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



Feeling Good about Giving 12

spent - and that this boost in happiness would lead participants to select a prosocial spending
choice in the future. To investigate whether recalling specific spending experiences influenced
happiness levels, we compared the happiness ratings of participants in the four recall conditions.
As expected, participants randomly assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else were
significantly happier than participants assigned to recall a purchase made for themselves. We
also predicted that this boost in happiness would shape people’s future spending choice, such
that happier participants would be more likely to spend prosocially in the future. To investigate
whether this happiness boost led participants to select a prosocial spending choice in the future,
we used the purchase amount (twenty or one-hundred dollars), purchase target (oneself or
others), and happiness to predict future spending choices. In line with our hypothesis, happiness
was the only significant predictor of future spending choice, suggesting that participants made
happier by recalling a previous purchase for someone else were significantly more likely to
choose to engage in prosocial spending in the future. Further, mediational analyses confirm that
other-oriented spending memories only fostered future prosocial spending choices to the extent
that these recollections increase happiness levels in the interim.

These data confirmed our hypothesis that prosocial spending and happiness fuel each
other in a circular fashion. By asking participants to recall a previous time they spent money on
others, we were able to observe that the prosocial spending recollections led to an increase in
happiness. Furthermore, by allowing participants to make a future spending decision, we were
able to show that this increase in happiness shaped spending decisions, such that happier people
were more likely to make to make prosocial spending choices in the future. In addition, we have
recently shown that these effects hold cross-culturally, with both North American and African



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