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- December 2022
- Article
The Emotional Rewards of Prosocial Spending Are Robust and Replicable in Large Samples
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn and Ashley V. Whillans
Past studies show that spending money on other people—prosocial spending—increases a person’s happiness. However, foundational research on this topic was conducted prior to psychology’s credibility revolution (or “replication crisis”), so it is essential to ask...
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- March 31, 2022
- Article
Two Approaches to Capping Health Care Prices
By: Michael E. Chernew, Maximilian J. Pany and Leemore S. Dafny
High health care prices for the privately-insured contribute to high premiums, which put downward pressure on wages, and induce employers to reduce benefit generosity and charge employees more for coverage. As the average annual premium for family coverage currently...
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- March 2022
- Article
When Less Is More: Consumers Prefer Brands that Donate More in Relative versus Absolute Terms
By: Elizabeth A. Keenan, Anne V. Wilson and Leslie K. John
When trying to make a good impression on consumers through charitable giving, is it better for brands to maximize the overall dollars they donate or how much they give in relative terms; for example, the proportion of profits? Across five studies we show that consumers...
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- 2021
- Article
Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy
By: Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans
Perhaps one of the most reaffirming findings to emerge over the past several decades is that humans not only engage in generous behavior, they also appear to experience pleasure from doing so. Yet not all acts of helping lead to greater happiness. Here, we review the...
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- Article
Common Variants of the Oxytocin Receptor Gene Do Not Predict the Positive Mood Benefits of Prosocial Spending
By: Ashley V. Whillans, Lara B. Aknin, Colin Ross, Lihan Chen and Frances S. Chen
Who benefits most from helping others? Previous research suggests that common polymorphisms of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) predict whether people behave generously and experience increases in positive mood in response to socially-focused experiences in daily...
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- August 2020
- Article
Does Spending Money on Others Promote Happiness? A Registered Replication Report
By: Lara B. Aknin, Elizabeth W. Dunn, Jason Proulx, Iris Lok and Michael I. Norton
Research indicates that spending money on others—prosocial spending—leads to greater happiness than spending money on oneself (e.g., Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008, 2014). These findings have received widespread attention because they offer insight into why people engage...
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- Article
The Interplay Between Sharing Behavior and Beliefs About Others in Children During Dictator Games
By: Hernando Santamaría-García, María Luz González-Gadea, Rafael Di Tella, Agustín Ibáñez and Mariano Sigman
Previous studies in adults demonstrated that beliefs and sharing decisions in social scenarios are closely related. However, to date, little is known about the development of this relationship in children. By using a modified dictator game, we assessed sharing behavior...
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- 2017
- Working Paper
The Importance of Unemployment Insurance as an Automatic Stabilizer
By: Marco Di Maggio and Amir Kermani
We assess the extent to which unemployment insurance (UI) serves as an automatic stabilizer to mitigate the economy's sensitivity to shocks. Using a local labor market design based on heterogeneity in local benefit generosity (defined as the percentage of household...
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- Article
Give What You Get: Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus Apella) and 4-Year-Old Children Pay Forward Positive and Negative Outcomes to Conspecifics.
By: Kristin L. Leimgruber, Adrian F. Ward, Jane Widness, Michael I. Norton, Kristina R. Olson, Kurt Gray and Laurie R. Santos
The breadth of human generosity is unparalleled in the natural world, and much research has explored the mechanisms underlying and motivating human prosocial behavior. Recent work has focused on the spread of prosocial behavior within groups through paying-it-forward,...
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- 2014
- Article
Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity
By: Kurt Gray, Adrian F. Ward and Michael I. Norton
When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different—to pay it...
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- September 2012
- Article
Vicarious Dishonesty: When Psychological Closeness Creates Distance from One's Moral Compass
By: F. Gino and A. Galinsky
In four studies employing multiple manipulations of psychological closeness, we found that feeling connected to another individual who engages in selfish or dishonest behavior leads people to vicariously justify the actions of this individual and to behave more...
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- Article
Informal Family Insurance and the Design of the Welfare State
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
We study unemployment benefit provision when the family also provides social insurance. In the benchmark case, more generous State transfers crowd out family risk-sharing one-for-one. An extension gives the State an advantage in enforcing transfers through taxes...
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- 1998
- Working Paper
Some Evidence on the Optimal Welfare State Based on Subjective Data
By: Rafael Di Tella and Robert MacCulloch
It is often difficult to evaluate all the costs and benefits of the welfare state. This paper suggests an alternative approach based on surveys of citizen satisfaction with welfare programs. In the first part of the paper we estimate the level of unemployment benefits...
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