The Strange Nature of Altruism

Hi. I’m Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and this week we’re gonna talk about how money changes the way we feel, at least in part. We’re going to talk about how these researchers, who happen to be economists, wanted to allow people to spend a little bit of money and see how it made them feel. So, they surveyed them for their levels of personal happiness, gave these people—young students on campus—20 bucks and said, “Go spend 20 bucks on yourself and then come back.” When the students came back, they surveyed them for their levels of personal happiness and sure enough, as expected, the students were happier. Yay!

A different group of randomly selected students they surveyed for their happiness, gave them 20 bucks, but this time they said, “Go and spend the money on someone else who has no ability to repay you.” So they wander off onto campus, find some stranger and do something that costs around 20 bucks for that person and when they came back to the researchers they were surveyed for their personal happiness. They weren’t a little bit happier; they were a lot happier! Well, what the heck is going on with that?! It’s insane. These kids should have been happier spending money on themselves than for some perfect stranger. But that’s not the case. And this video today is all about why we get happy when we serve other people.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world, so stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So why is it that these kids were happier spending money on others than on themselves? The researchers were curious. They thought it was irrational for that to happen and so they thought maybe if they gave the kids a thousand dollars to spend on themselves they would have been really, really happy and if they spent $1,000 on a complete stranger they’d be miserable. Nobody was going to give these guys that much money for an experiment so they partnered with some universities in very poor countries—India and Nigeria—and this time with the same $20 they knew that the $20 went so much further. In Nigeria, for example, it will feed a family of four for a week. It was a lot of money.

So, the same thing—survey for happiness, give them 20 bucks, have them spend it on themselves, survey them again and the people were happier as predicted. But bizarrely, spending 20 bucks on a total stranger in Nigeria made people a lot happier. Well, what’s going on with all of this? I want you to watch this brief little video that I’m using here with permission from the producers and you’re going to maybe thrown off—the woman is speaking Dutch—but watch what happens to these children as they go through this little experiment.

Okay, so that’s really cute, isn’t it? Those children are really lovely and they do nice things for one another. They share. It’s all very sweet and wonderful and children that are the age of these kids in the video are probably socially conditioned, right? That’s, they’ve been taught that they should share. That’s why they’re being all kind, right? That’s what we think. Watch this next video and in this video, there is a parent in the room—the mother of these little infants—but she makes neither verbal contact or eye contact with their infant. And similarly, the researcher—the guy in the red sweater—doesn’t speak to the kids, doesn’t look at the kids. Watch what happens.

Okay, it’s so crazily cute. I mean, those children are just so sweet, but nobody’s gonna tell me that those little wee infants were socially conditioned to behave that way. Instead, something innate in them made them want to help these perfect strangers. Why would they do it? Again, it’s irrational. They get no advantage to helping this person and the truth is we really don’t know why. All we know for sure is that altruistic behaviors make us feel good. And the best we can come up with is that there’s an evolutionary purpose, that when we behave selflessly and give to others with not necessarily any expectation of return, evolution found that there was a reason to reward us for that behavior, and it’s likely that as tribal people we needed to be able to help one another.

One day after another, giving generously and if I helped you today you’d help me tomorrow. And we’d all help somebody else on the third day and this behavior of what goes around comes around was obviously helpful for survival and evolution, taught us to do it by making us feel good in the moment. So we don’t know exactly why, but that’s the theory and we know for a fact that altruistic behaviors make us feel good. So if you want to be happy, go be nice to other people. That’s all there is to it. Go be nice this week. I’m providing you an exercise, downloadable at the link below, that’s really gonna get your mind turning deeply about what altruism means to you and what benefits you can get from it. I’m Paul Krismer, your happiness expert.

I love giving you this kind of content. If you like it, share it, like it and help other people find out. If you want to see more content like this, subscribe to my channel and you’ll get a video every Sunday morning. Thanks for watching. Bye for now.