Philip Brickman

You may be waiting for the same thing right now.

Brickman's Lottery In 1978, a researcher named Philip Brickman at Northwestern University published a study that should have ended an entire category of human delusion in you and everyone around you.

It didn't, because the delusion it targeted, the belief that getting the extraordinary thing will produce extraordinary, lasting happiness, is one of the most stubbornly resistant ideas in human psychology.

Brickman's team surveyed lottery winners in Illinois, people who'd received windfalls ranging from $50,000 to $1,000,078.

These were life-changing sums, sudden and unearned, the kind of financial event you've promised.

The study measured their reported happiness one year after winning.

The windfall had recalibrated their hedonic baseline upward, making ordinary pleasures feel flat by comparison.

Getting the extraordinary thing It had, in fact, made the texture of daily life slightly worse for them by raising the bar for what registered as pleasurable at all.

And that's basically what your emotional baseline is like.

Two psychologists, Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, studied this in the 1970s.

They looked at two groups of people living about as opposite of events as you could imagine.

Lottery winners and people who had just become paralyzed in an accident.

You may have heard of hedonic adaptation, which is the behavioral pattern in this.

In 1978, three psychologists, we have Philip Brickman and Dan Coates at Northwestern University, and Ronnie Janoff-Bollman at the University of Massachusetts, went looking for the most extreme good and bad fortune they could find.

And they published what they found in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

They compared 22 major lottery winners with 22 of their neighbors.