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

Feeling Good about Giving 11

more important than how much money they received. Therefore, this experimental study
provides support for the causal claim that spending money on others leads to higher happiness
than spending money on oneself. Moreover, these results suggest that the spending amount need
not be large to facilitate positive hedonic gains, as prosocial purchases made with as little as five
dollars were sufficient to boost happiness levels.

Does Happiness Run in a Circular Motion?

The streams of research reviewed above - that happy people give more, and that giving
makes people happy - beg an obvious question: Is there a positive feedback loop between
happiness and giving? Previous research on volunteering and prosocial behavior has suggested
that happier people are more likely to engage in these activities and subsequently experience
higher happiness levels from doing so (e.g., Thoits & Hewitt, 2001; Piliavin, 2003). Thus, we
explored whether the link between happiness and prosocial spending runs in a circular motion,
such that recollections of previous prosocial spending makes people happier, and in turn, more
likely to engage in prosocial spending in the future.

To investigate this question, we asked a sample of students to think back and describe the
last time they spent either twenty or one hundred dollars on either themselves or someone else.
After describing this experience, each participant was asked to report their happiness. Next, each
participant was given the opportunity to select the future spending behavior they thought would
make them happiest from the four conditions presented in the experimental study described
above (five or twenty dollars to spend on themselves or others).

Our hypothesis was that recalling a prosocial spending experience would make people
happier than recalling a personal spending experience - regardless of how much money was

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