Does Variety in Hedonic Spending Improve Happiness? Testing Alternative Causal Mechanisms Between Hedonic Variety and Subjective Well-Being

In brief

Spending on pleasure has only a weak link to happiness, partly because people adapt. Variety may counter that: across four studies with self-reported and bank-recorded spending, people who spread their hedonic spending across more kinds of experience were happier, holding total spending constant. Panel data gave mixed evidence on which way the causation runs, so the paper is careful about what it claims.

Abstract

Previous research has found only a small, inconsistent association between hedonic consumption and subjective well-being, often attributed to individuals adapting to the happiness gains from their purchases. Given that diverse experiences can reduce or avert hedonic adaptation, we hypothesized that variety in hedonic spending would be associated with greater well-being. This hypothesis was tested in four studies (total N = 2,920), using both self-reported and objective bank-reported spending data. In our correlational analyses, hedonic spending variety was uniquely associated with well-being, even after controlling for total hedonic spending and other financial variables. Our investigation also explored the directional relationship between hedonic spending variety and well-being, yielding mixed results for both causal pathways in two time-lagged panel studies. Additionally, in two parallel experiments, participants reported that varied hedonic spending contributed more to happiness than uniform hedonic spending. These findings have implications for basic well-being science by testing how varied consumption behaviors and well-being are interrelated.

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