I believe there have been psych studies to this effect. Asked whether you'd rather make 110k when everyone else is making 80k, vs. 140k when everyone else is making 200k -- assuming prices remain constant, which is economically dubious, of course, but hey, it's a thought experiment -- and most people choose the former.
"But the most the exciting finding was the influence of another factor: how the rival player was doing. Activation was at its highest for those players who got the right answer while their co-player got it wrong. But participants who got more money than their co-players showed much stronger activation in the "reward centre" than when both received the same amount."
This has a lot of interesting implications. For one, the classical homo-economimus model of humans as rational utility maximizers is further called into question. For two, it highlights the hedonic treadmill effect. No matter how much you earn, as long as you're comparing yourself to someone who makes more, you're unlikely to be satisfied.
I think it's important to point out that this kind of behaviour is rational under some perspectives, particularly evolutionary ones (dodgy though their explanatory power may be). It's more important, genetically speaking, to be somewhere near the apex of your social group and thereby get more valuable reproduction opportunities, than it is to be materially comfortable on some notional absolute scale.
It's more than economically dubious, it's outright false. If everyone else is making less than you, then whenever you buy anything whose cost is mostly personal service, it'll be cheap in real terms (i.e. the amount of time you have to work to buy one hour of someone else's labour).
Conversely, if other people earn more money than you, you're going to have to work longer to pay for someone else's time.
It strikes me that this is the difference between wealth in the past, and wealth now.
A medieval king was vastly wealthier than me in his ability to command other people's time. But I am vastly more wealthy than him in my ability to command nature, which means I have access to much better medical care, communications, and entertainment opportunities than he had.
For one, the classical homo-economimus model of humans as rational utility maximizers is further called into question.
While I wouldn't argue that humans are rational utility maximizers, this result doesn't call that into question in and of itself: there could easily be utility functions which depend on relative status or position, rather than absolute material wealth.
Here's another study to that effect: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3315638/Rela...
"But the most the exciting finding was the influence of another factor: how the rival player was doing. Activation was at its highest for those players who got the right answer while their co-player got it wrong. But participants who got more money than their co-players showed much stronger activation in the "reward centre" than when both received the same amount."
This has a lot of interesting implications. For one, the classical homo-economimus model of humans as rational utility maximizers is further called into question. For two, it highlights the hedonic treadmill effect. No matter how much you earn, as long as you're comparing yourself to someone who makes more, you're unlikely to be satisfied.