It Really Is Better To Give Than To Receive

Contrary to what you might initially think, giving away your money feels good. A ScienceNow report from last week shows that it's not how much you have that matters, it's how you spend it. People who donate their dollars to charities or splurge on gifts for others are more content than those who horde their riches or spend it on self-indulgent splurges.

Psychologist Kathleen Vohs, with the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, says she started thinking about the psychology of money when she moved from a postdoctoral position to her first faculty job. The big salary increase meant she could hire a mover instead of relying on help from friends. While it certainly made the move easier, Vohs said that she missed the camaraderie of sharing pizza and beer after a big group effort. The experience led her to hypothesize that while money makes people more independent, it can also act as an isolating social barrier.

To gather evidence for her hypothesis, Vohs collected data on income, spending, and happiness from 632 people across the United States and also recruited several hundred college students to participate in a variety of experiments. In all data sets, happiness correlated with the amount of money people spent on others rather than on themselves or the absolute amount of work-related bonus or income. Vohs speculates that the effects of altruistic spending are probably akin to those of exercise, which can have immediate and long-term effects. Giving once might make a person happy for a day, but "if it becomes a way of living, then it could make a lasting difference," she says.

Not surprisingly, this study is already making ripples outside of behavioral psychology circles. Which is of course music to the ears of those of us who rely on philanthropy for our survival. The Coral Reef Alliance (yes, this is a gratuitous plug) is a member-supported, non-profit organization, dedicated to protecting the health of coral reefs by integrating ecosystem-based management, sustainable tourism, and community partnerships. We're small, efficient, nimble, have tremendously low overhead, and devote the vast majority of our financial resources to direct site-based conservation work. And best of all, our efforts are demonstrating measurable gains in reef health and local community support for conservation.

So allow me to help make you feel better by offering you a twofer. Click on over to CORAL's donation page and make an investment in conservation that helps us protect a critically threatened ocean ecosystem as well as the local communities that depend on healthy reefs for their survival. Send the link to a friend. Your financial contributions won't just fund important work, it will make you feel good too. It's win-win. So in the words of The Partridge Family: Come On, Get Happy!