We were all told by our math teachers in elementary school that math will be very important to us when we grow up. Maybe we didn’t believe it as children, but many studies show that the teachers were right.
Dr. Par Bjelkebring, professor of psychology at the University of Gothenburg and prof. Dr. Ellen Peters, director of the Research Center at the University of Oregon, is engaged in researching the way of making decisions and how it affects the feeling of well-being and happiness. In a study they published together, they came to the conclusion that, in general, people who are better at math earn more money and are more satisfied with their lives than people who are not as talented at math.
But it seems that being good at math is a double-edged sword. Although people with math skills are very satisfied when they have high incomes, compared to those who are not so good at math, they are more dissatisfied when they do not earn much money.
Many researchers indicate that more money increases life satisfaction and happiness, but up to a certain point. Bjelkebring and Piters’ research somewhat corrects this thesis and shows that the satisfaction derived from income is largely related to how good a person is at mathematics.
Psychologists investigated the relationship between math ability, income and life satisfaction, using a survey of 5,748 randomly selected Americans.
The study included two questions and one test relevant to the research objective. One question asked to the participants was about the annual income of their household. In the second, respondents were asked to rate their level of satisfaction with their life on a scale from zero to 10.
In addition, the respondents solved eight mathematical problems that differed in difficulty in order to gain an insight into their mathematical abilities.
For example, one of the moderately difficult questions was, “Jerry got the 15th highest and 15th lowest grade in his class. How many students are there in the class?” The correct answer is 29 students.
The obtained results were then combined to determine the existence of a correlation.
Since mathematical skills and income are usually related to the level of education, the researchers took that into account as control variables, as well as the level of verbal intelligence, personality traits and other demographic data.
On average, the better a person was at math, the more money they earned. For every additional correct answer on the eight-question math test, people reported an average of $4,062 more in annual income.
If two people with the same level of education, one of whom did not answer any of the math questions correctly, and the other answered all of the math questions correctly, research has shown that the person who answered all of the questions correctly will earn about $30,000 more each year.
Also, it turns out that people who are better at math are on average more satisfied with their lives than those with lower math abilities. This finding agrees with many other studies and suggests that income affects life satisfaction.
However, previous research has shown that the relationship between income and happiness is not as simple as “more money means more happiness.” It turns out that how satisfied a person is with their income often depends on how they feel compared to other people’s incomes.
Other research has also shown that people who are better at math tend to make more numerical comparisons in general than those who are worse at math. This led the research team to suspect that people with math skills would also compare incomes more. The results seem to have confirmed that.
Simply put, the better a person was at math, the more he cared about how much money he made. People who are better at math had the highest life satisfaction when they had high incomes. But satisfaction with the amount of income goes both ways. These people also had the lowest life satisfaction when they had lower incomes. Among people who aren’t as good at math, income wasn’t nearly as related to happiness. So, the same income is valued differently depending on a person’s math skills.
An oft-cited fact – backed up by research – is that once a person earns around $95,000 a year, earning more money does not dramatically increase satisfaction. This concept is called income saturation. The research of Bjelkebring and Peters, however, questions that general thesis.
Interestingly, people who are the best at math do not seem to show income saturation. They were more and more satisfied as the income was higher, and there seemed to be no upper limit. This did not apply to people who were not so talented in mathematics. The group with the least knowledge in mathematics showed satisfaction with incomes already at the threshold of about 50,000 dollars. After that, making more money made no difference.
For some, money seems to buy happiness. However, more research is needed to truly understand this correlation, but the researchers hypothesize that this is because mathematically oriented minds are constantly comparing numbers – including income – to make sense of the world. Which, as it turns out, isn’t always a great thing.
By comparison, those who are worse at math derive life satisfaction from other sources than just income. So, the researchers advise, if you’re depressed about your income, maybe looking beyond the numbers will bring you more life satisfaction.
Source: www.sitoireseto.com
