Does Winning Make People Happier? The Longitudinal Evidence

The received wisdom is that lottery winners return to their previous happiness within a year. It comes from a genuinely famous study, and the best modern evidence contradicts it.

The classic study everyone cites

Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman's 1978 paper comparing lottery winners, accident victims and controls is one of the most cited results in psychology. It gave us the phrase hedonic treadmill: the idea that people adapt to circumstances and drift back to a personal baseline.

Its reputation outran its evidence. The winner sample was small — a couple of dozen people — and the design was cross-sectional rather than following individuals over time. As a landmark that launched a research programme it deserves its status. As a definitive answer to what happens to winners, it was never powered to be one.

The modern study

Erik Lindqvist, Robert Östling and David Cesarini, Long-Run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-Being, Review of Economic Studies, volume 87, issue 6 (2020), pages 2703–2726.

The design is much stronger:

• A large sample of Swedish lottery players, using administrative data in a country where such linkage is possible.
• Surveyed 5 to 22 years after the lottery event — long-run, not a snapshot months later.
• Winners compared against matched controls drawn from the same player population, so the comparison is winners versus similar people who did not win, rather than winners versus the general public.

The finding: large-prize winners showed sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persisted for more than a decade, with no evidence of dissipating over time.

That is a direct contradiction of the strong hedonic-adaptation story. On this evidence, people do not simply drift back.

The distinction that reconciles the two

The key is that happiness is not one thing, and the research separates two constructs that everyday language conflates:

• Life satisfaction — your evaluation of how your life is going, taken as a whole. This is what the Swedish study found rises durably.
• Momentary affect / emotional wellbeing — how much joy, stress or anxiety you experience day to day. Effects here are consistently weaker across the wealth literature.

Money buys a great deal of the first: security, options, the absence of financial fear, freedom from work you dislike. It buys much less of the second, because your daily emotional weather is driven by health, relationships, sleep and temperament — none of which a bank transfer touches.

So "money doesn't buy happiness" is roughly true for moment-to-moment mood and roughly false for how satisfied you are with your life. Both halves are in the data.

What it does and does not license

It does not mean playing the lottery is a good idea. Life satisfaction improves conditional on winning a large prize, an outcome with probability of roughly one in hundreds of millions. The expected value of playing remains firmly negative (positive expected value in a lottery). A study of what happens to winners says nothing in favour of buying a ticket, any more than research on the health of centenarians recommends ageing.

It does refute the moralised version of the curse story. The "sudden wealth destroys people" narrative is not supported by the best long-run evidence. See the 70% broke myth and lottery curse stories, fact-checked.

It coexists with the financial findings. Winners are more satisfied and mid-size winners in financial distress mostly postpone bankruptcy rather than escape it (the Florida study). Those are compatible: satisfaction and solvency are different measures, and the studies examine different prize sizes.

The caveats worth stating

• Sweden is not everywhere. Universal healthcare and a strong safety net mean a windfall arrives against a different backdrop than in countries where medical bankruptcy is a live risk. The direction of the finding may generalise; the magnitude may not.
• Survey non-response is a recurring hazard in winner research — people who fared badly may be less likely to answer. The Swedish design mitigates this with administrative linkage but cannot eliminate it.
• Large prizes specifically. The sustained-gain result concerns substantial wins.

If a windfall does arrive, the evidence on what to do with it is thinner than the evidence on how you will feel — the practical consensus is in the first 72 hours.