How Money Ruins Chocolate

I recently visited an amazing pool. It had one of those artificial rivers, a water slide, several hot tubs, cascading fountains, and even a fake beach. When I returned to my community pool, with its peeling paint and cracked concrete, it seemed somehow less charming than it did last summer.

My reaction is consistent with Daniel Gilbert’s experience-stretching hypothesis, from his book Stumbling on Happiness, which essentially argues that once you know what you’re missing, what you have doesn’t make you as happy. With that in mind, some researchers set out to find whether people who are reminded of money are less capable of enjoying relatively inexpensive pleasures, like eating a piece of chocolate.

The researchers watched 40 participants eating chocolate and rated their apparent enjoyment—whether they savored each bite or downed it  quickly. Some of the participants were shown a photograph of money before they ate the chocolate; others were shown what researchers called a “neutral” photograph. Turns out, those who had been shown a photograph of money spent noticeably less time savoring the chocolate, and therefore presumably didn’t enjoy it as much.

From the paper:

Our studies provide a novel contribution by demonstrating that the emotional benefits that money gives with one hand (i.e., access to pleasurable experiences), it takes away with the other by undercutting the ability to relish the small delights of daily living.

Sure, but don’t I need money to buy chocolate? And wouldn’t more money allow me to buy higher-quality chocolate (Hershey’s is hardly worth chewing)? I also wonder how this fits with Nobel laureate Daniel Kaheneman’s finding that earning $60,000 a year makes you happy, but that earning more than that doesn’t significantly increase how good you feel. Incidentally, earning less than $60,000, he’s found, is a total bummer.

What I do know is that fake beach really did make me happy.

(The study, titled “Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness,” was published in Psychological Science. The abstract is here. The authors are Jordi Quoidbach, Elizabeth W. Dunn, K.V. Petrides, and Moïra Mikolajczak.)