TORONTO - It's often said that money can't buy happiness, although some argue it can, but newly published research suggests that having money - and then spending it on others - might just do the trick.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School teamed up for a series of studies looking at levels of happiness reported by people and how they spent money.
One of the experiments involved recruiting students on campus in Vancouver, giving them $5 or $20 and instructing half of them to spend the money on themselves and the other half to spend it on others.
"What we found was that people were significantly happier at the end of the day if they'd been instructed to spend the money on others rather than on themselves," said one of the authors, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at UBC.
The findings are published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
Dunn said she embarked on the project after being struck by research that seemed to suggest money can't buy happiness.
"That conclusion was based on the broad finding that in general, income is correlated pretty weakly with happiness," she said from Vancouver. "So I think it's fair to say that money doesn't buy happiness, or doesn't buy much happiness, but what seemed wrong to me was to assume that money can't buy happiness."
Dunn said she wanted to explore whether money might be able to buy happiness if people spent it differently.
"We turned to the psychological literature which suggests that doing good for others is associated with one's own happiness, so doing volunteer work, random acts of kindness and so forth can all promote happiness."
"So we thought, well, money is one vehicle of achieving pro-social goals or of helping others. So what if people used their money to benefit other people?"
Another branch of Dunn's research, conducted with UBC master's student Lara Aknin and Michael Norton of Harvard, involved a survey of 632 Americans asking them to rate their general happiness, to report income and to estimate how much they spent in a typical month on bills and expenses, gifts for themselves, gifts for others and donations.
"We found that indeed people who spent more of their income on other people, on gifts for others and on charitable donations did, in fact, report greater happiness," Dunn said.
She cautioned, though, that this didn't tell them anything about causality - only that there's a relationship between spending and happiness.
The team also asked people at a firm in Boston to report how happy they were about a month before receiving a bonus.
The employees received profit-sharing bonuses ranging from $3,000 to $8,000. Then, six to eight weeks later, they reported again on their general happiness and what percentage of the bonus they had spent on bills and expenses, rent or mortgage, buying something for themselves, buying something for someone else, donating to charity, or other spending.
"And what we found was that employees who devoted more of their bonus to others, to charitable gifts ... increased in happiness more as a result of receiving this bonus," Dunn explained.
Robert Biswas-Diener has done extensive research on happiness, and said these findings add to the scope of knowledge on the topic.
