Your grade school math teacher probably told you that being good at math would be very important to your grownup self. But maybe the younger you didn’t believe that at the time. A lot of research, though, has shown that your teacher was right.
We are two researchers who study decision-making and how it relates to wealth and happiness. In a study published in November 2021, we found that, in general, people who are better at math make more money and are more satisfied with their lives than people who aren’t as mathematically talented. But being good at math seems to be a double-edged sword. Although math-proficient people are very satisfied when they have high incomes, they are more dissatisfied, compared to those who aren’t as good at math, when they don’t make a lot of money.
Many researchers have suggested that more money only increases life satisfaction and happiness up to a certain point. Our research modifies this idea by showing that satisfaction derived from income relates strongly to how good a person is at math.
Nearly 6,000 people responded to a survey that asked about math skills, income and life satisfaction.
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A math and happiness test
We investigated the relationship between math ability, income and life satisfaction, using surveys sent to 5,748 diverse Americans as part of the Understanding America Study.
The study included two questions and one test relevant to our research. One question asked participants about their household yearly income. Another one asked respondents to rate how satisfied they are with their lives on a scale of zero to 10.
Finally, people answered eight math questions that varied in difficulty to get a sense of their math skills. For example, one of the moderately difficult questions was: “Jerry received both the 15th highest and the 15th lowest mark in the class. How many students are in the class?” The correct answer is 29 students.
We then combined the results to see how they all related to one another.
Math skills and income also are tied to level of education, so, in our analyses, we controlled for education, verbal intelligence, personality traits and other demographics.
Connecting math skills to income and satisfaction
On average, the better a person was at math, the more money they made. For every one additional right answer on the eight-question math test, people reported an average of $4,062 more in annual income.
Imagine you have two people with the same level of education, one of whom answered none of the math questions correctly and the other answered all of them correctly. Our research predicts that the person who answered all of the questions correctly will earn about $30,000 more each year.
The survey also showed that people who are better at math were, on average, also more satisfied with their lives than those with lower math ability. This finding agrees with a lot of other…
