I don’t know about ‘blessed’, but it sure makes you happier

I knew it all along, but it’s nice to have some science to back it up

Spending on Happiness — HBS Working Knowledge
Can money buy you happiness? Yes—so long as you spend the money on someone else. According to new research, giving other people even as little as $5 can lead to increased well-being for the giver.

That’s the insight into the secret of happiness by HBS professor Michael Norton and two colleagues from the University of British Columbia, Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin. Their article, “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness,” appeared in the March 21, 2008 issue of Science.

Being a cynic, my immediate concern was that lots of jerks would carefully spend $5 to feel happier, but that was addressed in the interview:

Q: If we were aware that giving equates to happiness, would we be more likely to spend money on others instead of on ourselves?

A: We were actually most worried about the opposite problem, whether knowing about the effect of prosocial spending might erase it, if people engaged in prosocial spending in a calculated manner in order to “get happy.” We conducted a survey in conjunction with the New York Times “TierneyLab” in which readers who had just learned about our findings were invited to complete a brief survey in which they reported their happiness, as well as how much money they had spent on others and on themselves so far that day. Consistent with our previous research, we found that spending more on others was associated with greater happiness among this sample of approximately 1,000 New York Times readers, even though the respondents had been exposed to our previous findings.

So, I say: get happy! Spend some money on someone else.

(Now I’d like to see some research to determine if this is cultural or pan-human, and thus probably biological. I bet it’s the later, and derives from the same roots that make altruism a pro-survival trait.)