What makes us happy? I don’t mean in general – this isn’t a column about the good life, your plans to escape to the country or the latest mindfulness app. This is 2024, a year of elections stretching from India to Britain and the US, so let’s focus on what polls do for our perkiness.
Clearly, campaign length, with Britain almost certainly joining the US in an autumn vote, won’t make anyone happy. But let’s get more scientific, with the help of a new study digging into US presidential elections between 2008 and 2020. The researchers surveyed voters’ happiness on a one (extremely unhappy) to eight (extremely happy) scale before and after election.
They found that your preferred candidate winning delivers a happiness boost; and them losing, a hit to happiness. Obviously. But the losers lose more than the winners gain (what’s catchily called hedonic loss aversion). Interestingly, it’s not just our partisan preference that shapes an election’s happiness impact. It matters whether the result is a surprise to us, or involves a change to who runs the country.
The loss aversion is particularly concentrated among people surprised by the result – those who didn’t expect to lose don’t like it when they do. This is more common than it should be because political partisans tend to overestimate their candidate’s chances.
But the biggest and longest-lasting happiness impacts come not from being surprised (which we get over quickly), but when there’s a change in government that we do or don’t like. But even then, there’s no permanent impact on our happiness. So, if you lose an election this year, perk up. You’ll have an unhappy month, but it won’t ruin your life. In general. If Donald Trump wins, being unhappy will be the least of our problems.
• Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation and author of the forthcoming book Great Britain? How to Get Our Future Back
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