"Among this research is a series of five studies launched by Liudmila Titova and Kennon M. Sheldon.""An initial study asked students to recall a time when they did something to make someone else happy, and a time when they did something to make themselves happy. When asked how they had felt about each experience, students recalled feeling greater well-being during the other-directed activity compared to the self-directed one.A second study further suggested that the social interaction involved in helping another person was not driving the effect of the other-focused activity. During an experiment, students who were asked to do something to make another person happy later reported greater well-being than those who were asked to simply socialize or to do something to make themselves happy.
A “spillover” effect also did not appear to be responsible for the effect. In another experiment, the researchers found that participants’ well-being was not significantly linked to the well-being of the person they were trying to make happy. This suggests that doing something for someone else was not improving participants’ well-being through a spillover of the other person’s happiness. Instead, the extent that participants believed they were making the person happy was positively tied to their own well-being, suggesting that it was the perception that they made someone happy that made them feel good.A final experiment revealed that this boost in well-being occurs even when the person being helped is a total stranger. Passersby on the street were given two quarters and randomly assigned to one of four conditions. They were instructed to either keep the change as a reward for the survey, to put the change in their own parking meters, to put the change in a stranger’s meter, or to put the change in a stranger’s meter along with a note explaining what they did. It was found that participants reported the highest well-being when they put the money in the stranger’s meter, and the effect was slightly weaker when they fed the stranger’s meter without a note.""It was found that the basic psychological need for relatedness — the need to feel connected to others — mediated the effect of the other-focused activity in all five studies. In other words, feeling a greater connection to others explained why doing something for another person tended to leave participants happier than doing something for themselves."
Related posts:
Happiness Is Not What We Think It Is (this research suggests that money increases happiness but at a decreasing rate and that socializing is something that is a big cause of happiness)
What Brings More Happiness, More Time Or More Money? (this study found that people that chose more free time over more money tended to be happier)
Does Wealth Make Us Happier? (maybe wealth buys freedom that makes us happier)
Another interesting article is The pursuit of happiness: Author seeks to take its measure and find where people are most content.
It quotes former University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi. He said "Without dreams, without risks, only a trivial
semblance of living can be achieved."
Does Or Can Money Buy Happiness?
Interesting Book: Stumbling on Happiness
Does Money Make You Mean?
Money buys happiness after all
The happiness wars
Dagwood Bumpstead Explains The Hedonic Treadmill (We get used to having more things. Then we want to make more money so we can get more things that only makes us happier for a short time. Then we make more money and so on)
Do income and happiness tend to go together? Yes, both within and across countries .
Science proves it: Money really can buy happiness .
More On The Economics Of Gift Giving.
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