People adapt more slowly to social income changes than to temporal income changes.

Abstract

People hedonically adapt to most changes, but they adapt more slowly to some changes than to others. This research examines hedonic adaptation to income changes, and asks whether people adapt more slowly to social or temporal income changes. Four experiments, manipulating the actual pay rate of online workers, find that people adapt more slowly to social income changes (e.g., a decrease in others' income but not in one's own income) than to temporal income changes (e.g., an increase in everyone's income). This pattern holds for both negative changes (Experiment 1) and positive changes (Experiments 2, 3, and 4) and can be explained by a differential-consideration account (Experiment 3). These results suggest that in the short run, both temporal and social changes influence one's hedonic experience, but in the long run, what influences one's hedonic experiences is how much one earns relative to how much others earn, and not how much one earns now relative to how much one earned in the past. This research enriches the existing literature on hedonic adaptation, and on social versus temporal changes, and yields practical implications for the impact of income changes on subjective well-being over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).