This is a bit old, but I just came across it– an article in Time reports on a study which says that money can buy you happiness, but it reaches diminishing returns past $75,000 or so. That is, people whose yearly salary is around $75,000 seem to have reached the point at which money can make them maximally happy.

I’d be happy for $75,000. Just for the record, if anyone’s wondering? I would.

As you would expect, there are caveats to that. The happiness affected by having that amount of money was not your general day-to-day cheer, but your sense of fulfillment and well-being in life:

Before employers rush to hold — or raise — everyone’s salary to $75,000, the study points out that there are actually two types of happiness. There’s your changeable, day-to-day mood: whether you’re stressed or blue or feeling emotionally sound. Then there’s the deeper satisfaction you feel about the way your life is going — the kind of thing Tony Robbins tries to teach you. While having an income above the magic $75,000 cutoff doesn’t seem to have an impact on the former (emotional well-being), it definitely improves people’s Robbins-like life satisfaction. In other words, the more people make above $75,000, the more they feel their life is working out on the whole. But it doesn’t make them any more jovial in the mornings. . .Researchers found that lower income did not cause sadness itself but made people feel more ground down by the problems they already had. The study found, for example, that among divorced people, about 51% who made less than $1,000 a month reported feeling sad or stressed the previous day, while only 24% of those earning more than $3,000 a month reported similar feelings. Among people with asthma, 41% of low earners reported feeling unhappy, compared with about 22% of the wealthier group. Having money clearly takes the sting out of adversities.
At $75,000, that effect disappears. For people who earn that much or more, individual temperament and life circumstances have much more sway over their lightness of heart than money. The study doesn’t say why $75,000 is the benchmark, but “it does seem to me a plausible number at which people would think money is not an issue,” says Deaton.

And the article mentions what would seem like the biggest point of contention to me, which is that people often care more about their standing relative to others than they do about their sum worth. A person who is financially very comfortable but lives and works around people who make significantly more than he or she does may actually be less happy than someone who makes substantially less but is more on par with his or her friends and colleagues. This tells me that should I ever win the lottery, I should not move into a wealthy neighborhood and hang out with movie stars. Which I wouldn’t want to do anyway.

It also seems, however, that regional differences would matter hugely in this consideration, something the article– and the study it reports on– don’t appear to consider. $75,000 is not stinking rich, but it’s a good bit of money to make in many parts of the U.S. But I sure wouldn’t try to move to New York City or San Francisco on that salary. You’d think the happiness threshold of people who live in such places would be quite a bit higher than for the rest of us, but perhaps that was averaged out. This web site is useful for calculating cost of living for a different city relative to where you are now. It says, for example, that a person who makes $75,000 a year living in Dallas should make $170,571 in San Francisco. Housing is the biggest factor in that difference, being 715% more expensive! Wow.

What this study really says to me is that there is an identifiable point at which people become what you’d call “comfortable,” and this matters in terms of their overall satisfaction in life. Their worries cease impinging on their pursuit of happiness, because poor health and inability to pay your bills are a huge source of worry. The spookiest thing about Mitt Romney is the fact that he not only doesn’t have these worries, but he doesn’t even know what it’s like to have these worries. He can’t properly empathize with Americans on…well, most things in life because he is completely unequipped to process the feeling of not being sure if you need to sell your car in order to hang onto your apartment and keep the lights on, let alone not being sure if you can afford to buy your sixth house (and put a car elevator in its garage). I’m talking about a form of privilege here– inability to empathize because of never having been exposed to the same fear, concern, or worry as those who are suffering it– but it’s so far beyond that, that it hardly seems like the right word. Hyper-privilege, perhaps. Most if not all American presidents have been privileged, but Mitt Romney is hyper-privileged. And that’s why the usual attempts by presidential candidates to appeal to the common American are extra laughable coming from him.

Should someone so far beyond the standard of living which makes the average American happy be in charge of our collective pursuit of happiness? I’m thinking “No.” Perhaps this would be a difficult question if the person under consideration had made some kind of effort to demonstrate an ability to empathize with those who are in a situation he has never and will never have to endure, but Romney has done precisely the opposite– he has sneered at and written off such people. Rather hilariously (and frighteningly) he has lumped people who are comfortable into that group and written them off as well. Like my parents, for example. How does anybody support someone who has said “Screw you” to half the country in that way, even if they aren’t in that half?

Anyway, this wasn’t intended to be a political commentary. If you’re interested in the psychology of happiness generally, I would highly recommend Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis and Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. If you were unaware that there is a psychology of happiness– guess what? There is. And no, it hasn’t succeeded in making everyone happy yet, as I’m sure you are aware. But it’s useful, because it helps us understand why we’re not happy and why it’s very often not our fault. That’s an important counter to so-called power of positive thinking theories which claim that we can just decide to be happy. We can’t. We can decide to do things which will contribute to our happiness, and they may succeed and they may not, but there is no Happiness Switch, and nothing which can flip it. Not even a bucketload of money, though that money can sure help in terms of erasing the worries that are caused by lack of money. So as with all aphorisms, there’s a lot more to “Money can’t buy happiness” than is expressed in the statement itself. It can. It can buy you the happiness of being able to pursue happiness unfettered. Or at least, less fettered than you were before.

Recently I finished listening to Jesse Bering’s book Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human. The book is a compilation of his essays posted at Scientific American so it ranges in subject all over the place, but his introduction states an interest that essentially ties all of them together– Jesse, a research psychologist, enjoys discussing, topics that make a lot of people uncomfortable. Things that are not discussed in polite company, and even in not-so-polite company might turn some stomachs. As the book’s title suggests, much of that is sexual. As a gay man, Jesse is more than familiar with the common homophobic position which holds essentially “I am disgusted by (what I presume) you do in the bedroom, therefore you are immoral/mentally disturbed/criminal/sub-human/etc.” But his book is about far more complex topics than this, taking an evolutionary (“What might be an adaptive function of this?”) approach to topics ranging from female ejaculation to zoophilia to masturbation to age-related sexual interests (pedophilia, ephebophilia, gerontophilia, and so on) and much, much more.

I enjoy learning about topics that make people uncomfortable and gross them out, too. But my interest is more for the sake of the discomfort specifically– I want to know why things disgust people, and how that translates into disgust-avoidant beliefs and behaviors. Sometimes it’s obvious– feces smells bad. It’s not good to eat, have on you, or be around in general. Any of these things could make you sick, and being nauseated is both a sign of being sick and a response to things that could cause sickness. Rotting food, same story. Decaying corpses, same story. But we have developed elaborate responses to these things way beyond what would be necessary to simply keep ourselves safe from contaminants. The anthropologist James Frazer articulated two forms of “sympathetic magic” which have been found to apply very closely to disgust– the first being the law of contagion, which is that a thing takes on the properties of another thing by having contact with it. Homeopathic magic, or “like affects like,” suggests that the resemblance of thing A to thing B can cause one to act similarly to the other. So in the first case you have the obvious example of, say, a dead fly in a glass of water. It doesn’t matter how much water is in that glass; you’re not going to want to drink it because of that single dead fly. In the second case, you have fake dog poo, and such things as brownies shaped (and colored) to look like dog poo. Even with the full knowledge that what you’re holding in your hand is in fact a tasty confection, you’re very likely to look at it with some skepticism.

Of course, you’re not guaranteed to look at it that way– people have different levels of squeamishness, and we can become accustomed to something to the extent that it no longer grosses us out even though it once did. I’m pretty sure that I will never become comfortable with watching a surgery being performed, but some very necessary people– surgeons– either began with a comparatively low level of disgust for the whole experience or adapted sufficiently to be able to handle it. The disgust you feel when looking at an open wound is classified as a response to “body envelop violation,” which is pretty much just as it sounds. The body has been opened in some way, which presents us with the alarming sight (and occasionally smell) of blood and guts, which is frightening because our sense of empathy compels us to identify with the person who has been injured (in the case of surgery it’s obviously not an injury, but this distinction matters not at all to my amygdala) and consider that we also can be hurt, suffer, and even die. A parasite is disgusting for its similar functioning as violating the body– parasites invade for the purpose of benefiting themselves at the hosts’s expense, up to and including death. “Animal reminder” disgust is the emotion we can experience when we think of ourselves as flesh and blood creatures different only in shape from the millions of other forms of furry, scaly, scratchy, or slimy creatures that crawl, fly, sprint, or swim across the planet. You can see this disgust in a person who adamantly avows that his or her ancestors were not monkeys (apes, really) when confronted with Darwin’s tree of life theory of evolution. If we’re animals, the thinking goes, consciously or unconsciously, we’re not special. There is no particular reason for us to be unique in any way. This thought is not at all disquieting for someone knowledgeable about evolution, but can be downright stomach-turning for someone who has been raised to believe that our existence as humans is a result of a special act of God. To say that we are otherwise seems…impure.

In concerns about purity, it’s easy to see where disgust as a physical response translates into a moral emotion. Going back to male homosexuality for example, it’s where the feeling of discomfort is interpreted as an unease in the face of what is obviously a violation of the laws of nature, the way God made things. If you want a good analysis of how disgust as a moral emotion plays out in the theater of public opinion and even makes its way into legislation, I’d recommend Martha Nussbaum’s excellent book Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. In it she recruits study of psychology, psychoanalysis (unfortunately) and the philosophy of John Stuart Mill to examine how moral disgust as a justification for political stances and law-making has led to oppression of minority groups and some very backwards positions on bioethics over the years, as a barrier to compassion, understanding, and acceptance of new science and technology. If you want to read about the most up-to-date psychological understanding of how disgust works as a moral emotion, especially through means of association, I’d suggest checking out the publications of psychologist David Pizarro, whose TED talk on that very topic you can watch here:

You’ll notice that he cites Nussbaum, as well as psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, Paul Bloom, Roy Baumeister, and the mack daddy of disgust research Paul Rozin. They are all interested in how intuitions shape moral reasoning generally, and how disgust does so specifically.

Pizarro cites studies he himself took part in, as well as those of other scientists, to show that people with conservative political leanings are much more prone to disgust, and that it can actually be predictive of their voting behavior– specifically regarding gay marriage, gay sex in general and other sexual issues. Pizarro actually found that arousing disgust in people caused their political judgments to shift toward conservatism. So not only do conservatives appear to be people who are more susceptible to disgust generally, but you can apparently make a person more conservative by exposing them to sensory input that they find disgusting– in this case, by making the room they were in smell gross.  He even found that prompting people to take precautions involving keeping clean (such as reminding them that washing their hands can help to prevent flu infection) achieves the same effect. Yes, telling people to wash their hands made them think more conservatively in their moral reasoning.

For this reason when Jonathan Haidt articulated his domains of moral emotion, he placed the domain of Purity/Sanctity (along with Respect for Hierarchy and In-Group Loyalty) squarely in the category of conservative thinking. I’m thinking that while this might be entirely valid, there are some things which can be counted upon to arouse disgust in liberals but not conservatives which have not been evaluated in these studies, which have mostly focused on sexual practices, body envelope violations, and excrement. But that is for a post in the future.