金钱或许真的能买来幸福

The Beatles may still be right: money can't buy you love - but it could buy you happiness, according to new research.

新研究表明：披头士说的话也许仍然成立：金钱不能给你买来爱情--但却能买给你幸福。

But there's a catch - what you're actually buying is time. The study published in the official scientific journal of the National Academy of Sciences involved more than 6,200 people in the US, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands. It asked people how much they spent on time-saving services and how this made them feel. Researchers also gave a group of 60 people in Vancouver money to buy an item on one weekend and to purchase a service that saved them time on the next weekend, and compared the effects.

但也是有陷阱存在的--你真正买到的是时间。美国国家科学院的官方科学杂志上刊出了这篇研究，研究了美国、加拿大、丹麦和新西兰的6200多位人士。研究人员询问人们花在省时服务上的费用，以及这给他们带来的感受。同时，研究人员在第一周的时候给了60位温哥华人一笔钱买东西，第二周的时候让他们把钱花在省时的服务上，之后比较效果。

The results from both parts of the study showed that rather than splashing out on material things in the pursuit of happiness, you'd be better off paying someone to clean your house, do your food shopping or carry out home repairs.

研究的这两个部分都得出了这样的结果：相比花钱买物质品追求幸福，花钱请别人打扫家里、买菜或维修家具倒更使人快乐。

But even people who can afford to pay for labour-saving services don't always take advantage of this route to more time and greater happiness. The survey included 818 Dutch millionaires and found that almost half did not spend money on outsourcing tasks that they don't like doing.

但即使人们负担得起节省劳力的服务，他们也不总是利用这一点来获得更多的时间和幸福。这一研究包括818位荷兰籍的百万富翁，并发现：基本一半的百万富翁都不会花钱请别人做他们不喜欢做的事情。

"People who hire a house cleaner or pay the kid next door to mow the lawn might feel like they're being lazy," said one of the researchers, Professor Ashley Whillans, of Harvard Business School.

"花钱请清洁工或给钱给邻居的小孩让他们修剪草坪会给人懒惰之感，"其中一位来自哈佛商学院的研究员阿什利·威尔兰斯教授说道。

"But our results suggest that buying time has similar benefits for happiness as having more money." So buying back time could be a way to indirectly buy happiness. But what if how you go about spending money was the deciding factor?

"但我们的结果表明：花钱买时间与拥有更多的钱能够带来同样的幸福感。"所以买时间可能间接的买到了幸福。但如果怎么花钱才是决定性因素呢？

If we splash the cash in a way that fits our personality type we are likely to be more satisfied with life, according to research by the University of Cambridge that looked at more than 76,800 transactions from 625 people over a six-month period. Each transaction was analysed to determine whether it fitted with one of the big five personality attributes - openness, conscientiousness, extra-version, agreeableness or neuroticism.

剑桥大学的一项研究调查了625人在6个月间的76800余次交易记录，研究发现：如果我们花钱的方式与我们的性格相投，那我们对生活的满意度很有可能就会更高。研究员分析了每一次的交易以确定是否与人们的五大性格特征之一符合，即开放性、尽责性、外倾性、宜人性和神经质性。