World Happiness Report 2023 120 during the pandemic people experiencing the most acute stress were the most likely to exhibit increases in various forms of prosocial behavior.98 This may be because acute stress or fear motivates people to act, which can manifest as helping behavior when the stress emerges in a social context.99 This effect may help to explain the surge in altruism observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. It may also help to explain why in general daily affect is less reliably associated with altruism than life satisfaction: because acute changes in both positive mood and some forms of negative mood—including acute stress or fear—can motivate helping. A positive mood may be particularly likely to increase even costly altruism when it is the result of having received help from others. Those who receive help are more likely to help others, often as a result of increased gratitude,100 a positive emotion consistently linked to both well-being and altruistic behavior. This pay-it-forward effect, in which generous allocations of resources spread from person to person, has been observed across many studies.101 In one longitudinal study, recipients paid acts of kindness forward with 278% more prosocial behaviors than controls who did not experience acts of kindness.102 And in an economic exchange game, people who had been helped by another person gave more money to a stranger than those who had not been helped.103 In another economic game in which participants were continuously changing partners, participants who received more money from one partner were more likely to make voluntary donations to other partners in subsequent rounds.104 While it should be noted that the effect appears to gradually decline with repeated prosocial decisions over time,105 in theory, this phenomenon of “upstream reciprocity” could yield durable and widespread increases in well-being among altruists, beneficiaries of altruism, and others they encounter. Open Questions In previous sections, we have described the robust relationships between altruism and subjective well-being. Existing work suggests a reciprocal causal relationship between the two, with each influencing the other in a bidirectional manner. However, many unanswered questions about the nature of this causal relationship remain, in part due to the challenges and complexities involved in studying the relationship between altruism and well-being. The Complexity of Directionality The research presented here points towards a multi-causal relationship between altruism and subjective well-being in actors, beneficiaries, and observers. Although some of this work can draw strong causal conclusions using careful design or randomized assignment to interventions,106 the conclusions that can be drawn from some research studies are more limited due to their correlational nature. For example, some studies that find positive effects of volunteering on well-being107 have not accounted for factors that may drive self-selection into volunteering by those who are happier. However, one study sought to account for this possibility. Using a longitudinal panel in the United Kingdom, the authors controlled for higher prior levels of well-being of those who volunteer and found that volunteering nevertheless led to subsequent increases in well-being.108 This study focused on one potential causal arrow: the effect of altruism on the altruist’s well-being. But larger, more comprehensive studies should ultimately consider a wider range of causal arrows, including the effects of altruism on the happiness of beneficiaries and observers, and the effects of well-being on acting altruistically or being the beneficiary of altruism. Addressing such questions would require the collection of comprehensive longitudinal, momentary assessment data, similar to data that have been collected to measure a wide variety of everyday altruistic behaviors (enacted, received, or observed).109 These data could be collected at both the individual level and aggregated at the regional or country level, with the goal of disentangling the level of analysis at which this
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