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

Garam Kim, Ingrid Adams, Malik Diaw, Mira Celly, Leif D Nelson and Minah H Jung

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 9, 1-12

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.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0272434 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 72434&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0272434

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272434

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().