The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home

by Dan Ariely

Just as our eyes adjust to changes in light and environment, we can adapt to changes in expectation and experience. For example, Andrew Clark showed that job satisfaction among British workers was strongly correlated with changes in workers’ pay rather than the level of pay itself. In other words, people generally grow accustomed to their current pay level, however low or high. A raise is great and a pay cut is very upsetting, regardless of the actual amount of the base salary. In one of the earliest studies on hedonic adaptation, Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman compared the overall life happiness among three groups: paraplegics, lottery winners, and normal people who were neither disabled nor particularly lucky. Had the data collection taken place immediately following the event that led to the disability or the day after the lottery win, one would expect the paraplegics to be far more miserable than the normal people and the lottery winners much happier. However, the data were collected a year after the event. It turned out that although there were differences in happiness levels among the groups, they were not as pronounced as you might expect. While the paraplegics were not as satisfied with life as the normal people and the lottery winners were more satisfied, both paraplegics and lottery winners were surprisingly close to