The Half-Life of Happiness: Hedonic Adaptation in the Subjective Well-Being of Poor Slum Dwellers to the Satisfaction of Basic Housing Needs
通过多国实地实验，研究发现为极端贫困人口提供改善住房后，其主观幸福感在16个月内显著提升，但随后平均8个月内60%的增益消失，预测28个月后效果完全消退，揭示了享乐适应现象。
Subjective well-being may not improve in step with increases in material well-being due to hedonic adaptation, a psychological process that attenuates the long-term emotional impact of a favorable or unfavorable change in circumstances. As a result, people’s degree of happiness eventually returns to a stable reference level. We use a multicountry field experiment to examine the impact on subjective measures of well-being of the provision of improved housing to extremely poor populations in order to test whether they exhibit hedonic adaptation when their basic housing needs are met. After 16 months, we find that subjective perceptions of well-being improve substantially for recipients of improved housing but that, after, on average, eight additional months, 60% of that gain has dissipated. Extrapolation achieved through estimation of a structural model of hedonic adaptation suggests that the decay rate of the treatment effect is 20% per month. As a result, after 28 months of treatment exposure, we forecast that the entire treatment effect will have disappeared.