Recent scholarly and media accounts paint a portrait of unhappy parents who find remarkably little joy in taking care of their children, but the scientific basis for these claims remains inconclusive. In the three studies reported here, we used a strategy of converging evidence to test whether parents evaluate their lives more positively than do nonparents (Study 1), feel relatively better than do nonparents on...

A central question in psychology and economics is the determination of whether individuals react differently to different values of a cared-about attribute (e.g., different income levels, different gas prices, and different ambient temperatures). Building on and significantly extending our earlier work on preference reversals between joint and separate evaluations, we propose a general evaluability theory (GET) that specifies when people are value sensitive and when...

The authors demonstrate that people discount delayed outcomes as a result of perceived changes over time in supplies of slack. Slack is the perceived surplus of a given resource available to complete a focal task. The present research shows that, in general, people expect slack for time to be greater in the future than in the present. Typically, this expectation of growth of slack in...

Social commentators have pointed to problems of workers who face “time stress”—an absence of sufficient time to accomplish all their tasks. An economic theory views time stress as reflecting how tightly the time constraint binds households. Time stress will be more prevalent in households with higher full earnings and whose members work longer in the market or on “required” homework. Evidence from Australia (2001), Germany...

This research examines how a focus on time versus money can lead to two distinct mind-sets that affect consumers' willingness to donate to charitable causes. The results of three experiments, conducted both in the lab and in the field, reveal that asking individuals to think about “how much time they would like to donate” (vs. “how much money they would like to donate”) to a...

The results of five field and laboratory experiments reveal a “time versus money effect” whereby activating time (vs. money) leads to a favorable shift in product attitudes and decisions. Because time increases focus on product experience, activating time (vs. money) augments one’s personal connection with the product, thereby boosting attitudes and decisions. However, because money increases the focus on product possession, the reverse effect can...

Does thinking about time, rather than money, influence how effectively individuals pursue personal happiness? Laboratory and field experiments revealed that implicitly activating the construct of time motivates individuals to spend more time with friends and family and less time working—behaviors that are associated with greater happiness. In contrast, implicitly activating money motivates individuals to work more and socialize less, which (although productive) does not increase...

The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. If so, asking people to think about other future activities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1–3, college football fans were less...

People directly experience only themselves here and now but often consider, evaluate, and plan situations that are removed in time or space, that pertain to others' experiences, and that are hypothetical rather than real. People thus transcend the present and mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. We argue that this is made possible by the human capacity for abstract processing of...

Using longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey, the authors examine how individuals' employment compensation—salaried or hourly—affects their decisions to trade time for money. Results indicate that there is a positive association between hourly wages and a desire to exchange leisure time for more money. This relationship holds even when a fixed-effects model controls for unobserved differences among individuals as well as for job-relevant...