Feeling Good about Giving 7
moods on helping has generally focused on happiness - whether incidental as with finding
money, or global as with overall well-being - unrelated to the specific cause or individual in
need of charity, as opposed to negative mood directly tied to the victim: “I feel good in general,
and so am going to give” rather than “I feel badly for that person, and so am going to give.”
Future research should manipulate both factors independently to examine the interplay of
positive and negative mood on giving.
The research reviewed thus far has examined how moods - both positive and negative -
cause people to give, as well as exploring the consequences of this behavior for the victim (i.e.
whether they received help or not). This work, however, only addresses one direction of the
causal arrow between mood and prosocial behavior. Below we review the evidence in the
opposite direction. That is, does giving make people happy?
Giving Makes People Happier
Dialogue on whether prosocial behavior increases well-being dates as far back as ancient
Greece, where Aristotle argued that the goal of life was to achieve “eudaemonia,” which is
closely tied to modern conceptions of happiness. According to Aristotle, eudaemonia is more
than just a pleasurable hedonic experience; eudaemonia is a state in which an individual
experiences happiness from the successful performance of their moral duties. In recent years,
popular opinion, self-help gurus and community organizations have endorsed the notion that
helping others has mood benefits. Although these claims sometimes outpace the evidence base,
a growing body of research provides methodologically diverse support for the hedonic benefits
of generosity.