Department of Economics, New York University, New York City, New York, United States of America.
Marketing Department, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York City, New York, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 Sep 7;17(9):e0272434. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272434. eCollection 2022.
Spending money on one's self, whether to solve a problem, fulfill a need, or increase enjoyment, often heightens one's sense of happiness. It is therefore both surprising and important that people can be even happier after spending money on someone else. We conducted a close replication of a key experiment from Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008) to verify and expand upon their findings. Participants were given money and randomly assigned to either spend it on themselves or on someone else. Although the original study (N = 46) found that the latter group was happier, when we used the same analysis in our replication (N = 133), we did not observe a significant difference. However, we report an additional analysis, focused on a more direct measure of happiness, that does show a significant effect in the direction of the original. Follow-up analyses shed new insights into people's predictions about their own and others' happiness and their actual happiness when spending money for themselves or others.
为自己花钱，无论是解决问题、满足需求还是增加享受，通常都会提高幸福感。因此，令人惊讶和重要的是，人们在为他人花钱后可以更快乐。我们对邓恩、阿克宁和诺顿（2008）的一项关键实验进行了密切复制，以验证和扩展他们的发现。参与者得到了钱，并被随机分配将其用于自己或他人。尽管原始研究（N=46）发现后者更快乐，但当我们在我们的复制品（N=133）中使用相同的分析时，我们没有观察到显著差异。然而，我们报告了一项额外的分析，重点关注更直接的幸福感衡量标准，该分析确实显示出与原始结果一致的显著效果。后续分析为人们对自己和他人幸福感的预测以及为自己和他人花钱时的实际幸福感提供了新的见解。
