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

Feeling Good about Giving 3

People see a world out of whack. They see the greatest health crisis of 600 years and they want
to do the right thing, but they’re not sure what that is. (RED) is about doing what you enjoy and
doing good at the same time.

—Bono, “Ethical Shopping: The Red Revolution,” Belfast Telegraph, January 27, 2006.

Helping others takes countless forms, from giving money to charity to helping a stranger
dig his car out of the snow, and springs from countless motivations, from deep-rooted empathy
to a more calculated desire for public recognition. Indeed, social scientists have identified a host
of ways in which charitable behavior can lead to benefits for the giver, whether economically via
tax breaks (Clotfelter, 1985, 1997; Reece & Zieschang 1985), socially via signaling one’s wealth
or status (Becker 1974; Glazer & Konrad 1996; Griskevicius et al., 2007) or psychologically via
experiencing well-being from helping (Andreoni, 1989, 1990; Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008).
Charitable organizations have traditionally capitalized on all of these motivations for giving,
from attempting to engage consumers with emotion-laden advertising to pushing governments to
offer tax incentives. The psychological benefits of giving are underscored by Bono’s quote
above, referring to the Product (RED) campaign, in which a portion of profits from consumer
purchases of luxury goods is donated to the Global Fund for AIDS relief: Giving feels good, so
why not advertise the benefits of “self-interested giving,” allowing people to experience that
good feeling while increasing contributions to charity at the same time?

In this chapter, we have two primary aims. First, we explore whether claims about the
benefits of helping are in fact justified: While many appeals for charity center on the notion that
helping makes the giver happy, a relatively small amount of research exists to support this causal
claim. We review evidence that happy people give more, that giving is associated with and

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