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CNN
20-03-2025
- General
- CNN
Kindness will make you happier than a higher salary, report shows
Summary Acts of kindness make people happier than earning higher salaries, according to the World Happiness Report released on International Day of Happiness. About 70% of people worldwide performed at least one kind act in the past month. Studies show helping others boosts happiness for both giver and receiver, with the United States ranking 24th on the global happiness list. People significantly underestimate others' kindness, with researchers finding strangers return lost wallets more often than expected. Happiness increases when kind acts involve personal connection, free choice, and a clear positive impact on others. The world may feel cold, scary and cruel, but if you are open to seeing it, there is a lot of kindness, according to a new report. The World Happiness Report, released each year on the International Day of Happiness, is a global analysis on happiness and well-being in partnership with Gallup, the University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. This year's report paid special attention to acts of benevolence and people's expectations of their communities. What are acts of benevolence? The report divided them into three categories: donating money, volunteering and doing a nice thing for a stranger. Based on the data, 70% of the world's population did at least one kind thing in the last month, the report found. 'That's a really, really high number,' said Dr. Felix Cheung, the report's coauthor and assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Population Well-Being. 'We should just look at that number and feel really good. Seven in 10 people around us have done something nice … in the past month.' This trend of doing kind things is down from a spike during the Covid-19 pandemic, but it is still an improvement from pre-lockdown numbers, according to the report. 'Even though the world feels like it's a pretty difficult place right now, it is nice to know that people are engaging in kind and generous acts,' said Dr. Lara Aknin, professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and an editor of the World Happiness Report. There is evidence that doing nice things helps both the recipient and the doer feel happier, and benevolence may be a key step to improving your own happiness and the overall happiness in the United States, which continues to drop on the list of happiest countries, said Ilana Ron-Levey, a managing director of the public sector at Gallup. (The US ranked No. 24 on this year's list of the happiest countries.) Doing good feels good Making a donation, doing an hour of volunteer work or engaging in some other small act of kindness may seem insignificant in the list of big things that make a happy life, but the data says otherwise, according to Ron-Levey. 'Acts of generosity predict happiness even more than earning a higher salary,' she said. Aknin has studied the impact of benevolence and found that it's significant. One experiment recruited a sample of participants on university campuses to report their baseline happiness. Researchers then gave them a small amount of money –– about $2 to $5 –– and told them to spend it on themselves or someone else, she said. 'Then we measure people's immediate emotional reactions,' Aknin said. 'By and large, we find in almost all of our studies that people randomly assigned to spend generously report feeling higher levels of happiness than people who spend on themselves.' The pattern was similar in other countries such as South Africa, Uganda and India. 'We're a super social species,' Aknin said, 'and we argue that acts of generosity help build and sustain those connections.' The 'empathy gap' Given the number of people who do kind things, expectations of benevolence are generally low, Aknin said. 'Long story short is that people are overly pessimistic,' she said. To understand how people perceive the levels of kindness around them, researchers for the survey asked if people expected a lost wallet to be returned to them, Cheung said. The researchers broke the survey down by seeing if people expected a neighbor, the police or a stranger would return the wallet. 'The US ranks 17th in the world in believing a neighbor would return a lost wallet, 25th in the world in believing the same of police, but ranks only 52nd in believing that a stranger would return a wallet, which really suggests some fraying of social cohesion,' Ron-Levey said. People were more likely to believe that a neighbor or police officer would return a lost wallet if found, but belief in a stranger is a barometer of trust, Aknin said. 'The stranger returning a lost wallet is really, really important in terms of that trust in your society,' she said. And researchers have been able to compare the expectations with reality. In previous studies, researchers have gone to different cities around the globe, dropped wallets and analyzed the rates of the wallets being returned against what the people in that city reported they believed would happen, Aknin said. Almost every place drastically underestimated the likelihood of the wallet being returned by a stranger, she said. The disparity is called an 'empathy gap,' Aknin added. For example, about one-third of people expected a lost wallet to be returned in the US, whereas two-thirds of such wallets actually were, Cheung said. It makes sense that a bigger empathy gap would have a negative impact on happiness, Aknin added. 'If we assume the worst of others, it shapes how we interact with the world,' Aknin said. 'If we expect the worst of others, we walk around the world fearful, and that matters for our own well-being.' Why build community The good news is that the empathy gap can be closed, Aknin said. 'We're not asking people to have unreasonably optimistic (expectations),' Cheung said. But ifyou can 'develop that trust and you can expect that level of kindness, you will be a lot happier.' The report shows that people's perceptions of the kindness of others has improved when they take social risks, Aknin said. 'When they do, they realize that most of these risks are met with kindness and positivity,' she said. Aknin's research has also showed the best ways to perform benevolent acts to get the boost of happiness. She calls it the three C's. In your kind acts, you should connect with others, Aknin said. For example, you are more likely to get a bigger boost taking someone out for coffee rather than sending a person $5 to get coffee on their own, she said. 'Social time is pretty critical, or that face-to-face connection can go a long way,' Aknin added. The second C is for choice, meaning it feels better when you act in a kind or generous way because you want to, not because you feel obligated to do so, she said. The last is for a clear sense of positive impact. Doing something you can see the impact of or donating to a cause that you can see the benefit of is likely to give you the most fulfillment, Aknin said. One other metric that may tell part of the story regarding the connection between kindness and happiness is the rate of people eating alone, Ron-Levey said. 'Even when accounting for household size, eating alone is linked to lower lifestyle satisfaction,' she said. And meal sharing has been going down: One in 4 Americans reported eating all their meals alone the previous day –– which is a 53% increase since 2003, Ron-Levey said. 'These things are all connected,' she added. 'If you're eating by yourself most of the time, if you don't have someone that you can rely on in a time of need, if you're losing trust in institutions and your community, it's going to lead most likely to fewer benevolent acts, which, in turn, affects your happiness.' Those factors add up to isolation and lack of social connections, which can affect your happiness, Ron-Levey said. But that lack of community isn't true everywhere. A sense of community and social connection is 'one of the most important explanations of why Finland and the Nordic countries remain at the top of the happiness rankings year over year,' she added.
The Guardian
20-03-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Covid ‘benevolence bump' endures as acts of kindness 10% higher than before 2020
The world experienced a 'benevolence bump' of kindness during the Covid-19 pandemic that has remained, with generous acts more than 10% above pre-pandemic levels. The annual World Happiness Report found that in 2024, acts such as donating and volunteering were more frequent than in 2017–19 in all generations and almost all global regions, although they had fallen from 2023. Helping strangers was still up by an average of 18% from the pre-pandemic era. Prof Lara Aknin, a Canadian professor of social psychology and one of the report's editors, said the number of people who reported helping strangers sharply increased in 2020 and the numbers had been sustained. She said: 'I think many people have an interest in helping others, but sometimes shy away; they don't want to overstep their welcome. The Covid-19 pandemic made it abundantly clear that many of us need help from our neighbours and friends. 'So maybe people felt a greater sense of obligation and lower levels of inhibition knowing their help would be welcomed.' She said data in the coming years would help reveal whether the benevolence trend was here to stay. 'One perhaps really optimistic possibility is that we've now opened our eyes to the needs of other people and the emotional rewards we get from helping other people, and that could fuel this positive spiral between helping others and wellbeing,' she said. The report said researchers were 'struck by the longevity of the increases [in benevolence] appearing first in 2020', and the 'size and persistence of the post-Covid increases in benevolent acts' meant that even in 2024, four years after the onset of Covid, they were still 10% higher. The World Happiness Report is an annual barometer of wellbeing across more than 140 nations coordinated by the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre, the analytics company Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. This year's edition emphasised people's tendency to be too pessimistic about the kindness of others. A study across 40 countries on how often dropped wallets were returned found the rate was twice as high as people expected – and wallets were more likely to be returned if they contained money. John F Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia and a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, said the data from the wallet study 'confirms that people are much happier living where they think people care about each other'. The report also found that sharing meals with others was strongly linked with positive wellbeing across all global regions, and that those who shared more meals with others reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and social support. But dining alone is becoming more prevalent, especially among young people, and in the US there has been a 53% increase in people dining alone since 2003 – one reason why the country has fallen in the happiness rankings. The report's annual happiness rankings was led by Nordic countries, with Finland coming first out of 147 ranked nations for the eighth year in a row, while Costa Rica and Mexico, in sixth and 10th places respectively, entered the top 10 for the first time. The US fell to its lowest-ever position in 24th place, closely following the UK in 23rd place – it's lowest placing since the 2017 report. Switzerland, Canada and Australia were all pushed out of the top 10, and this years' rankings mark the first time 'none of the large industrial powers ranked in the top 20'. The report concludes: 'In general, the western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010.' It added that a decline in happiness and social trust in Europe and the US had partly led to a rise in political polarisation and anti-system votes. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, the director of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre and an editor of the World Happiness Report, said: 'This year's report pushes us to look beyond traditional determinants like health and wealth. 'It turns out that sharing meals and trusting others are even stronger predictors of wellbeing than expected. In this era of social isolation and political polarisation we need to find ways to bring people around the table again – doing so is critical for our individual and collective wellbeing.'
