 6.6 6.6 34.7 20.8 29.1 2.1
$20,000–$99,999 8.1 7.2 26.4 21.8 35.4 1.1
$100,000+ 10.2 8.6 19.9 23.6 36.9 0.8
Women
G$20,000 5.3 5.7 33.5 35.6 18.5 1.4
$20,000–$99,999 7.5 6.7 23.8 34.3 26.7 1.0
$100,000+ 9.1 7.0 19.6 35.9 27.3 1.1
Women Feelings (0-6 scale)
Happy 4.67 4.45 4.21 4.04 3.94 4.25
Tense/Stressed 0.92 1.17 1.30 1.80 2.00 1.61
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