Prosocial spending encourages happiness: A replication of the only experiment reported in Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008)

PLoS One. 2022 Sep 7;17(9):e0272434. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272434. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Spending money on one's self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, often heightens one's sense of happiness. It is therefore both surprising and important that people can be even happier after spending money on someone else. We conducted a close replication of a key experiment from Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008) to verify and expand upon their findings. Participants were given money and randomly assigned to either spend it on themselves or on someone else. Although the original study (N = 46) found that the latter group was happier, when we used the same analysis in our replication (N = 133), we did not observe a significant difference. However, we report an additional analysis, focused on a more direct measure of happiness, that does show a significant effect in the direction of the original. Follow-up analyses shed new insights into people's predictions about their own and others' happiness and their actual happiness when spending money for themselves or others.

Publication types

  • Randomized Controlled Trial
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Emotions*
  • Happiness*
  • Humans
  • Pleasure

Grants and funding

The research was supported by the University of California, Berkeley X-Lab. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.