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MONEY BUYS HAPPINESS -- IF YOU SPEND ON SOMEONE ELSE
Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham and Todd Eastham
Reuters
March 20, 2008

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2042446720080320

WASHINGTON - Money can buy happiness, but only if you spend it on someone
else, researchers reported on Thursday.

Spending as little as $5 a day on someone else could significantly boost
happiness, the team at the University of British Columbia and Harvard
Business School found.

Their experiments on more than 630 Americans showed they were measurably
happier when they spent money on others -- even if they thought spending the
money on themselves would make them happier.

"We wanted to test our theory that how people spend their money is at least
as important as how much money they earn," said Elizabeth Dunn, a
psychologist at the University of British Columbia.

They asked their 600 volunteers first to rate their general happiness,
report their annual income and detail their monthly spending including
bills, gifts for themselves, gifts for others and donations to charity.

"Regardless of how much income each person made, those who spent money on
others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves
did not," Dunn said in a statement.

Dunn's team also surveyed 16 employees at a company in Boston before and
after they received an annual profit-sharing bonus of between $3,000 and
$8,000.

"Employees who devoted more of their bonus to pro-social spending
experienced greater happiness after receiving the bonus, and the manner in
which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of their
happiness than the size of the bonus itself," they wrote in their report,
published in the journal Science.

"Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others
experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on
themselves," they said.

They gave their volunteers $5 or $20 and half got clear instructions on how
to spend it. Those who spent the money on someone or something else reported
feeling happier about it.

"These findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations
-- as little as $5 -- may be enough to produce real gains in happiness on a
given day," Dunn said.

This could also explain why people are no happier even though U.S. society
is richer.

"Indeed, although real incomes have surged dramatically in recent decades,
happiness levels have remained largely flat within developed countries
across time," they wrote.

.............

RELATED BLOG:
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS:
http://nhnecommunity.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=650220%3ABlogPost%3A1882
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Published by David Sunfellow
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