World Happiness Report 2023 106 taking turns paying for meals or sports teammates helping each other practice their skills. Finally, fairness (or equity) reflects prosocial behavior motivated by the goal of adhering to desirable norms, such as equitable outcomes. Fairness may reflect sacrificing resources, typically not to alleviate distress or suffering or in anticipation of future benefits, but to achieve outcomes that are considered equitable or just for everyone. Common forms of fairness involve dividing a shared resource equally—for example, friends dividing a shared meal into equal portions or roommates sharing their limited space equally. It is important to distinguish among these forms of prosociality because they occur in different contexts and are promoted by different neural and cognitive processes.14 Thus, each form of prosocial behavior is likely to have variable effects on social and emotional outcomes. Although cooperation and fairness may promote (or be promoted by) subjective well-being, a particularly robust literature links well-being to acts of altruism—including a wide range of non-obligatory, non-reciprocal behaviors such as volunteering, making charitable donations, helping strangers, donating blood, donating bone marrow, or donating an organ. In this chapter, we focus exclusively on the link between altruism and well-being. Positive Associations Between Altruism and Subjective Well-Being A wealth of research now demonstrates that altruism is often positively correlated with subjective well-being, which comprises both high life satisfaction and experiencing more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions in daily life.15 Two recent global investigations have found this at both the geographic and individual level using data collected from countries around the world. Photo by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash
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