Maximising Happiness from Good Deeds (17th August 2014)
It was the philosopher and comedian, Ken Dodd, who offered the view that happiness is the greatest gift that we possess. The challenge is how to achieve that desirable state.
One of Doddy’s comic creations was Knotty Ash University but guidance on how to be happy comes from a more distinguished academic establishment, Stanford in California.
Jennifer Aaker is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and along with Melanie Rudd from the University of Houston and Michael L Norton of the Harvard Business School the three academics have some concrete advice on how to be happy. Their paper is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology and entitled ”Getting the most out of giving: Concretely framing a prosocial goal maximizes happiness.”
One reliable route to personal happiness is to engage in doing something nice for someone else. In other words performing acts of kindness makes you happy. Such deeds not only help and benefit the recipient but also create a pleasurable “helper’s high” that benefits the giver.
Research shows that individuals who regularly do volunteer work report greater happiness and less depression than those who don’t.
There is evidence that performing five random acts of kindness each day for six weeks brings a happier state of mind.
So a proven route to happiness is to do good deeds, but the way that they are framed can affect what Aaker et al refer to as the “helper’s high” – the level of resulting happiness after performing a good deed.
Aaker, Rudd and Norton’s paper shows that having specific goals when carrying out philanthropic works has more impact than vaguer, abstract intentions.
An example of this would be having the specific objective of trying to make someone smile rather than the less concrete one of just trying to make them happy.
The psychologists conducted various experiments to explore their hypotheses/contention that specific goals related to acts of kindness are better than general ones.
In one experiment the researchers took 50 participants and in return for them performing two assigned tasks in a day to make someone happy they gave them a $5 Amazon gift card. They were then asked to describe what they had done and what feelings had resulted.
Half the sample was instructed to make someone smile, the others just to make a person happy. Not surprisingly there were numerous ways in which the respondents had performed their acts of kindness. Some had given people a helping hand, others had shared a joke with others.
However, those individuals asked to get someone to smile reported greater personal happiness than those given the more generalised request of just promoting happiness.
Why should that be the case? The researchers believe it is because framing a goal in definite terms is more likely to bring success than a more general approach. If there is a more specific goal, there can be a more focused approach to achieving that goal. Additionally it is easier to know whether the outcome has been successful. So if the objective is to make someone smile there’s clear evidence that end has been achieved. Whilst if it’s the broader goal of just making somebody happy it’s not easy to tell that has been achieved.
The research also established that people are not very good at predicting which charitable acts will bring them the most happiness. The psychologists went back to the participants in the “smile” and “happiness” groups and asked them to predict how happy they would feel 24 hours later after they had finished their task.
Whether their goals were concrete or abstract, participants evaluating just their own condition — either concrete or abstract — inaccurately predicted the same degree of happiness as those pursuing the other. Second, those weighing both conditions incorrectly anticipated that the abstract goal of making someone happy would create greater personal happiness than making someone smile. The authors write “People do not recognize that acts performed in service of a prosocial goal that is framed concretely (versus abstractedly) will more effectively cultivate personal happiness,”
This research supports my grandma’s contention that you should leave the world a better place for being there. Having specific goals will be a help to achieving that aim.