Study: Doing good makes you feel good

You probably know it already from personal experience, but a new study reported in the Journal of Research in Personality shows that there is a direct correlation between doing good things for people and feeling good.

[University of Louisville in Kentucky research Michael] Steger couldn’t help but wonder which behavior makes people happier — seeking pleasure or doing good?

To find out, he and his colleagues asked a group of 65 undergraduates to complete an online survey each day for three weeks that assessed how times they participated in hedonic, or pleasure-seeking behaviors, versus meaningful activities, such as helping others, listening to friends’ problems and/or pursuing one’s life goals.

The surveys asked the subjects how much purpose they felt their lives had each day and whether they felt happy or sad. The subjects also completed two sets of questionnaires at the beginning and end of the study to assess how they felt about their lives more generally.

They found that the more people participated in meaningful activities, the happier they were and the more purposeful their lives felt. Pleasure-seeking behaviors, on the other hand, did not make people happier.

They ran the study twice, getting the same results both times. The study supports a point of view that is polar opposite of a lot of what gets continually reinforced in our society.

“A lot of times we think that happiness comes about because you get things for yourself,” said Richard Ryan, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, who was not involved in the study. But “it turns out that in a paradoxical way, giving gets you more, and I think that’s an important message in a culture that’s pretty often getting messages to the opposite effect.”

Wary of reading the results the wrong way, the researchers looked at the order of events...

In order to make sure that the relationship between happiness and doing good wasn’t the other way around — that happiness instead leads people to do good things—the researchers looked at which tended to come first. They found that the subjects became happier after they did something good, suggesting that happiness does, in fact, come about as a result of doing good things.

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