Happiness Is....

spending money on your friends and strangers? According to new research published in Science, spending money on other people has a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. This may come to a surprise to some, but makes perfect sense to others.
HH-UK-cover.jpg
Given that we are creatures of reciprocity and live our lives not in absolute terms but in relative ones - both spending less money and spending it on others seems a reasonable path to increased happiness. Ethicist Jonathon Haidt has written a length about such dilemmas in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. There are important reasons why paraplegics are generally happier than lottery winners. Those reasons are related to the fact that if you happen to find a quarter in a payphone, you are more likely to come to a stranger's aid than if you do not. The Happiness Hypothesis is a wild journey blending ancient philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and positive psychology that ends at what makes us happy. I highly recommend it.

Meanwhile, go buy a friend (or a stranger) a latte. You'll be happier because of it.

More like this

"This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because…
Drake Bennett has an interesting and nuanced article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on money and happiness. To make a long story short, money can buy us some happiness, but only if we spend our money properly. Instead of buying things, we should buy memories: A few researchers are looking again…
The NYTimes has a great interview with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert: What we've been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy -- or unhappy. If you can't tell which futures are better than others, it's hard to find happiness.…
tags: emotional health, mood, happiness, National Lottery "Money can't buy happiness" as the old addage goes, and every once in awhile, that's actually true, too. Yesterday, for example, I read an article based on scientific research that suggested that it's the simple things in life that make…

It is hard to deduce causality from these kinds of experiments. It may be that people who are already happy are more likely to give away money.

I like it. It's way too easy to be very self-focused, especialy in our modern society. Much better to think more of others and less of yourself for a healthy ego.

It is hard to deduce causality from these kinds of experiments. It may be that people who are already happy are more likely to give away money.

It is hard to deduce causality from these kinds of experiments. It may be that people who are already happy are more likely to give away money.