Downward Social Comparison Increases Life-Satisfaction in the Giving and Volunteering Context

Yunhui Huang ()

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2016, vol. 125, issue 2, 665-676

Abstract: Using samples of U.S. residents recruited from an online subject pool, this research confirms that charitable behavior is associated with higher life-satisfaction based on a retrospective survey (Study 1). Adopting experimental manipulation, we also find that participants report higher life-satisfaction after volunteering for a downward comparable target (i.e., the poor) than helping a non-comparable target (i.e., Wikipedia). But the above effect exists only among high social-comparison individuals (Study 2). Moreover, among people high in social comparison, comparing oneself with a downward comparable target without helping can lead to a similar level of life-satisfaction as helping the target. In contrast, participants who are low in social comparison achieve higher life-satisfaction when comparing themselves to rather than helping the target (Study 3). These findings suggest that charitable giving and volunteering contributes to life-satisfaction through allowing for downward social comparison. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Keywords: Giving and volunteering; Life-satisfaction; Downward social comparison (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-014-0849-6 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:soinre:v:125:y:2016:i:2:p:665-676

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-014-0849-6

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().