Deutschlandfunk Kultur
Wenn man älter wird, werden die Partys langweiliger, aber das dort servierte Essen immer besser. Sprüche, die man auf Partys jenseits der 30 hört. Aber war früher wirklich alles besser und war man vor allem glücklicher? Eine Studie gibt Antworten.
Psychology Today
But how reliable and accurate are your memories of last year?
This is not a trivial question. If your memories of last year are somehow biased or distorted, then your appraisal of your happiness trajectory—and by extension, your life—may be distorted.
A recent (2020) paper by Alberto Prati (University of Oxford) and Claudia Senik (Sorbonne University) set out to explore this issue. The researchers first mined a large data set from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), analyzing longitudinal data from over 20,000 participants.
The Conversation UK
Who’s right about price inflation? Everyone. The point is that inflation is not the same for everyone.
Over the same period, and in the same country, different people experience different inflation rates. This is an acknowledged economic fact known as inflation inequality.
In theory, people who are the most exposed to inflation should be the ones who endure a larger wellbeing loss as prices rise. In a recent study, I showed this, using data from France’s official consumer confidence survey.
Alberto Prati is an Assistant Professor in Economics at the University College London, where he teaches economic psychology. He also serves as a Research Fellow of the Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford, and as an associate of the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics.
Alberto’s research has shown how the investigation of memory biases can improve the interpretation and statistical analysis of subjective satisfaction data. He has also used satisfaction data from large surveys to estimate the connection of wellbeing and pro-environmental behaviors, as well as the wellbeing impact of inflation inequalities. Life satisfaction is a cognitive judgment, while happiness is an emotion: some of Alberto’s experimental research has built bridges between these two dimensions, and investigated the mechanisms underlying how people decide what they want to believe and to remember.
Currently, Alberto is working on solving some fundamental issues in the measurement of life satisfaction, with the aim of outlining some practical advice to help producers and users of wellbeing data. Apart from his focus on wellbeing, he has been working on several measurement puzzles, e.g., how to measure unobservable inequalities, and how to estimate time preferences accurately.
The Ajinomoto Research Fellowship is supported by Ajinomoto Co, Inc.
Inverse
Humans have a complicated relationship with happiness. Consider this study on the subject: Scientists found that valuing happiness can lead to less happiness when you feel happy. It’s an emotional rollercoaster fueled by unhelpful expectations.
Yet the relationship gets more complex still. According to a recent paper published in the journal Psychological Science our current state of well-being can interfere with our perception of the past…
A newly-published large-scale study has described how people tend to overstate the improvement in their wellbeing over time, and to understate their past happiness.
The research, published in the journal Psychological Science, was led by Dr Alberto Prati of the Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford, alongside Professor Claudia Senik (Sorbonne, Paris School of Economics).
The pair analysed data from more than 60,000 adults across the UK, USA, France and Germany spanning from the 1970s to present day. They used these longitudinal surveys to compare how a person’s perception of their wellbeing changes over time.
While the precise questions asked differed by country, in all four studies individuals were asked to rate their life satisfaction on a numeric scale, and for their rating of their past life satisfaction.
Their findings show what the researchers describe as a ‘deep asymmetry’, where happy people tend to recall the evolution of their life to be better than it was, and unhappy ones tend to exaggerate their life’s negative evolution. This suggests that people’s remembered wellbeing is actually much more dynamic than previously stated, and seems to be influenced by their current level of life satisfaction.
And the findings bolster existing research which shows happy people to be more optimistic1, perceive risks to be lower2 and are more open to new experiences3 compared to their unhappier counterparts.
Dr Alberto Prati, Research Fellow at Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre and Assistant Professor at University College London, said: “Answering the question ‘how satisfied are you with your life?’ is an act of memory.
“Therefore, if we want to understand life satisfaction, we need to understand how people reconstruct their life narrative and recall their past happiness. There is much more to do for this, and Claudia and I are already working on the next steps.”
‘Feeling Good Is Feeling Better’ is published in Psychological Science.
Can people remember their past happiness? We analyzed data from four longitudinal surveys from the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany spanning from the 1970s until the present, in which more than 60,000 adults were asked questions about their current and past life satisfaction. We uncovered systematic biases in recalled happiness: On average, people tended to overstate the improvement in their well-being over time and to understate their past happiness. But this aggregate figure hides a deep asymmetry: Whereas happy people recall the evolution of their life to be better than it was, unhappy ones tend to exaggerate their life’s negative evolution. It thus seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday. This recall structure has implications for motivated memory and learning and could explain why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks to be lower, and are more open to new experiences.
New research suggests that inflation inequalities represent a substantial (and, often, overlooked) burden for consumer’s wellbeing.
The findings are published in a new working paper authored by Dr Alberto Prati, Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, Associate Researcher at the LSE Centre for Economic Performance and Assistant Professor at University College London.
Dr Prati analysed data from more than 60,000 individuals in France, who were asked to assess their satisfaction with living standards as well as the change in prices over the last 12 months.
By examining the relationship between these two measures over time, and after applying some behavioral and statistical techniques to account for noise and biases, Dr Prati found that differences in self-reported perception of inflation are a robust predictor of differences in individuals’ satisfaction.
At a given point in time, a consumer reporting a one percentage-point higher inflation than another consumer endured a statistically significant satisfaction gap. This gap is even larger than the one associated with a 1% difference in income.
This effect of inflation inequality adds up to the effect of average inflation, that was first documented two decades ago by Professor Andrew Oswald, Senior Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre and a Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick.
Dr Prati also created a new dataset to study how different groups of consumers react to price changes. He found that those who were commuting by car reported higher levels of inflation and lower levels of satisfaction with living standards when the gasoline price increased.
These differences were observed even in a context of general price stability, when average inflation was particularly low.
Dr Prati said: “Until recently, this study would have not been possible. It happened thanks to the impressive work of the French Wellbeing Observatory, which has been collecting quarterly data on subjective well-being. This kind of surveys open the door to new research and help understand the determinants of the well-being distribution.”
The full working paper ‘The well-being cost of inflation inequalities’ is published by the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance. As a pre-print discussion paper it has not yet been subject to formal peer review.
Read a blog post from Dr Prati on inflation inequalities and their impact on individual wellbeing on the LSE website here.
In terms of well-being, how costly is inflation? To answer this question, empirical evaluations have typically studied average inflation rates at the national level, thus disregarding the role of inflation inequalities within a country. In this paper, we relax the assumptions that heterogeneous consumers face homogeneous inflation rates, and study the correlation between price changes and self-reported satisfaction with living standards. We use newly available data from France, and adopt two approaches. First, we focus on individually perceived inflation and use the internationally harmonized Opinion Price Index as a proxy for experienced inflation. Variations in perceived inflation help predict wellbeing differences among consumers, even when controlling for relevant socio-demographic factors, personality traits and common method variance. We estimate their marginal impact to be higher than equivalent variations in nominal income. Second, we compare groups of consumers over time, and find that changes in the price of a good disproportionately affect the relative well-being of those who consume it. The study shows that the well-being cost of the inflation crisis would be underestimated if looking at aggregate figures only.
In terms of well-being, how costly is inflation? To answer this question, empirical evaluations have typically studied average inflation rates at the national level, thus disregarding the role of inflation inequalities within a country. In this article, we relax the assumptions that heterogeneous consumers face homogeneous inflation rates, and study the correlation between price changes and self-reported satisfaction with living standards. We use newly available data from France and adopt two approaches.
The study shows that the well-being cost of the inflation crisis would be underestimated if looking at aggregate figures only.