Does doing something for others make you happier?
· Source: Dunn, Aknin & Norton, Science, 2008
It’s a grey afternoon and you’re dragging yourself through it. On the way back from lunch you pick up a coffee for the colleague who stayed late last night. She looks up, surprised, and says it’s exactly what she needed. Walking back to your desk, you notice you feel lighter than you did ten minutes ago, and the coffee wasn’t even for you.
Moments like that are easy to dismiss as luck or politeness. But psychologists have asked a fairly direct question about them: when people use what they have on someone else instead of themselves, do they end up happier? One well-known set of studies tried to answer it in three different ways.
Three ways of asking the same question
Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton began with a survey. They asked a nationally representative sample of 632 Americans how happy they were, what they earned, and how much they spent in a typical month on bills, on gifts for themselves, on gifts for other people and on charity.
People who spent more on others were happier. Spending on themselves made no difference either way. The authors point out that a survey like this can’t show cause and effect. Happier people might simply give more. So they kept going.
A bonus, and where it went
Next, the team followed 16 employees who received a profit-sharing bonus from their company. Everyone rated their happiness about a month before the money arrived. Six to eight weeks after it came, they rated their happiness again and reported how they had spent the bonus.
In the same paper, the employees who had put more of the bonus toward other people were happier afterwards. How they spent it predicted their happiness better than how big the bonus was. Sixteen people is a very small group, though, and the result points in a direction rather than settling anything.
An envelope and a deadline
The third study was the experiment, and it’s the part people remember. Dunn and colleagues asked 46 people how happy they felt in the morning. Then each person got an envelope with either $5 or $20, to be spent by five in the evening that same day.
Chance decided the instructions. Half were told to spend the money on themselves: a bill, an expense or a small treat. The rest were told to spend it on a gift for someone else or give it to charity. After five o’clock, the researchers called everyone and asked about their happiness again.
People who had spent the money on someone else reported feeling happier that evening than those who spent it on themselves. Whether the envelope held $5 or $20 made no real difference.
Most people would have bet the other way
The authors then described the four versions of the experiment to a new group of 109 students and asked which one would make them happiest. Most picked spending on themselves, and most picked the bigger amount.
That’s the interesting part for everyday life. If people consistently guess that a treat for themselves will do more than a small thing for someone else, they’ll keep choosing the treat. The study suggests that guess is often wrong, at least for a day like the one in the experiment.
A bigger, stricter test
Small studies from that period have been checked again, and this one was too. In 2020, Aknin, Dunn and colleagues ran larger replications, registered in advance. In one, 712 students were randomly assigned to buy something either for themselves or for a stranger in need. Those who bought for someone else again reported more happiness in the moment.
In two other studies, people only remembered a time they had spent money on themselves or on someone else. There the difference was small or absent. The authors’ conclusion is a careful one: spending on others does seem to raise happiness, but how much depends a great deal on how you measure it. That’s a fair way to hold this finding. It’s real and modest, and it shows up most clearly when people actually do the thing rather than recall it.
Does it have to be money?
Every study here involved spending money, mostly small amounts. None of them tested making tea for a tired partner, helping a neighbour carry shopping or texting a friend who’s having a rough week. Those are what most of us do far more often than buy gifts.
It’s a reasonable guess that small everyday acts work in a similar way, since what the studies changed was who the effort was for, not how big it was. But that’s our suggestion, not something these papers measured. If you try it, treat it as an experiment of your own and notice how the evening actually feels.
In the experiment, who the money was for mattered more than how much it was.
Two cups instead of one
Here is an invented example. Tomás works from home and his flatmate has an exam tomorrow. Around four, when Tomás usually makes himself a tea and checks his phone, he makes two cups and leaves one on her desk without a word.
She glances up and grins. That’s the whole event. It takes two minutes and costs nothing worth counting. At night, when Tomás thinks back over the day, that small moment is the one he remembers first, ahead of the meeting that went well and the email he finally answered.
The next day he doesn’t plan anything grand. He just keeps the question in mind once: who could use something small today?
When giving starts to cost too much
Giving can turn into something that drains you. If you feel you have to keep doing things for others to deserve their company, or you can’t say no even when you’re exhausted, or caring for someone has taken over most of your life for months, it’s worth talking to a therapist or your doctor. The same applies if nothing lifts your mood any more, including the things that used to feel good to do for others. These studies were about a small pleasant boost on an ordinary day, and they can’t help with that kind of weight.
Try it tonight
- In the morning, pick one small thing to do for one person today: a coffee, a lift, a message.
- Do it before the evening, without making a big deal of it.
- At night, say what you did and how the other person reacted, in two sentences.
Say it in Halflight before bed: what you did today, and who it was for. It keeps the notes under each date, so a month from now you can read back the small things you gave.