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



Feeling Good about Giving 6

an interaction with a confederate (posing as a customer) that varied in pleasantness. Next,
another confederate approached the sales staff and requested help finding an item that did not in
fact exist. While experienced staff members were largely impervious to the effects of mood,
inexperienced staff provided more help—by trying to find the item, suggesting alternatives, and
devoting more time to helping the customer—than did those in a neutral mood. Converging
evidence for the benefits of positive mood on prosocial behavior in the workplace comes from
research on naturally occurring mood; in a study by Williams and Shiaw (1999), employees who
reported being in a good mood were more likely to display organizational citizenship behaviors
that were not part of their formal job requirements.

Taken together, the existing evidence suggests that happier people do indeed help more in
a variety of contexts. Studies using random assignment to experimentally induce positive mood
have provided important evidence that happiness
causes increased helping behavior. Supporting
the external validity of these findings, naturally occurring positive moods have also been shown
to facilitate prosocial behavior. While we have focused on the impact of positive mood on
giving, however, another well-documented area of inquiry has documented the impact of
negative mood on helping as well, a seeming contradiction (see Batson, 1987; 1991). For
example, Cialdini et al. (1987) showed that watching another person suffer a mild electric shock
motivates helping in an observer through a sense of heightened empathy and increased personal
sadness. Similarly, Small and Verrochi (in press) found that people were more sympathetic and
likely to donate when charitable appeals contain victims with sad expressions, and the sadness
experienced on the part of the donor mediates the effect of emotion expression on sympathy. We
suggest that a key difference in the way these two research streams have operationalized mood
may account for these seemingly disparate findings. Research exploring the impact of positive



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