Feeling Good or Feeling Better?

Alberto Prati and Claudia Senik ()
Additional contact information
Claudia Senik: Paris School of Economics

No 13166, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Can people remember correctly their past well-being? We study three national surveys of the British, German and French population, where more than 50,000 European citizens were asked questions about their current and past life satisfaction. We uncover systematic biases in recalled subjective well- being: on average, people tend to overstate the improvement in their well-being over time and to understate their past happiness. But this aggregate figure hides a deep asymmetry: while happy people recall the evolution of their life to be better than it was, unhappy ones tend to exaggerate its worsening. It thus seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday. These results offer an explanation of why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks to be lower and are more open to new experiences.

Keywords: memory biases; remembered utility; life satisfaction; intra-personal comparisons (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-exp, nep-hap, nep-hea, nep-hpe, nep-ltv and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: Psychological Science, 2022, 33 (11), 1828–1841

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13166.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Feeling good or feeling better? (2020)
Working Paper: Feeling good or feeling better? (2020)
Working Paper: Feeling good or feeling better? (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13166

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().