This is the link to the actual study: http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2008p32.pdf http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2008p32.pdf Note that the study

This is the link to the actual study: http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2008p32.pdf http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2008p32.pdf Note that the study title is "Aspirations, Attainments and Satisfaction", not the nebulous and broadly defined "Happiness" as reported in the article. This is significant because the study specifically analyses self-reported survey responses for, as the title suggests, aspirations, attainments and satisfaction. And they are quite particular about the factors that are taken into account in their analysis, for example: happy marriage status, "big ticket" consumer durables, number of kids, etc It would be hard to argue that aspiring for a 7L washing machine (and subsequently attaining it) constitutes the same happiness as a happy marriage, which is what this study asserts (from my cursory read of the paper, they don't normalise or put weights on the factors). Overall the study is dubious, sophomoric at best. I had quite a few of criticisms of the methodology while reading through the paper. If they're not going to be rigorous about it, they should just not bother doing these kinds of studies, presumably only to confirm their own pre-conceived biases. The biases are obviously mainstream too, as is evidenced by all the pop psychology comments here.