The Power of Giving

Giving -- philanthropy -- makes human beings happy. That's why we give, donate to causes.

When someone donates millions of dollars to an institution -- a hospital, a educational outfit -- and gets his/her name placed on the institution, that can be explained by a simple human longing for immortality. The desire of human beings to perpetuate their memory is well documented.

But why do we give $100 to American Red Cross or $50 to American Heart Association or $5 to Boy Scouts or $25 to a soup kitchen. There are no named plaques or boards. We give not for personal glory, we give because the very act of giving with the knowledge that giving is helping someone makes us happy.

Professor Michael Norton and his colleagues have conducted extensive research on this topic. Norton says, "Intentional activities—practices in which people actively and effortfully choose to engage—may represent a promising route to lasting happiness. Supporting this premise, our work demonstrates that how people choose to spend their money is at least as important as how much money they make," the researchers explain.

That's why probably those that give continue to give because they have found that giving brings happiness. However, those that have not given are more worried about losing because they have not experienced that the joy of giving is substantially greater than the joy of parting with the resource.

So the first lesson is to induce human beings into giving some -- and if they do, they are likely to repeat giving. The old cliche -- the more you give, the more you get -- is quite correct.

Giving does not have to be only money, it may be time, intellect and service. Gandhis, Mandelas, Kings, and Teresas have found that service is joyful and that's why it is not only not burdensome but gratifying for them.

"Our findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations—as little as $5 in our final study—may be sufficient to produce non-trivial gains in happiness on a given day."