Philip Brickman

Who they are

This page records only what the cited paper states. Biography beyond that is not given here.

Key papers

Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative? (1978), with Coates and Janoff-Bulman. The study was framed by adaptation level theory, which predicts two processes that stop a windfall from raising happiness as much as expected. Contrast with the peak experience of winning should make ordinary pleasures feel smaller, and habituation should wear down the new pleasures that winning makes possible.

The first study compared 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and with 29 paralysed accident victims who had been interviewed earlier. As predicted, the winners were not happier than the controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events. A second study found that these effects were not due to differences between people who buy lottery tickets and people who do not, or to whether the interview made the lottery salient. The accident victims showed a contrast effect of their own, idealising their past, which did not help their present happiness. Happiness was rated on a single question, and in the catalogue of the World Database of Happiness the paralysed group's mean rating is clearly below the winners'.

Key ideas

The paper is the founding demonstration of hedonic adaptation to good fortune. It is small, and later work qualifies it. A 2006 revision of adaptation theory argued that set points are not neutral and can move, and a 2020 study of Swedish lottery players found that large-prize winners reported higher life satisfaction for more than a decade. The 1978 paper supports the idea that a windfall does less than people expect. It does not show that people adapt to everything.

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