#28: When Money Buys Happiness with Lara Aknin

Lara Aknin studies what makes people happy. In particular, she’s spent a lot of time looking at how being generous can improve one’s well-being. She is an associate professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University, and you heard her a couple weeks ago on Opinion Science. Her work was featured on our episode on gift-giving, but she has so much interesting work that it seemed setting aside a whole episode for our entire conversation.Things that come up in this episode:College students were happier when spending money on others vs. on themselves (Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008; for a replication see Aknin et al., 2020)The positive effects of spending on others extends around the world (Aknin et al., 2013), in small rural societies (Aknin et al., 2015; Aime et al., 2017), with children (Aknin, Hamlin, & Dunn, 2012), and among ex-offenders (Aknin et al., 2018).Giver-focused gifts promoted greater relationship closeness than recipient-focused gifts (Aknin & Human, 2015)For reviews of the effects of “prosocial spending,” see Aknin et al. (2018) and Dunn et al. (2020)  Check out my new audio course on Knowable: "The Science of Persuasion."For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/when-money-buys-happiness-with-lara-aknin/ Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScienceLearn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.