In 1978, a psychologist named Philip Brickman published a paper with a finding that has haunted happiness research ever since. He and his co-authors tracked down lottery winners — people who had recently landed substantial prizes, life-changing money in late-1970s dollars — and asked them to rate the pleasure they took in ordinary things. Talking with a friend. Hearing a funny joke. Buying clothes. Eating breakfast. Reading a magazine.
The winners rated those small pleasures lower than a control group of ordinary residents pulled from the phone book.
Not slightly lower. Measurably lower, on a rating scale.
The study that named the treadmill
Brickman’s team wasn’t only interested in the winners. They also interviewed people who had recently been paralysed in accidents — a group at the other extreme of sudden life change — and compared both to a control group living in the same neighbourhoods. The full study appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The expectation, going in, was obvious. Winners should be euphoric. Accident victims should be devastated. And in the raw, present-tense sense, both were — winners reported the win itself as a huge positive event, victims reported the accident as a huge negative one.
But when the researchers asked about ordinary life — the coffee, the conversation, the joke, the magazine — the picture inverted in a way nobody had quite predicted.
The specific numbers
Brickman’s team used a rating scale where participants scored how much pleasure they currently derived from mundane activities. The control group averaged higher than the lottery winners. The paralysed accident victims — and this is the part that made the study famous — scored between the two groups.
The accident victims were rating their morning coffee higher than the millionaires were.
Winners also rated the pleasure they expected to derive from those same everyday activities in the future lower than controls did. Whatever the money had done to their internal scale, it hadn’t just dulled the present. It had dimmed the projection of ordinary days to come.
Why a good meal stopped tasting as good
The mechanism Brickman proposed had two parts, and both have held up reasonably well in the fifty-odd years since.
The first was contrast. Winning a lottery jackpot is such an intense peak experience that everything else gets measured against it. A croissant is fine. A croissant is not a cheque for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reference point moves, and the small good things shrink next to the memory of the enormous good thing.
The second was adaptation. Human nervous systems are built to normalise. A new car smells new for a month, then it smells like a car. A bigger house feels enormous for a season, then it feels like where you live. The technical name for this, first proposed by Brickman and Donald Campbell in their 1971 paper and later illustrated in the lottery study, is the hedonic treadmill — the sense that people keep running to stay in the same emotional place.
The winners themselves
The interviews behind the numbers are what make the paper linger. Winners described losing friends who now felt awkward around them. They described family members asking for loans, and the strange calculation of saying yes or no. They described quitting jobs and then not knowing what to do at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.
One winner told the researchers that the phone had not stopped ringing for weeks after the win, and then had gone quiet in a way the old life had never been quiet.
Another said the win had made every subsequent good thing feel small by comparison — a raise at a spouse’s job, a child’s good report card, a well-cooked dinner. The scale had been stretched. Everyday joys now had to compete with the memory of a moment that changed everything, and they lost.
What later research did to the finding
The 1978 study has been re-examined many times, and some of its edges have softened. The sample was small, and later work using larger datasets found that big wins do produce durable increases in life satisfaction, particularly around financial security.
What has held up is the narrower, stranger finding buried inside Brickman’s paper. Sudden wealth appears to shift the reference point from which daily pleasures are judged, and once that reference point moves, ordinary good things register as smaller than they used to.
People who earn their way to wealth gradually, over decades, do not show the same effect, or show it much more weakly. The suddenness matters. The size of the contrast matters. The comparison to what came before is the whole engine of the phenomenon.
The accident victims, again
The counter-finding is what gives the paper its haunting shape. The people who had lost the use of their legs, some of them within the past month, were rating morning coffee and conversation with friends higher than people who had just come into a fortune.
Brickman’s team suggested a mirror mechanism was at work. When the peak experience is catastrophic loss rather than sudden gain, the reference point moves in the opposite direction. A cup of coffee, tasted from a hospital bed after weeks of not being sure you would taste anything again, becomes enormous. The scale contracts around what is still available.
Later work has broadly supported this — not universally, and not without qualification, but often enough that it is now a stable finding in clinical psychology.
What the treadmill actually predicts
The trap Brickman identified is not that money makes people unhappy. It doesn’t, on average. The trap is that the joys people imagine winning will unlock — the pleasure of the morning coffee in the new kitchen, the pleasure of the meal in the new dining room — are precisely the joys most vulnerable to the shifted reference point.
The big win doesn’t dim itself. It dims everything smaller than itself.
Which is why, in the years since, researchers studying life satisfaction have kept coming back to a slightly awkward practical conclusion: the durability of everyday pleasure depends partly on not having a nearby peak experience that dwarfs it. This is one strand of the broader understanding of why people who get what they wanted often keep wanting more.
The Illinois winners, decades later
Brickman himself did not live to see how thoroughly his paper would be absorbed into popular psychology. His treadmill metaphor, first laid out with Campbell in 1971 and tested in the 1978 lottery study, was picked up by later researchers and eventually became one of the most widely cited concepts in the field of subjective well-being.
The original winners were never systematically followed up. Their names were kept confidential, and by now most would be in their eighties or nineties, or gone. Whatever happened to their coffee, their conversations, their good meals — whether the scale eventually recalibrated, whether the ordinary things came back into focus, whether the treadmill ever slowed — is not in the record.
What the paper leaves, instead, is the small, unsettling pattern in the results. A group of people who had just been handed the outcome most others spend their whole lives imagining, rating a good breakfast lower than those who had received nothing.
The controls, eating the same breakfast on an ordinary Tuesday, gave it a higher rating. Nobody had promised them anything. Nobody had changed their life. And the toast, apparently, was better.
