In the summer of 1978 a landmark study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It is the sort of thing you can imagine began as a joke, while a trio of academics from Massachusetts and Northwestern universities shared a monster doobie at a conference.
Guys! Wouldn’t it be, like, so cool if we could show that victims of horrendous accidents were just as happy as the winners of shitloads of money. Hilarious, man — let’s do it. Now pass that bad boy over here.
Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman interviewed 22 major lottery winners, 29 paraplegics and quadriplegics, and 22 randoms. They were asked to rate the amount of pleasure they received from eating, watching TV, chatting with friends and so on.