Can You Buy Happiness?

Yes, you can "buy" happiness! But, as it may seem counter-intuitive, you need to give away a portion of your money for free to "buy" happiness. People get happiness by spending money on someone else. According to a new research, conducted by Harvard Business School’s Professor Michael Norton and his two colleagues from the University of British Columbia, Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin, giving other people even as little as $5 can lead to increased well-being for the giver.

Norton and colleagues found these results to hold in three different studies: a nationally representative survey, a field study of windfall spending, and an exploration in which participants were randomly assigned to spend money on others rather than on themselves.

The research says that one of the most puzzling paradoxes in social science is that though people spend so much of their time trying to make more money, having more money doesn't seem to make them that much happier. The issue was not that money couldn't buy happiness, but that people simply weren't spending money in the right way to make themselves happier.

The relative percentage rather than the absolute amount of their money that people spend on others matters to make the people happy. In other words, people need not be wealthy and donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity to experience the benefits of pro-social spending; small changes — a few dollars reallocated from oneself to another — can make a difference.

Although people believe that having money leads to happiness, the research suggests that this is only the case if, at least, some of that money is given to others.