You

Close friend who lives less than a mile away: 63%

Other friends who live nearby: 25%

Sibling who lives nearby: 14%

Spouse who lives with you: 8%

Friends who live farther away: 0%

Neighbor who lives on your block: 0%

You Make Me HappyImagine yourself at the center of this circle. The people whose rings are closer to yours have a greater chance of boosting your mood if they are happy. The percentages indicate the chance their happiness will rub off on you, as indicated by a study of adults in Framingham, Mass.

Mind.Sc ient i f icAmerican.com SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND 9

Your “roaming entropy,” or the frequency and variety with which you get out and about, likely affects your brain health. In a study of adult mice, the animals with higher roaming entropy had a greater proliferation of adult-born neurons.

>> Social Medicine How interacting with the people around us makes us healthier, happier and longer lived

Most of us have felt the satisfaction that comes from spending money on another person, whether it be a gift for a friend or a donation to disaster victims. Now an international team of psychologists report that the relation between generous spending and happiness holds around the world, even in countries as im-poverished as India and Uganda. “Here in North America we might think we have the luxury of extra money to spend on others, whereas people in poorer places might be better off spending their limited resources on themselves,” says the study’s lead author, Lara Aknin of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “But we see that generosity is rewarding in rich and poor countries.”

This conclusion comes in part from a sweeping survey of 200,000 adults in 136 countries, who answered questions about both their charitable donations and their subjective well-being. After household income and other demographic factors were taken into account, a positive link between donations and happiness emerged in 120 of these countries, rich and poor alike, and the boost in well-being from having given in the past month was as high as it would be if the respondent’s household income were to double, according to the survey responses.

The researchers then ran several experiments to test if giving actually caused the happiness boost. For example, participants in Canada and South Africa, the latter a nation with much lower per capita GDP, were randomly assigned to buy a goody bag either for themselves or for a sick child in a local hospital; in both countries, those who had spent the money on the anonymous child reported feeling happier than those who had spent the money on themselves.

The experiments yielded a robust cross-cultural consistency, according to the studies published in May in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, supporting the idea that the relation between giving to others and our own well-being is a universal human trait. Indeed, other recent research agrees. In an experiment Aknin and her colleagues published in January in PLOS ONE, toddlers too young to talk or to have been taught to share smiled more when sharing a treat than when receiving a gift. Moreover, in a set of studies published last year in Nature, researchers showed that giving was more spontaneous than greed, which required more thought.

Aknin believes giving feels good the world over for the same reason that eating and sex do: we have in our brain a naturally selected system of short-term re-wards for behavior that aids long-term survival. None of our ancestors could survive on their own, Aknin points out, “so if generosity fostered social connections, then it might have been a really adaptive strategy.”

—Marina Krakovsky

Generosity Is Its Own RewardPeople around the world are happier the more they donate to charity

Altruism inspires more altruism, according to many studies. In one experiment, an initial act of kindness prompted others to donate, but in progressively smaller amounts. Yet the total quantity donated was triple the initial gift (only a small portion of the experi-ment, which involved 24 people, is illustrated here). This cascade, identi� ed by James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the Universi-ty of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis, director of the Human Nature Lab at Harvard Universi-ty, represents one way to map contagious altruism.

Contagious AltruismContagious AltruismContagious AltruismContagious Altruism

Eleni Lucas$100 $10

$5

LucasLucasLucas$100$100 $10

$5$5Erika

Lysander

JamesJay

Brecken Harla

ErikaErikaJay

You Make Me HappyYou Make Me HappyYou Make Me Happy

director of the Human Nature Lab at Harvard Universi-ty, represents one way to map contagious altruism.

$20

$8

$5$5

miq513News4p.indd 9 7/10/13 10:51 AM