Good for self or good for others? The well-being benefits of kindness in two cultures depend on how the kindness is framed

ABSTRACT

In light of cultural differences in conceptions of happiness, we investigated whether members of independent (vs. interdependent) cultures would benefit from prosocial behavior when self-focus is highlighted (vs. when other-focus is highlighted). In a 1-week randomized controlled intervention, U.S. (N = 280) and South Korean (N = 261) participants were randomly assigned to read a news article that described kind acts as good for oneself or good for others, or to read a control article. All participants then performed kind acts throughout the week, and completed pre- and post- measures of subjective well-being, connectedness, competence, and autonomy. Consistent with independent self-construals, U.S. participants who read that kindness was good for themselves showed greater increases in positive affect, satisfaction with life, and feelings of connectedness – and greater decreases in negative affect – than those who read the control article. Future research is needed to continue developing culturally-sensitive designs of positive activities.

KEYWORDS:

• Well-being
• culture
• kind acts
• framing
• need satisfaction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Prior to the current study, we conducted a similar study in which participants read news articles about how happiness is good for the self, how happiness is good for others, or about how being organized was beneficial and found no significant differences between these framing conditions for any of the outcome variables, PA, NA, SWL, Connectedness, and Competence (all t _contrasts < |1.78|; all ps > .05).

2. For negatively-worded connectedness items, α = .44 at baseline and α = .43 at post-intervention; for negatively-worded competence items, α = .60 at baseline and α = .70 at post-intervention; for negatively-worded autonomy items, α = .57 at baseline and α = .63 at post-intervention.

3. Standardized difference score contrasts (Time 1 was standardized by Time 1 SDs and Time 2 was standardized by Time 2 SDs) produced the same (significant) results as the unstandardized contrasts reported in this paper.