desde The Boston Globe

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A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it's just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.
"Just because money doesn't buy happiness doesn't mean money cannot buy happiness," says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. "People just might be using it wrong."

Dunn and others are beginning to offer an intriguing explanation for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The problem isn't money, it's us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

Any attempt to put these findings into practice, however, has to contend with the subtle but powerful ways money itself channels our thinking, and the ways it plays on human attitudes about sharing and scarcity. Recent studies have suggested that merely thinking about money makes us more solitary and selfish, and steers us away from the spending that promises to make us happiest.

Money spent on experiences - vacations or theater tickets or meals out - makes you happier than money spent on material goods. Leaf Van Boven, an associate psychology professor at the University of Colorado, and Thomas Gilovich, chair of the psychology department at Cornell University, have run surveys asking people about past purchases and how happy they made them.

"We generally found very consistent evidence that experiences made people happier than material possessions they had invested in," says Van Boven.

Why? For one thing, Van Boven and Gilovich argue, experiences are inherently more social - when we vacation or eat out or go to the movies it's usually with other people, and we're liable also to relive the experience when we see those people again. And past experiences can work as a sort of social adhesive even with people who didn't participate with us, providing stories and conversational fodder in a way that a new watch or speedboat rarely can.

In addition, other work by Van Boven suggests that experiences don't usually trigger the same sort of pernicious comparisons that material possessions do. We like our car less whenever we catch a glimpse of our neighbor's newer, nicer car, but we don't like our honeymoon any less because our neighbor went on a fancier one.