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...capture how people valued their income. They reasoned that people tend to make specific comparisons of personal wealth, not only with the average income of the larger population, but with the individual incomes of their neighbors, colleagues at work or friends from college. And the higher their rank, the greater their sense of happiness and self-worth would likely be. "For example, people might care about whether they are the second most highly paid person, or the eighth most highly paid person, in their comparison set," write the authors, Chris Boyce, a psychologist at the University of Warwick, and Simon...
Working with a data set of 12,000 adults in Britain, Boyce and Moore assigned a rank to each participant based on income, and compared these positions to their answers on life-satisfaction surveys. The status rankings were determined using a statistical formula that incorporated factors such as geography, age, gender and educational status. So, a participant's income could be ranked along with those of neighbors, for instance, or with those of other similarly educated peers...
Boyce and Moore found that an individual's rank, viewed this way, was a stronger predictor of happiness than absolute wealth. The higher a person ranked within his age group or neighborhood, the more status he had and the happier he was regardless of how much he made in dollars (or, in the study's case, pounds). "What we're trying to do is understand and explain why, over 30 to 40 years, the large economic growth we have experienced hasn't made us any happier," says Boyce. "If absolute income matters, as we increased our income, everybody should...
Bracketology has expanded beyond basketball too. For example, a 2007 book called The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything used the NCAA-tournament format to rank a wide range of minutiae, from cooking tools to hairstyles to animated characters. Bart Simpson outlasts Homer in a stirring first-round matchup, and in the video-game tournament, Tetris beats Zelda to take the title. No upsets there...
Holding off Cal was a challenge from the get-go for Harvard, as the home team boasted some of the nation’s top-ranking players. Holding the No. 16 rank in the second singles spot with a 10-2 record, the Golden Bears’ Marina Cossou was no easy opponent for Tachibana, who dropped the match...