Helping others makes us happier — but it matters how we do it

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2019

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Research shows that helping others makes us happier. But in her groundbreaking work on generosity and joy, social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn found that there's a catch: it matters how we help. Learn how we can make a greater impact -- and boost our own happiness along the way -- if we make one key shift in how we help others. "Let's stop thinking about giving as just this moral obligation and start thinking of it as a source of pleasure," Dunn says.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily.
0:05.1	This TED Talk features happiness researcher Elizabeth Dunn, recorded live at TED 2019.
0:12.7	So I have a pretty fun job, which is to figure out what makes people happy.
0:20.1	It's so fun. It might almost seem a little frivolous,
0:24.9	especially at a time where we're being confronted with some pretty depressing headlines.
0:30.2	But it turns out that studying happiness might provide a key to solving some of the toughest
0:36.9	problems we're facing.
0:38.3	It's taken me almost a decade to figure this out.
0:43.3	Pretty early on in my career, I published a paper in science with my collaborators
0:48.3	entitled, Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness.
0:52.3	I was very confident in this conclusion,
0:56.0	except for one thing.
0:58.0	It didn't seem to apply to me.
1:02.0	I hardly ever gave money to charity,
1:04.0	and when I did, I didn't feel that warm glow I was expecting.
1:09.0	So I started to wonder if maybe there was something wrong with my
1:14.1	research or something wrong with me. My own kind of lackluster emotional response to giving
1:24.1	was especially puzzling because my follow-up studies revealed that even
1:29.2	toddlers exhibited joy from giving to others. In one experiment, my colleagues Kylie Hamlin,
1:36.1	Lara Acknan, and I brought kids just under the age of two into the lab. Now, as you might
1:41.4	imagine, we had to work with a resource that toddlers really care about.
1:46.3	So we used the kind of toddler equivalent of gold, namely goldfish crackers.
	...

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