the power of the internet, or, I didn't get much real work done today

So I was reading an otherwise fairly unremarkable NY Times editorial today about policy decisions and happiness. And then, about halfway down the piece:

"Happiness seems fairly cheap to manipulate. In one experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire about personal satisfaction after Xeroxing a sheet of paper. Those who found a dime lying on the Xerox machine reported substantially higher satisfaction with their lives."

Nothing says "unverifiable apocryphal story" quite like the words "In one experiment", so I figured I probably should dig around on the internet to find the truth.

As it turns out, it was an actual study. And, indeed, it was mentioned at the bottom of the second internet-page of this other NY Times article from 1999, which notes:

"Dr. [Norbert] Schwarz... has conducted an experiment in which some people who used a University of Michigan copying machine found a dime that researchers planted, while others were not given a dime to find.

After using the copier, people were asked how happy they were about life, and those who found a dime were consistently more upbeat about ''their lives as a whole, the economy, that kind of thing,'' Dr. Schwarz said. ''We've found that a dime can make you happy for about 20 minutes. Then your mood wears off.''

So, a real study done by a real Doctor of something, proving that finding a dime does indeed make you happier, although certainly this reference to the study retains some ambiguity. Another article referring to the dime study makes a further claim:

"Schwarz of the University of Michigan found that people who came upon unclaimed dimes at a copy machine (planted by researchers) reported greater levels of overall satisfaction with their lives than those who did not find coins. (Their upbeat mood, however, lasted for only 20 minutes.)

The study had another twist. When researchers asked participants about their happiness levels - but first asked them if they'd discovered dimes at a copy machine and heard them say yes - the coins lost their ability to influence mood. It seems chance events failed to influence mood once the participants were made conscious of the event.

For Schwarz, the dime study shows just how people's happiness levels fluctuate throughout the day based on random events. We can gain more control over our moods, he explained, if we acknowledge that there are random forces that influence them."

So the study has a kind of clear academic angle, or, at least, clear to someone who studies this kind of thing. More searching for Schwarz only turns up papers with titles like "Situated Cognition and the Wisdom of Feelings: Cognitive Tuning", which I definitely don't understand any of. But it's more than enough to allay my doubts about the authenticity of the Dime Study. Success!