Even a little generosity makes you happier, scientist found
A little generosity can go a long way in making you happier, scientists say as they found that people that pay attention to the well-being of others are happier than those who focus only on their own advancement.
Scientists form the University of Zurich discovered that generosity plays an important part in our happiness. According to them, those that pay attention to the well-being of other are happier that those that only concentrate on themselves.
Philippe Tobler and Ernst Fehr from the Department of Economics investigated and found out that the little things we do for others gives us a sense of well-being, called by behavioral economists a warm glow. The scientists set about to find out how brain areas communicate to produce this feeling and their results provide new insight into the interplay between altruism and happiness.
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What they found is that generosity makes you happier, but the amount of generosity did not influence the increase in contentment.
“You don’t need to become a self-sacrificing martyr to feel happier. Just being a little more generous will suffice,” says Philippe Tobler.
And there’s more, simply promising to behave generously activated the altruistic area of the brain and intensified the interaction between this area and the area associated with happiness. And the scientists believe that these findings could also help to reinforce positive behavior.
“It is remarkable that intent alone generates a neural change before the action is actually implemented,” says Tobler. “Promising to behave generously could be used as a strategy to reinforce the desired behavior, on the one hand, and to feel happier, on the other,”
The scientists published their results in the journal Nature Communications detailing the experiments they conducted, the results, and the interpretation of their findings.
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