Philip Brickman

Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?

Adaptation level theory suggests that both contrast and habituation will operate to prevent the winning of a fortune from elevating happiness as much as might be expected. Contrast with the peak experience of winning should lessen the impact of ordinary pleasures, while habituation should eventually reduce the value of new pleasures made possible by winning. Study 1 compared a sample of 22 major lottery winners with 22 controls and also with a group of 29 paralyzed accident victims who had been interviewed previously. As predicted, lottery winners were not happier than controls and took significantly less pleasure from a series of mundane events. Study 2 indicated that these effects were not due to preexisting differences between people who buy or do not buy lottery tickets or between interviews that made or did not make the lottery salient. Paraplegics also demonstrated a contrast effect, not by enhancing minor pleasures but by idealizing their past, which did not help their present happiness.

Drive and predisposition as factors in the attitudinal effects of mere exposure

Abstract From the response competition interpretation of the attitude-enhancing effects of exposure it was hypothesized that (1) arousal during exposure would decrease affective ratings whereas (2) arousal during rating would decrease the ratings of low frequency stimuli but enhance the ratings of high frequency stimuli. Experiment I provided weak support for the first hypothesis while Experiment II provided clear support for the second hypothesis. Experiment III, exploring an unexpected finding from Experiment I, suggested that exposure will lead to more favorable ratings only if a stimulus is initially neutral or positive.

Effects of Status and Knowledgeability of Audience on Self Presentation

This study tested the hypothesis that people would enhance their statement of performance expectancies before a higher status audience with power over their performance outcomes while becoming more modest before an audience of peers, and that this pattern would be most evident when the audience was believed to be relatively uninformed about the persons history of competence. Students stated their grade expectancies for a course to one of three audiences: the teacher, fellow students, or an uninvolved graduate student researcher. In each audience condition, some subjects were told that the audience had access to their grade-point averages, while others were left to assume that their answers were the only information the audience would have. Students displayed greater self enhancement to the teacher than to fellow students, regardless of the information level of these audiences. Information level determined presentations to the researcher, with the informed researcher treated like the teacher (receiving enhanced self presentations) and the uninformed researcher treated like the students (receiving modest self presentations). A person may find it useful to voice certain public expectancies simply because they have desirable effects on his audience (Goffman, 1959). If a person indicates publicly that he expects to do well, the message may serve to influence an audience to adopt a more favorable set towards him. Subjects have been found to describe themselves as more competent at a task when addressing someone with power over them as opposed to someone without such power (Stires and Jones,

Optional stopping on ascending and descending series

Abstract For an optional stopping task on which the value of the alternatives is a positive or a negative function of their sequential position, the optimal decision rule for unknown distributions (“sample the first X and then select the next new maximum”) yields much too short search on the ascending series and much too long search on the descending series. One hundred and twelve undergraduate subjects playing such a game did in fact continue much longer on a descending series than on an ascending series. Though subjects playing the descending series eventually learned to optimize better than subjects playing the ascending series, the latter saw themselves as more successful on the task. Implications are discussed for real world situations in which people fail to maximize their gains in an improving environment, or fail to minimize their losses in a deteriorating environment.

Effects of Varying Exposure to Another Person with Familiar or Unfamiliar Thought Processes.

From work on the positive effects of mere exposure it was hypothesized that persons who gave familiar associations to a set of common stimulus words would be better liked than persons who gave unfamiliar associations, and that longer exposure would enhance the evaluation of associations and target persons who were initially strange. Evidence in support of these hypotheses was gathered in a study in which 6 male and 36 female undergraduates viewed word associations by target persons who varied in whether their background was familiar or strange, whether their associations were high, moderate, or low in familiarity, and whether their thoughts were given a high, moderate, or low degree of exposure. The preference or familiar others is suggested as one factor in the more widely studied preference for similar others, and a method is outlined for disentangling the two.