How Money Can Buy Happiness

According to a newly published report, money can buy happiness but not in the way that you might think. Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School found that spending money on others makes people happier than if they spend it on themselves.

Their experiments on more than 630 Americans showed they were measurably happier when they spent money on others -- even if they thought spending the money on themselves would make them happier.

"Regardless of how much income each person made, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not," said Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, in a statement to Reuters.

The researchers ran several different experiments and at least one of them was designed to avoid the "causation versus correlation" issue that often plagues studies on human behavior. For example, it is possible that instead of the happiness being the result of giving money away it is the other way around and it is the charitable giving that is the result of the happiness. Anticipating this quandary the researchers designed an experiment whereby recipients of a bonus were randomly assigned to groups that spent money on themselves or on others. Even in this case the results were consistent with the others: Giving money away leads to greater happiness levels.

The results could also explain why people are no happier even though U.S. society is on the whole much more wealthy.

Just this month there have been natural disasters in China, Myanmar and Oklahoma. Now is very good time to improve the lives of both yourself and the recipients of your aid. (Link to American Red Cross).