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



Feeling Good about Giving 5

induction, children were asked to talk about these memories and then think about them once
again. Children were then allowed to have some candy from a treasure chest (self gratification)
and also give money to other students if they wished (altruistic behavior). While both happy and
sad children ate more candy than those in the control condition, only happy children gave more
money away to classmates. These results also suggest that prosocial behavior may not necessitate
self-sacrifice, as happy children engaged both in more self-gratification and more altruistic
behavior - like those consumers who buy Product (RED) iPods and enjoy the product while also
giving to charity. Similar to results for adults, other positive mood states - such as the feeling of
success - are related to prosocial behavior in children (Isen, Horn, & Rosenhan, 1973).

While the majority of research has explored the impact of happiness on prosocial
behavior via mood inductions, recent extensions have examined how naturally occurring moods
influence helping behavior. Wang and Graddy (2008) suggest that happy people are both more
emotionally capable to help others and have more optimistic personalities, fostering charitable
giving behavior. Using individuals’ self-rated happiness as an indicator of psychological
inclination to donate, they found that a feeling of happiness affected religious giving, but not
secular giving, which may have stemmed from the association of happiness and religious giving
in people’s minds. Konow and Earley (2008) also argued that happier people give more because
they are fueled by their positive emotions. In the context of a dictator game, where a proposer
divided a fixed endowment between himself and one other (the recipient), individuals who were
happier at the beginning of the game were more likely to give at least a dollar to their partner.

Positive moods, whether experimentally induced or naturally occurring, have also been
shown to facilitate helpful behavior in the workplace. Forgas, Dunn, and Granland (2008)
induced a positive, neutral, or negative mood in sales staff at a department store by engineering



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