The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Giving Tuesday: Why Giving Money to Others Makes us Happier

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Money can buy you happiness - but not in the way we think. Giving money away - especially to help others - has been shown make us happier than spending on ourselves.  Social psychologist Lara Aknin explains the best ways to spend on loved ones, friends and even total strangers to get the biggest happiness bang for your buck.  And Harvard's s Josh Greene reveals how much money Happiness Lab listeners gave to charity via Giving Multiplier last year - and how many lives you saved.  To give to a charity of your choice and to some of the most effective charities around (and have your donation matched at a special rate) visit: https://givingmultiplier.org/invite/HAPPINESSLAB The Happiness Lab will return in January 2023. See you then.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I thought, you know, maybe $20,000, $30,000 or something like that. This is Josh Green. You might remember him from a past episode of The Happiness Lab that we recorded last year. Josh is a psychology professor at Harvard, but he didn't come on the show just to talk about scientific studies. Josh wanted your money and my money. And wow, were we generous. It was clear early on that he was going over a quarter of a million dollars. I was like, oh my gosh. I was just absolutely blown away. And it wasn't just like it was a bit more than I expected. It's just stunning in the most delightful way.

Josh is a proponent of what's been called effective altruism. He thinks each and every one of us should be trying to help, and in some cases even save, the lives of the people around us whenever we can. And he's found that one of the best ways to do that is not just by donating money to charity, but by making sure that every cent we donate counts. That's why he set up a new website called givingmultiplier.org, where you can give money to your favorite cause at the same time as you donate to the most effective charities on the planet.

Ones where just a few of your dollars will stop someone from going blind or catching a deadly illness. I think people are kind of stunned to learn how much farther your money can go, how much more impact you can have if you can pick the right charity, right? I mean, people think like, oh, if you gave twice as much, that would be doing a lot more. But if you choose wisely, you can have an impact that's a hundred times more, a thousand times more, supporting the kind of charities that really get a lot of bang for their buck, or address issues that are of just enormous importance and where we have some ideas about what we can do to prevent catastrophes

and things like that. So last year, following the post-Thanksgiving consumer bonanzas that are Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Josh came on the Happiness Lab for the lesser-known holiday of Giving Tuesday. He offered us a chance to spend on other people in a way that can have an extra big impact. He shared the URL givingmultiplier.org slash happiness lab that we could use to donate both to a cause of our choice and to one of those effective charities identified by experts. Givingmultiplier.org also matched some of our donations. I went to the website and gave, and so did members of the production team and many listeners who heard Josh on the show. All of us felt a little happier, having done some good in the world.

But I didn't quite realize just how much money we'd all raised and how much good we'd really done. I was stunned. Your audience just has this sweet spot of heart and head, right? People who really care and not only want to feel better in their own lives, but really want to improve other people's lives, but also like get that the world is complicated and that you need to think and you need to do research and you need experts who can guide you. And I think that magic combination is just, you know, comes together in the Happiness Lab podcast and with listeners. I'm not going to tell you the exact amount of money we collectively donated quite yet, because where would be the fun in that? First, I going to tell you the exact amount of money we collectively donated quite yet, because where would be the fun in that? First, I want to dive into the science of giving and the powerful link between donating to a good cause and boosting your own well-being, because the

science shows that giving money to help someone else often feels better than keeping it for ourselves, no matter how much that goes against our intuitions. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.

Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. People say money can't buy happiness, but research shows that's not quite true. We can use our money to buy ourselves out of pesky tasks we prefer not to do and free up our time to spend with more enjoyable activities and more enjoyable people. This is Laura Aknan. You know those meal prep services you hear advertised on podcasts a lot? Lara decided to try one out when her sister-in-law bought her a voucher. I remember thinking like, oh, this will be fun to try for a week or two. But I have been so pleasantly surprised by how this has freed up my time. I don't need to meal prep as much. I don't need to deal with buying all those groceries.

I also don't need to do all the pesky shopping that is often involved and hard to do with a four-year-old kind of tugging at my sweater. So I have been a firm believer of using my money to buy myself out of meal prep over the last few years. And it has brought me happiness and probably relieved a lot of frustration at the same time. We often assume that buying ourselves things, new clothes, a shiny car, or a nicer cell phone, will bring us happiness. But acquiring new possessions doesn't feel as good as we usually hope. And research shows that the well-being boost we do experience is pretty short-lived. But research also shows, as Lara has found, that using money to buy time

can lead to a boost in well-being. But as a professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University, Lara has begun studying an even more surprising way to trade dollars for happiness. And that way, well, it involves just giving those dollars away. Lara's research examines the psychological consequences of what's known as pro-social spending. I asked Lara exactly what counts as pro-social spending. I asked Lara exactly what counts as pro-social spending. Well, it can take a very formalized approach where we might be donating money to our favorite charity on a one-off occasion. It might be something that is more systematic where we have payroll deductions each month. Or it can be in many ways that are much more interpersonal. So it could be

treating a best friend to coffee or taking a new colleague out for dinner. It doesn't need to be large and substantial, but in any way kind of using our money to benefit other people. And so how have we figured out that this is really good for our happiness? You know, start with some of the correlational studies that you and others have worked on. People who use their time in generous ways tend to report higher levels of happiness. In fact, there are large international surveys that have documented this for quite some time. But over the last couple of years, my colleagues and I have tried to examine whether people who use their money to help others might also report being happier. And so in one of our first papers on this topic, we recruited a large sample of over 600 participants and asked them to simply tell us how they spend their money in a typical month. To avoid the painstaking detail of like listing and going through bank accounts, we asked them to simply give us estimates of how much they spent on

one category was bills and expenses. Another category was gifts for themselves. Those were both considered kind of personal directed spending. So spending on oneself. But we also asked about two pro-social categories. One involved spending money on others by way of gifts and the others was charitable donations. And using those monthly estimates, what we did was we also looked at people's happiness reports and saw how people spent their money in a typical month predicted their monthly happiness. And what we found was that how much money people spent on themselves in a typical month, to our surprise, did not predict their happiness, but how much money they spent on others did,

such that the more they spent on others, the happier they reported feeling. This is while we were controlling for household income. And so it wasn't just that these folks had more money to spend and could have the luxury of spending on others, but even holding that constant, people who spent more on others in a typical month were happier. I mean, it's such a violation of what we normally think of that brings us happiness. I mean, I hope this isn't just my very selfish intuitions, but I have the sense like when I'm buying myself more stuff, I'm going to wind up happier than when I'm buying stuff for other people. But that seems to be not the case, which is pretty weird. Yeah. Having more money is confusingly related to how happy we are. It seems to the lower level predict higher levels of happiness and then it tapers off.

And I think part of that has to do with this hedonic adaptation. We buy more for ourselves and then expect more. And we seem to be unsatisfied. But when we're spending money on others, we can see this positive impact we're having on other people. We can strengthen social relationships, which is such a robust predictor of happiness. We are truly social animals. And so I think anytime we can go out of our way to forge connections with other people and strengthen those that we have, we're on a pretty clear path to pursuing greater happiness for ourselves. But one of the things you find is that even when people are donating to charities, so the money's pro-socially spent on someone they don't meet, this too can really have an effect on people's happiness, right? The short answer is yes.

My suspicion is that it might be kind of an overfiring of this response. So I think in many of our lives, and especially through our ancestral past, many times we gave, we were often giving in face-to-face ways in which we could build these relationships and see the positive impact of our gifts. And sometimes charities, even when we don't give face-to-face and we don't know the beneficiary, charities can still do a very good job of translating how they're going to use this money to help other people. There are some charities that do a fantastic job of that and others where it's almost as if you're giving into the ether and into the black hole. And in those situations, I think giving can sometimes fall a little flat. When we can imagine or get some feedback on how our gifts are helping other people, even when there's this disconnect and we're not forging

a relationship with someone we might ever receive from or receive back from in the future, we can still feel really good about giving. And so the results we've been talking about so far are all correlations. And as nerdy scientists, we tend to always use this phrase that correlation does not equal causation. So to really find out if pro-social spending boosts our well-being, we have to do an experiment. But this is something that you've actually done. It's sort of forced people to spread pro-socially, as it were. Yeah. In fact, we've done it lots of times now and it's one of my favorite parts of the job because I mean, we've done this in different ways. And so in some of our big experiments, what we do is we bring students into the lab and they sit privately by themselves and it's this intricately designed study. But the heart of the matter is, is that people report

their baseline levels of happiness and then they receive this extra small windfall of money, usually around $3. And so we're not talking large amounts here. And we tell people that with this money, they can purchase a goodie bag that is filled with edible treats like juice or chocolate bars, and they get to pick what they'd like to put in this goodie bag. And then using an experimental method, we randomly assign some people to a personal condition where they're told that if they buy this goodie bag, it's for them to keep and they'll pick it up at the conclusion of the experiment. But at the other condition, people are randomly assigned to this pro-social spending condition where we tell them that their goodie bag will be donated to a sick kid at a local children's hospital. It's important to let people feel that there is a true choice.

And so they are allowed to keep the money for themselves. But I would say 97% of people across these large studies choose to purchase the goodie bag in both conditions. And so almost everybody follows through with a personal or pro-social spending purchase. They go, they see the goodie bag purchased, and then they return back to their seat and privately report how they're feeling. And what we find time and time again is that people who purchase basically the exact same items for a sick kid at a local children's hospital report feeling higher levels of happiness than people who buy the same items for themselves. Which is really cool, right? Because it's exactly the same item, right? It's the same purchase.

Everybody's purchasing the goodie bag, but if you don't get it, right, if you don't personally benefit from the goodie bag, it winds up improving how you feel. Yeah. And we do, I mean, for what it's worth, we certainly do go deliver these goodie bags. I think it's important that people actually see the goodie bag. They physically see it packaged. And so they don't think we're pulling the wool over their eyes. They've gotten to make the choice that they want to give, which is, I think, an important precondition for feeling good about giving. But they can also really imagine how their gift is going to help another person because this goodie bag is very tangible. It's visible in front of their eyes. And they know

where I'm based in Vancouver, there's a very well-recognized and well-respected local children's charity. And we named that one in particular. And so I think most of our participants can imagine this goodie bag and how it might really brighten the day of someone who's experiencing a very tough time.

And so you mentioned doing these studies in Vancouver. And I think that's kind of important too. I think sometimes when we talk about the kinds of things we can do to improve our wellbeing, there's always this worry that, well, yeah, that might work for, you know, American or Canadian folks, but you know, is this really the kind of thing that's true cross-culturally? And I think one of the things that's amazing about your work is that you haven't done the thing that many social scientists do, where you just test people around you. You've actually tried to look at whether or not pro-social spending works across

the world. And so what have you found? We have found that there is some consistent evidence for this finding around the world. So my colleagues and I have really, like you say, tried to go out of our way and try to test our understanding of how far this relationship might expand. And what we have argued is that this might represent what we call a psychological universal. So finding that is detectable in most humans around the globe. And so to test this question, we have run experiments in South Africa, in Uganda.

I've traveled to a small village in Vanuatu where there is no running water. There's no electricity. Their food comes from local crops and only that. Most people have never left the small village and even still here using kind of conceptual replications of our original design, we see very similar patterns patterns so it's not just around the world but my colleagues and i have also tried to test whether this emerges early in development so in children under the age of two

we find that kids it's not necessarily money per se but the emotional rewards of giving can be detectable with kids are giving away small treats to a puppet who seems to really enjoy the goldfish crackers they give, as opposed to when they are receiving treats themselves. And so even here, early in development, we're seeing that humans feel good about giving and giving even when it's costly. And I love these developmental findings in the little kids, because I think if there's any group of participants we think of as incredibly selfish. It's like toddlers with their goldfish crackers. But even there, giving these things away is making you feel better. Yeah. It's really a pleasure to watch these videos because the kids are gifted this

small stash on their own. And over the course of a few minutes, we ask, will you give one of your treats to Monkey? Will you give one of the experimenter's treats to Monkey? And they simply watch the experimenter give a treat to Monkey. And on both occasions of giving, kids are smiling more when they're giving away than when they're receiving. But in our Vancouver-based study, we also found, and Vanuatu, we also found that kids smiled more when giving away a treat that belonged to them than an identical treat that did not. And I think that's a really critical comparison because kids are giving the same treat to the same person who responds the exact same way. And the only key difference is whether it costs them something. And it's in that occasion when they are smiling more. And so I think that provides us some clues to the idea that this

might be a really emotionally rewarding activity. It kicks in the most when we need it. And that is to build these relationships. And you're also finding that this relationship between pro-social spending and happiness kicks in at work and in our paychecks. So talk to me about some of the employee bonus studies you've been working on. Sure. So my colleagues and I have run a few studies trying to examine how generosity might play out in the workplace and whether giving in this context, which is often considered a little bit more of a volatile, personally focused domain can have similar benefits. So in some experiments we have

given on both work teams, but also sports teams, we've randomly assigned people to either spend small bonuses on themselves or spend them on colleagues. And generally speaking, what we find is we replicate the emotional rewards of giving. So when people give to others, they report higher levels of happiness than when they spend on themselves. But not only that, the recipients report higher levels of happiness, but also their teams win or are more productive. And so I think what this is suggesting is that this is building relationships and building a positive atmosphere. And so we've argued that perhaps there might be ripple effects of generosity that exist beyond the giver and not just to perhaps the obvious recipient, but just people in the vicinity who have the opportunity to kind of bask in the glow of the kindness that is around them. And another one of the ripple

effects you've identified is that the act of pro-social spending, once our happiness gets boosted, that seems to affect our generosity too, right? That's right. So there seems to be this really fascinating and heartwarming positive feedback loop between generosity and happiness. And so what we found in our research is that when people spend on others, they report feeling higher levels of happiness than when they spend on themselves. But in turn, those higher levels of happiness encourage subsequent acts of generosity. And so while a one-time act of giving may wax and wane over time, it doesn't necessarily persist indefinitely, but it puts us on a path to build better relationships and

continue doing acts of kindness. This feedback loop of generosity is great. When you give, it feels good, and so you give again, and then you feel even better, and so you give again. But Lara's research also suggests that there are some ways of spending money on others that can lead to an even bigger happiness boost. We'll see what those extra well-being boosting methods are when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what?

We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Giving to others we might reflexively think of as an act that connects us with other people, but I think if you stop and take a moment to think a little bit more deeply, there are many opportunities to give that are actually quite disconnected. Social psychologist Lara Ackman studies how pro-social spending, that is, using our money to benefit others, can markedly improve our own happiness. But she's also found that not all

pro-social spending is equal. Some types of giving can give us a bigger happiness bank for our buck than others. Consider, for example, the differential mood boost we get from merely giving versus connecting with the people we're helping. So there are often times, and I'm guilty of this too, where we send gift certificates to friends and we don't really get a chance to enjoy it with them. We send gifts to friends and family and other places, or we make donations to a charity, but don't even recognize it. Like I mentioned, the payroll deductions that happened before. And while all of those are wonderfully kind acts, they don't really emphasize and allow us to truly enjoy the social connection that pro-social spending can be so effective in doing.

And so a lot of our work has found kind of supportive of this general notion that when people give in ways that allow for a greater sense of social connection, we enjoy the act more. We experience a bigger boost of happiness from doing so. And I think it's important to realize that giving with a higher sense of social connection can come in various channels. So that can come from connecting with the recipient that you are actually helping. So for instance, give a check or spend your time donating at a food bank. Being there in person might be a lot more rewarding than simply sending a check in the mail where you have no face-to-face contact with someone on the other side. So giving where you're able to see the recipient, giving in ways that allow you to connect with

other donors. So there are ways in which we can give in collaborative campaigns online, through Facebook, through other ways, through just even my home department here often gives in large charitable endeavors. And so knowing that I'm giving with my colleagues and grad students is often very rewarding. And sometimes just connecting with a cause at large. So kind of situating ourselves in these ways that are more connected usually lead to larger emotional rewards from giving. And that's great that you pointed that out because I think one could hear this work and think like, oh, well, the best way to give is to someone who's like my best friend, or I'm really close to, but we can actually connect with recipients who we might not know, as long as we're connecting with the cause itself, it sounds like. That's right. In fact,

in one early study on this, my colleagues and I ran a study where we endowed students with a $10 payment for participating in a study, asked them if they'd like to donate to a subsidiary of UNICEF. And in one condition, participants were told that, which was true, the research assistant disclosed that they were personally interested and really connected with this charity. And in the other condition, this personal connection just remained silent. And what we found was that in general, people gave equal amounts of money across the two conditions, but in the condition where people were giving to someone who was personally affiliated with the cause, the more they gave, the happier they reported feeling. Meanwhile, the emotional rewards of giving were almost flatline in the other condition. And so sometimes when we're giving in disconnected ways, we might really rob ourselves of these emotional rewards. Another thing you found that's super important for the kind of happiness benefit that comes from pro-social giving comes from our autonomy in giving.

What do you mean by autonomy here? Yes. So usually autonomy is referred to whether people themselves have had the opportunity to make the decision that they want to give, that they are experiencing a sense of volition and personal choice, that they have pursued a sense of volition and personal choice, that they have pursued this opportunity in a meaningful way themselves. And so I think about this often when it comes to parenting, I try not to force my kids to give too much.

I try to scaffold these opportunities for them to realize that it's important to give. My colleagues and I have done some work in this domain, but I think probably the most highly referenced study in this area is by Weinstein and Ryan that has nicely controlled this, where people were given the opportunity to make donations. In one condition, people chose how much. In the other condition, they were kind of just yoked to give the identical amount. And when people had freedom to choose, the more they gave, the happier they were. But in the other condition, they gave identical amounts

and felt no such enjoyment. So it really seems like we need to be choosing like when we give, who we give, how much we give. I think that's super important because I sometimes get questions from folks about these benefits, not just a pro-social spending, but also just pro-social actions. And people sometimes feel like if they're forced to help, right, if they have no choice other than to help, that it doesn't feel good. It can feel almost onerous. I'm thinking of people who are stuck doing certain kinds of childcare, elder care. Obviously, they love the people that they're working for, but it doesn't seem like they're getting the same happiness boost that they might if they kind of chose to volunteer at a food bank or something like that. That's right. I think that's an important distinction. I think there are many times we

engage in generous acts, but sometimes through a sense of obligation. There is a bit of work suggesting that sometimes just even scaffolding what feels like a sense of obligation. There is a bit of work suggesting that sometimes just even scaffolding what feels like a sense of choice can be productive in this domain. So you can say, you don't need to do this, but it's your choice to decide if and how and when you'd like to give, kind of offering a little bit of flexibility

in how or when or why can free people up to regain some of this personal control that can make giving a lot more rewarding, less of a tedious task and more like something that they will enjoy and remember. I think that's really key because we forget that the way we frame things can be really powerful for how we think things are working. Even just reminding yourself, it's a choice that I'm spending my time doing this, or I've chosen to do this. That can have

a powerful effect on just the sense of autonomy we feel and therefore maybe the well-being boost that we get from engaging in those actions. A third sweet spot you found in this domain of pro-social spending boosting our happiness comes when we see that what we've done has a real impact. Why is impact so important to our psychology and to our enjoyment? That's a great question. I think people enjoy giving when it is more impactful because it helps them realize that they haven't just chosen to let go of a resource that is valuable to them, but that is having a clear and positive, improving someone else's life. And so there are opportunities where I think we want to see that we're effective in pursuing our goals. But even beyond that, I think we want to see that we have measurably improved the lives of others. And when we are given clear evidence of that,

we usually feel much better for it. So I think there are some charities that do a fantastic job of this. I remember at one point in my life, I was living in New York and there was a local organization that would collect clothing for women who were returning to the workplace. And you could see with every outfit you donated, how many women it would help and how they would rearrange the outfits to return as many women as they could to the workforce. And essentially, there was an online pro-social calculator, and I thought that was a brilliant idea. And so offering that as an incentive or an opportunity for potential donors

to see what they can do is a really effective tool. There are also some charities that do this brilliantly after the fact. One of my favorite examples is DonorsChoose, which is a website that allows people to give and support teachers all across the United States and perhaps even more broadly with specific needs that they require for their classroom. So if a teacher is in need of new software to teach programming to sixth graders, here's what they need. And they're often from lower income parts of the country where the school district is unable to do so. But also what happens afterward is usually the students and the teachers write hand written notes to the donor. We have used this in many of our studies, and it is one of the most touching things to see. I realize that some charities don't have an easy sell in this regard.

I mean, sometimes you're buying or protecting an acreage of land, and that isn't as easy of a sell to show how your actions have made a difference. But I think there are many times in which we can find this for ourselves by sometimes giving in person or sometimes even just like we said before, kind of circling back to the people who have dedicated their lives and their energy to this pursuit. And that, too, can be a huge booster. So I love donors choose. But I think one of the things we've realized in past episodes is that the kind of way we donate kind of matters too in terms of its impact. There might be things that don't feel really impactful in the moment, like we might not meet the recipients, but they might be doing a tremendous amount of good. And so do you think reflecting on that form of impact might also help us get more of a happiness benefit too?

Yeah. So sometimes we might not have the physical proof in front of us. Sometimes we may not be able to connect specifically with the recipient or a proxy of us. Sometimes we may not be able to connect specifically with the recipient or proxy thereof. Sometimes we have to rely on some mental calculations to try to imagine and take us one step further. I think there might be individual differences and to what extent people are able to do that. But I think we might be able to kind of mentally time travel, if you will, or at least mentally transport ourselves to imagine how these gifts might be helping other people. And I think the extent to which we're doing that would probably unlock a lot of emotional rewards. You know, what's so amazing about your research, Laura, is that you're constantly doing work showing that giving money away, not spending money on yourself is a better, more happiness

inducing way to spend money. I mean, do you get pushback on that? Sometimes, although it's interesting because I seem to receive pushback from both ends. On the one side, there are folks, sometimes economists and business folks or business students who say like, this seems crazy. I'm not sure why anybody would find enjoyment in spending some of their limited financial resources

on other people, limited or otherwise, I should say. And I try to show them the data and argue, as we've talked about here, that humans are social creatures and this provides a meaningful route to connect with other people. However, I also receive pushback from the other side where people email and call and say, well, this is obvious. We didn't need your work to make the point. Thank you very much. My grandmother told me this when I was four and she was right. And to that, I say, I'm glad.

I'm glad this seems like an intuitive reaction to many people. to that, I say, I'm glad. I'm glad this seems like an intuitive reaction to many people. I think to a certain extent it is. I think at a high level, we appreciate and gather that doing nice things for others gives us this form glow and it's a nice thing to do. But I think when push comes to shove and we see it in the data, when we ask people, what do you think will make you happier? And specifically when it comes to money, I think money is kind of a complicated psychological phenomenon where people seem to focus more inward than outward. But when we ask people, you know, given five or $20 and the choice to spend on yourself or others, what do you think will make you happier?

The overwhelming majority of people think that they would be happier spending on themselves. And so in some ways, this is counterintuitive. And in some ways it isn't. And my goal with a lot of this research is to try to understand how robust this relationship is and it seems to be quite robust, but also to make giving as rewarding as possible so that we kind of kick most people onto these positive feedback loops where they're feeling good about doing it

and we're likely to do it in the future. Laura's work really got me thinking. When we pointed all of you towards Josh Green's Giving Multiplier website last year so that you could donate to the most effective charities around, we never really updated you on just how much money we raised together as a community, and what good that money did around the world. So I decided to invite Josh back so he could share the good news himself. The response from this audience was just unbelievable. So I can just yeah because

you brought you actually nerded out and brought the numbers i haven't seen them yet you're going to tell me these for the first time yeah all right so let me just get to the to the headline number so the total raised the people who use the code and the people who i could identify by their their comments i'm sure i didn't catch every last person with the matching funds added on top raised 470 000 oh my. Close to half a million dollars just from your listeners over less than the last year. So I was just floored. I mean, unbelievable. That's amazing. That makes me want to cry. Listeners, y'all are amazing. But one of the great things about giving multipliers that we can not just say,

oh, that's almost a half a million dollars. You can actually put it in terms of the effectiveness, the impact that this money is having, right? Yeah. So, I mean, over a quarter of a million dollars is going to the super effective charities on our list. And I can just, you know, give some examples of that. So the Against Malaria Foundation, one of the most tried and true methods for just doing a huge amount of impact with your dollars is distributing anti-malarial bed nets. This is a huge cause of death, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. And happiness labbers with the matches gave $38,000 to the Against Malaria Foundation, which, you know, in the world of philanthropy, that might not seem like a huge amount. But first of all, that's just a small amount of what you folks did overall. That's just one out of these nine charities.

But, you know, each malaria net costs about $5 all in to buy and distribute. So we're talking about something like 7,600 nets or something like that. And when you look at that number, you can imagine that that can do a lot of good. I will preface what I'm about to say by saying that a lot of people mistakenly think that it's really, really, really cheap to save somebody's life. So Lucius Caviola, my collaborator on this, has done research showing that a lot of people think it's like $100 or $150

because you've seen ads over the years, oh, you can save someone's life for $100. It's not quite that easy, right? But it's not anywhere close to impossible either. So my best guess estimate, and this is a very rough estimate and GiveWell is very clear that these are rough estimates, distributing 7,600 malaria nets, which is what this amount should buy, you would expect that to save something like seven people's lives, mostly children. And

the effectiveness there is going to vary by region, which is going to vary by season. So, you know, there are a lot of nerdy caveats with this, but we're really talking about is just the part of the donations that went to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is just, you know, a small part of what your, this audience has done, clearly saving life, whether it's two or seven or 10 or 20. And that's, that's for real. I mean, that's really based on, on rigorous research going back many years. So that, to me, that's just unbelievable. And that's just one part of, you know, what you've done. The science suggests that every one of you who went to givingmultiplier.org slash happinesslab and donated

probably bought yourself a little happiness boost. But the fact that we all together raised nearly half a million dollars has made me really, really happy. I cannot stop thinking of all the lives we've improved and maybe even saved. Happiness Lab listeners, I'm so proud of us. So let's do it again. If you gave last time and felt a happiness bump, why not get into that positive feedback loop Lara was talking about? Head back to givingmultiplier.org slash happiness lab and give whatever you can again.

And if you're still not convinced of the personal benefits of pro-social spending, you can head to givingmultiplier.org slash happiness lab and run the experiment for yourself. The Happiness Lab has big plans for 2023, and we're working on some show ideas that I'm really excited about. for 2023, and we're working on some show ideas that I'm really excited about. What I can tell you now is that we'll be back at the start of January with a series that'll help you rise to the challenge of the new year. Until then, stay safe, stay happy, and thanks for giving. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Joseph Rydman checked our facts. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola.

Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. Thank you.