In 1978, psychologists Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman published a landmark study that found that lottery winners were not significantly happier than those who had been paralyzed in an accident. From this and subsequent work came the idea that people have a “set point” that determines their happiness over the course of their life. In other words, we get accustomed to any new situation and inevitably return to our general state of happiness.
