Happiness comes from trying to make others feel good, rather than oneself

ABSTRACT

Americans are guaranteed the right to ‘pursue happiness’ for themselves. But might they be better off if they pursued happiness for others? In five studies, we compared the two strategies, showing that, ironically, the second pursuit brings more personal happiness than the first. Retrospective study 1 (N = 123) and experimental studies 2 (N = 96) and 3 (N = 141) show that trying to make someone else happy leads to greater subjective well-being than trying to make oneself happy. In all three studies, relatedness need-satisfaction mediated the condition differences. Study 4 (N = 175) extended the findings by showing that trying to make others happy is more personally beneficial than when others try to make us happy. Study 5 (N = 198) found that feeding strangers’ parking meters produced the effect even though the participant did not interact with the targeted other.

KEYWORDS:

• Well-being
• happiness
• SDT
• relatedness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. There were no order effects, F(1, 115) = 2.67, p = .105.

2. We also conducted mediation analyses with all three basic psychological needs entered into the model simultaneously. The results showed that only relatedness served as a mediator, as suggested by the confidence intervals not including zero for relatedness indirect effect B = .32 (.08, .65) and including zero for direct effect B = .28 (−.24, .80).

3. We conducted attrition analyses and found that those who remained in the study and those who dropped out did not vary in terms of SWB (F(1,113) = 1.96, p = .164), gender (F(1,116) = 1.00, p = .319), or the condition that they were assigned to (F(1,118) = .05, p = .830).

4. A planned contrast analysis was also done controlling for T1 SWB, which resulted in a significant difference in relatedness for the group who was instructed to make others happy compared to the other two groups, F(2, 93) = 5.31, p = .024, d = .51.

5. Interestingly, when all three basic psychological needs were tested for mediation simultaneously, neither of them emerged as significant mediators, and the direct effect of the model remained significant (B = .36 (.03, .69)).

6. We conducted attrition analysis and found that those who remained in the study and those who dropped out did not vary in terms of SWB (F(1,162) = .01, p = .995), gender (F(1,161) = .02, p = .887), or the condition that they were assigned to (F(1,162) = 1.74, p = .236).

7. We also tested for simultaneous mediation. Similar to Study 2, the results showed that none of three basic psychological needs emerged as significant mediators.

8. There were no order effects, F(1, 167) = 1.63, p = .203.

9. We also conducted a mediation analysis where all three basic psychological needs were entered simultaneously. We found that only relatedness remained a significant mediator (B = .09, (.21, .07)), although the mediation was only partial (B = 1.67 (1.95, 1.38)).

10. We also tested all three basic psychological needs as mediators simultaneously. Only relatedness emerged as a significant mediator (B = .17 (.05, .34)), although the mediation remained partial (B = .63 (.32, .94)).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Academic Excellence Project [5-100].