The “Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey” included thirty thousand interviews completed in two waves by researchers at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University. Among other findings, the study states, “Those who gave contributions of time or money were 42 percent more likely to be happy than those who didn’t give.”
A literature review of philanthropic motivation studies done by Rene Bekkers and Pamala Weipking in 2011 provides more evidence from more sources that helping others produces positive psychological value for the helper, also labeled “empathic joy.”
James Andreoni offered economic models of philanthropy in 1989 that label this psychological value as “warm glow” or “the joy of giving.” Most interesting to me is that Andreoni’s search was borne of his belief that most giving is not a pure form of altruism.
Finally, a massive study was done by Daniel Kahneman and published through the National Academy of Sciences in August of 2010. Kahneman’s research tells us that well-being involves two separate aspects. First there is emotional well-being, or the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience and how frequently he or she experiences feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, stress, affection, and so on, which adds up to whether or not he or she experiences life as pleasant or unpleasant the majority of the time. And second there is “life evaluation,” which refers to the thoughts that people have about their lives when they think about them. Kahneman specifically sought to discover whether, in terms of these two measures of well-being, people had found that money buys happiness. He learned that “when plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000.” While people with a low income experience more emotional pain associated with such life misfortune as divorce, ill health, and being alone, people with a high income did not necessarily experience relatively greater levels of happiness. As Kahneman writes, “We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.”
If you’re interested in reading more, and don’t mind a little jargon, you can find a flood of studies and information at www.sagepub.com, a website on the leading edge of social psychological and personality science.
Findings from the little research and reading I’ve done confirm for me that beyond a certain income, “money does not buy happiness” and that helping others adds to physical and psychological health. But research is secondary to me; life’s experience is always my primary teacher.