Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior

Feeling Good about Giving 9

intriguing evidence of the impact of volunteer work on well-being in a large, nationally
representative dataset.

Additionally, some experimental work hints at a causal relationship between giving and
happiness. For example, when Field, Hernandez-Reif, Quintino, Schanberg, and Kuhn (1998)
asked a volunteer group of retired senior citizens to give infants a massage three times a week for
three weeks, these seniors experienced less anxiety and depression, as well as improved health
and a reduction in stress-related hormones. Further support for a causal link comes from recent
work by Lyubomirsky, Tkach, and Sheldon (2004), which shows that simply asking people to
commit random acts of kindness can significantly increase happiness levels for several weeks.
Specifically, in their investigation, Lyubomirsky and colleagues randomly assigned students to a
no-treatment control group or to an experimental group, in which students were asked to commit
five random acts of kindness a week for six weeks. As predicted, students who engaged in
random acts of kindness were significantly happier than controls.

Finally, our own recent research suggests that altruistic financial behavior, such as gift
giving and charitable donations, may promote happiness (Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008). In an
initial study, we asked a nationally representative sample of Americans to rate their general
happiness and provide monthly estimates of personal and prosocial spending. Specifically,
participants were asked to report their annual household income and general happiness level and
to estimate how much they spent in a typical month on (1) bills/expenses, (2) gifts for
themselves, (3) gifts for others, and (4) donations to charity. We summed categories 1 and 2 for
an index of personal spending and categories 3 and 4 for an index of prosocial spending. Lastly,
participants reported their general happiness on a one item happiness scale (Abdel-Khalek, 2006)
which simply asked participants "Do you feel happy, in general?” Analyses revealed that

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