Who’s Happy and How Much Do They Earn? - Happiness, Part 2

What do people earn? Our first lesson from this chapter is that people can guess other people’s salary from the information about how they live. Of course, in this particular study we never told anyone the salary, so there is no ‘right or wrong’. And, when we balance the respondents in terms of ages, we see similar results from men and women. Where we see differences is when we break out the respondents by how they describe their salaries versus the salaries of their friends. Those with lower salaries impute others as having lower salaries. Salaries as happiness: There seems to be a link between the perceived happiness of people (based on the vignette) and the salary that they are presumed to have. The relation is clearer for women than it is for men. With women, there is a far more linear relation between perceived happiness of people in the vignette and the salary earned.