Imagine you are given the opportunity to change the arrangements of your current job. Would you rather: a) work fewer hours and make less money or b) work more hours and make more money?
If you said a) then good news: a study published this year found that people who value time over money tend to be happier. Across six experiments – with university students, museum visitors, and respondents to an online survey – researchers found that the people who think it’s better to have more time than more money gave higher scores on questionnaire-based measures of happiness.
You might think this is a spurious result. Perhaps, for example, people who pick option a) do so because they tend to be financially well off (and so can afford to turn down the money), and it’s this financial security – rather than valuing time over money per se – that makes them happier.
But this isn’t the case. The link between prioritising time over money (as mentioned by the type of question we’ve just asked) held even after controlling for income, marital status (married people tend to be happier), materialism, and even how much spare time people feel they have. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we can infer causality. So even if it were possible to force yourself to change from being a b-type to an a-type person (which it probably isn’t), there’s no reason to believe that it would necessarily make you any happier.
Psy-Q by Ben Ambridge is published by Profile Books at £8.99. To order a copy for £6.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
