Emily Bambury
Professor Dempster
UNIV 200
4 April 2016
Introduction and Two Body Paragraphs
Thousands of videos on YouTube showing one specific scene used to be incredibly
popular. At a family gathering for Christmas or maybe a birthday, Cousin Mark opens his
present. It’s a lottery ticket. Someone grabs him a penny and as he scratches, his face begins to
light up, more than it ever has before. He screams with joy, “I won!” and his victory dance
ensues. The sender of the gift is behind the video camera chuckling until they can’t bare it
anymore. “It’s not real.” What. Uncle Mark’s face looks surprised again but this time in the
worst way possible. He fell for it. A fake lottery ticket. Mark knows one thing for sure. If he ever
really wins the lottery, whoever gave him this cruel joke of present will not see a penny of his
winnings. The lottery is associated with extremes: extreme happiness or extreme disappointment.
Do real lottery winners experience only a burst of happiness similar to fake lottery winners? Or
can the money they win truly change their subjective well-being and produce longer-term
happiness?
To understand the affects the lottery can have on happiness, it is imperative to first know
how money and wealth affect happiness. Money alone does not appear to heavily affect
subjective well-being (another name for happiness) until people start comparing their economic
status to those around them. Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve,
expressed this idea in a commencement speech he gave: “People’s happiness depends less on
their absolute wealth than on their wealth compared with others around them” (6). A team of
psychologists worked together to test how exposure to wealth and money affects a person’s
ability to savor mundane things (Quoidbach et all) and discovered that those with more perceived
wealth or simply “money on their mind” found significantly less enjoyment which “provides the
first evidence that money interferes with people’s ability to savor positive emotions and
experience” (Quoidbach et al 762). From this information we can conclude that if your basic
needs are met, anything exceeding that financially will not make you happier (Bernanke 5). In
addition, you will not be able to enjoy the little things in life as much is someone who thinks
about money less than you do. To cope with this, Bernanke suggests a gratitude journal. Listing
all the things you are grateful for in a day will help you to focus on you instead of others around
you and in addition, will likely help you to appreciate everyday things more meaning an overall
greater chance of happiness.
The chances of actually winning one of the bigger prizes in the lottery are slim to none.
In this way it differs greatly from simply obtaining wealth. The term “sudden wealth” is often
used to characterize this sort of coming into money. Two researchers, Sonja Nissle and Tom
Bschor, studied two women after they won the lottery speak on this idea: “Unexpectedly
winnings millions is in itself a dramatic change to the life situation to which one is accustomed
and has imagined will continue to its conclusion, and the magnitude of this change may even
equal that of events of severe loss” (186). This is counterintuitive to what most people assume. In
addition Nissle and Bschor discovered that the two women had conditions before winning the
lottery (anxiety, depression, and rough family backgrounds) that significantly worsened
following the lottery win. So, the lottery because of its very nature can feel similar to a loss and
can also heighten pre-existing conditions. However, the lottery does not only produce negativity.
Jonathan Gardner and Andrew J. Oswald work in finance and economics published an article
together called Money and Mental Wellbeing: A longitudinal study of medium-sized lottery
winners. Although the two point out that “mental stress actually increases in the year of winning”
(53) and that there is generally no immediate improvement in well-being after winning the
lottery (53), medium-sized lottery winners “exhibit a rise in psychological wellbeing” (54). Not
only does the person and their conditions affect happiness after the winnings, but also the amount
of the winnings themselves.