Searching for the External Validity of Social Preference Games: A Guide of Field Environments (with Daniel Navarro‐Martinez)

Abstract:
The last couple of decades have witnessed a lively debate on the external validity of social preference games. Yet, scientific progress in this area has been restrained by the difficulty of delineating the field environments that social preference games should generalize to. Here we present two studies investigating the field environments and behaviors to which social preference games are expected to relate, according to specialist researchers. In Study 1, we systematically reviewed all the papers published in the top 5 economics journals that used social preference games, and we analyzed the field settings explicitly linked to the games by the authors. In Study 2, we conducted a survey among members of the Economic Science Association (ESA) mailing list to investigate the field environments they viewed as most closely associated with different social preference games. Overall, our results provide a rich guide to the types of field settings that are expected to relate to social preference games, according to the people who use them. This guide constitutes a useful reference to organize future research on external validity and make it more systematic.



Happiness Without a Financial Safety Net: Low Income Predicts Emotional Volatility (with Jordi Quoidbach)

Abstract:
Decades of research suggest that money buys very little happiness. However, previous studies have relied on static measures assessing people’s well-being once or on average. We examine the “reel” of people’s emotional lives through over 1 million reports from 23,000 individuals whose happiness was tracked in real-time using a smartphone app. Results show that lower income is associated with increased happiness volatility—a relationship that replicates across multiple operationalizations of volatility, statistical models, and a sample of individuals from six developing countries (N > 25,000). An unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm further revealed that the greatest gap is between how frequent and intense the rich and the poor experience emotional downs, not ups. The happiness gap between the highest and lowest earners during episodes of intense unhappiness was 1.5 to 3 times the size of the gap in average happiness between these two groups. Finally, exploiting the exogeneity of monthly payments, we find that low-income people experience more moments and periods of anomalous happiness the last few days of the month, suggesting a causal relationship between income and happiness volatility.



Income and Boredom: Evidence from 30 Countries (with Daniel Navarro-Martinez, Stefan Pfattheicher, Jordi Quoidbach).

Abstract:
For decades, researchers, governments, and policymakers have sought to understand how financial scarcity affects people's well-being and quality of life. In this paper, we show that past studies have overlooked a fundamental psychological aspect of being poor: boredom. Using data from over 60,000 individuals across 30 countries, we find a robust negative association between income and daily experiences of boredom. In fact, compared with high-income earners, low-income individuals not only feel bored more often, but their experience of boredom is more closely linked to other negative states such as loneliness, worry, and anxiety. Our results pave the way for future research and policies that take boredom into account and address the full extent of the psychological tax exerted by financial hardship.



Is it boring to be an entrepreneur? Evidence from Europe (with Raquel Ortega-Lapiedra).

Abstract:
Individuals not only seek a happy and meaningful life, but an interesting one. In this letter, we show that past estimates of the well-being gains from entrepreneurship have overlooked an important aspect of the relationship between self-employment and well-being: boredom. Using a sample of over 30,000 individuals from 25 European countries, we show that self-employment is related to lower levels of boredom – a relationship that is not captured by traditional measures of hedonic or eudaimonic well-being.