Do experiences really make you happier than things? Rereading the 2003 study
Do experiences make you happier than things? Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) say yes, and a 2021 meta-analysis finds d = 0.38, with real exceptions.
In this article3 sections
Yes, on average, and the average is smaller than the advice suggests. Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich’s 2003 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (85(6), 1193-1202) found that people say money spent on doing things made them happier than money spent on having things. A 2021 meta-analysis of the aftermath puts the typical gap at d = 0.38, and roughly a third of that may be publication bias.
That matters if you are deciding what to do with a Saturday. A fair summary is “do something, preferably with someone, and expect it to go well.” The details below are what make that sentence defensible.
What did Van Boven and Gilovich actually run?
Four studies, none of them a field experiment.
Study 1. Ninety-seven University of British Columbia undergraduates were randomly assigned to recall their latest purchase over $100 made with the primary intention of acquiring either “a life experience” or “a material possession.” Experiential recall produced higher happiness ratings, t(95) = 2.91, p = .005, and more “money well spent,” t(95) = 2.26, p = .026. Cost did not differ (medians of $150 material and $190 experiential).
Study 2. A telephone survey of 1,279 Americans aged 21 to 69, run by Harris Interactive in late 2000 for Northwestern Mutual. Among the 1,263 who answered, 57% said an experiential purchase made them happier, 34% said a material one did. The authors called experiences the rule, not the exception, but the lowest-income respondents split evenly.
Study 3. Seventy Cornell undergraduates wrote about a past purchase, then re-read it a week later. Those with an experiential purchase were in a better mood afterward (adjusted M = 0.20 vs -0.20), F(1, 67) = 4.59, p = .036.
Study 4. Eighty-four students imagined choosing between, say, a watch and a Broadway show. Experiences won more often when the choice sat a year in the past or future than when it was tomorrow (happiness contrast, t(82) = 2.54, p = .013). The authors read this as experiences improving in hindsight and foresight.
Everything rests on recall and self-report. The authors flag this themselves: memory may follow peak moments and endings, so experiences could simply be remembered better than they felt. That is the peak-end pattern applied to receipts.
What did later studies change?
The effect survives, with conditions attached.
| Study | Finding |
|---|---|
| Nicolao, Irwin and Goodman (2009, Journal of Consumer Research, 36(2), 188-198) | The advantage is for purchases that turn out well. Press coverage of the paper says bad experiences hurt more than bad objects. |
| Caprariello and Reis (2013, JPSP, 104(2), 199-215) | Valuing experiences depends on the involvement of others; Weingarten and Goodman summarize it as no advantage for solitary experiences. |
| Bhattacharjee and Mogilner (2014, online 2013, JCR, 41(1), 1-17) | Younger people gain more from extraordinary experiences; ordinary ones catch up as people age and time feels shorter. |
| Weidman and Dunn (2016, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(4), 390-399) | In diary and experience-sampling studies, material purchases gave happiness more often and experiential ones gave more intense happiness on individual occasions. |
| Weingarten and Goodman (2021, JCR, 47(6), 855-877) | 360 effect sizes from 141 studies: d = 0.383, 95% CI [0.336, 0.430]. |
The last row is the one to remember. Weingarten and Goodman’s trim-and-fill adjustment dropped the estimate to d = 0.271. The happiness measures alone gave d = 0.326, below the relatedness measures at 0.558. So experiences seem to beat things more at feeling connected than at feeling happy. The advantage was also smaller for negative experiences, solitary ones, lower-status samples, and cases where the object was about as useful as the activity. Two conceptual replications cited in the meta-analysis (Park and Sela 2016, Sisso 2013) did not find it.
Weidman and Dunn’s paper is the most useful corrective for anyone who has absorbed the slogan. My gloss: a couch pays out every evening, a concert pays out once, harder. If your life is short on daily comfort, the ski weekend may not be what you are missing.
So what should a Saturday cost?
Treat the research as odds, not a law. Four rules fall out of it.
- Bring someone. The moderator with the most support is other people, and the effect on relatedness is the largest in the meta-analysis. Who gets your Saturdays is a decision worth making before you pick the activity.
- Choose reliable over ambitious. If Nicolao and colleagues are right that bad experiences sting more, an outing with a real chance of being miserable is a worse bet than a decent object. A dinner with a friend beats a speculative day trip.
- Check that it is not a disguised object. A pricey solo spa visit and a new jacket may be closer than the label suggests.
- Give it away sometimes. A different line of work, Dunn, Aknin and Norton’s 2008 study of spending on others, points the same direction on the social side.
Is this a better life? The 2003 paper never claimed that. For the separate claim that variety and difficulty matter more than pleasantness, see the work on a psychologically rich life. The experiential advantage is real and moderate, measured mostly by asking people how they feel about something that already happened.