Hedonic treadmill and perceived variety
The term “hedonic treadmill” was brought up in wellness studies (Diener 2000). “Hedonic treadmill” generally means the phenomenon in which people have a very strong capability to adapt to pleasant or painful events that happen in their life, and thus move back to an emotional baseline prior to the changes (Myers and Diener 1996). Many other researchers have extended the definition by distinguishing different types of “treadmill” according to their adaptation channel (Kahneman 2000b). The present study simply adopted the general concept of human attentiveness to adapt to pleasant or unpleasant experiences.
As pointed out by many researchers, having a variety of activities is one of the most crucial factors for resisting the hedonic treadmill of happiness in life (Lyubomirsky 2005; Chernev 2011). However, simply increasing the variety may not be the ultimate solution to reduce adaptation (Redden and Haws 2012). Researchers in marketing science have pointed out that categorization that influences the perceived variety of consumer products also effectively affects how consumers rate their enjoyment by changing the settings of assertion (Kahn and Wansink 2004). These studies suggested that the differences in the types of context in which the subject is compared with, might also contribute to the contrast bias.