Money can buy happiness, it turns out, if you spend it on someone else: in experiments and in survey data from 136 countries, people who spent on others reported a bigger lift in mood than those who spent it on their own wants

We are writers reading the psychology literature, not clinicians or behavioural scientists. The studies below describe average effects across groups of people, not guaranteed outcomes for any one reader, and much of the evidence is observational. Read this as reporting on a pattern, not as advice about how to spend your own money.

Give someone five dollars, tell them to spend it on somebody else by the end of the day, and their mood that evening tends to lift more than if you had told them to spend it on themselves. That is the finding at the centre of one of the most cited results in the psychology of money. And the size of the gift barely mattered.

The experiment came from psychologists Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin, and marketing professor Michael Norton, in their 2008 Science paper, “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness.” Participants got either $5 or $20 and were randomly told to spend it on themselves or on someone else. Those who spent it on others were happier by day’s end, whether they had been handed $5 or $20. 

Norton put it plainly in a Stanford interview: “spending as little as $5 over the course of a day on another person led to demonstrable increases in happiness.” A survey component of the same research pointed the same way. What predicted people’s happiness, Norton said, was “the relative percentage of their money that people spend on others—rather than the absolute amount.”

That 2008 experiment was small, and the result deserves some caution. When a larger group repeated it in a 2022 study, the main test did not show a clear difference, though a more direct measure of happiness did lean in the original direction. One striking campus result is a clue, not a settled law.

Sturdier evidence comes from sheer scale. A 2013 paper led by Aknin and Christopher Barrington-Leigh looked at Gallup World Poll data from 136 countries. Spending on others was linked to more happiness in 120 of them, and the pattern showed up in poor and rich places alike.

The researchers found that spending on others was “associated with greater happiness around the world, in poor and rich countries alike.” It was not uniform across all 136 countries, and its strength varied from place to place. To test whether giving actually causes the lift, rather than just travelling alongside it, the team ran experiments in Canada, Uganda, India and South Africa, where giving a gift, or recalling one, raised reported happiness.

Why would spending on others beat spending on yourself? A later review by the same authors argues the lift is likeliest when a gift satisfies one or more basic human needs: feeling connected to the person you gave to, seeing your gift make a real difference, and choosing to give rather than being made to. Buy a coffee for a friend and watch them enjoy it, and you may hit all three. Drop coins into a faceless online form, and the effect fades.

None of this cancels the older economics of money and mood. Having more still tends to help, especially for people on lower incomes. The researchers make the point modestly: how people spend, they wrote, “is at least as important as how much money they make.” Their own suggestion stays careful: a small windfall may do more for you if some of it goes to someone else.