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

Feeling Good about Giving 10

individuals who devoted more money to prosocial spending reported greater happiness, whereas
personal spending was unrelated to happiness. Even controlling for income, higher prosocial
spending was associated with greater happiness; income had an independent and similar
association with happiness. While these results provide a first glimpse of the association between
prosocial spending and happiness in the population, the correlational nature of this study
restrains discussion of causal claims.

Therefore, we also used an experimental design to test the casual claim that spending
money on others leads to higher happiness levels than spending money on oneself (Dunn et al.,
2008). Our hypothesis was that participants randomly assigned to spend money in a prosocial
fashion would be happier at the end of the day than others assigned to spend money on
themselves. Participants were approached in person during the morning hours (approximately
10am - noon) in public places and asked to reported their baseline happiness level. After doing
so, participants were randomly assigned to one of four spending conditions, receiving either five
or twenty dollars to spend on themselves or others. Specifically, participants in the personal
spending condition were asked to use their windfall on a bill, expense or gift for themselves,
while participants in the prosocial spending condition were asked to spend the money on a gift
for someone else or donation to charity. All participants were asked to spend the money in line
with their assigned spending direction by 5pm that day. Participants were then contacted in the
evening hours (between 6pm-8pm) on the phone by a research assistant to complete a follow-up
survey which assessed their current happiness level. As predicted, participants asked to spend
their windfall in a prosocial fashion were happier at the end of the day than were participants in
the personal spending condition. Interestingly, the amount of money people were given did not
influence how happy they were that evening, suggesting that how people spent their money was

<<   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   >>

More intriguing information