Spending as little as $5 a day on someone else could significantly boost happiness, the team at the University of British Columbia found.
Their experiments on more than 630 Americans showed they were measurably happier when they spent money on others even if they thought spending the money on themselves would make them happier.
“We wanted to test our theory that how people spend their money is at least as important as how much money they earn,” said Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. They asked their 600 volunteers first to rate their general happiness, report their annual income and detail their monthly spending including bills, gifts for themselves, gifts for others and donations to charity.
“No matter how much income each person made, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not,” Dunn said in a statement.
Dunn’s team also surveyed 16 employees at a company in Boston before and after they received an annual profit-sharing bonus of between $3,000 and $8,000. “Employees who devoted more of their bonus to prosocial spending experienced greater happiness after receiving the bonus, and the manner in which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of their happiness than the size of the bonus itself,” they wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.
They gave their volunteers $5 or $20 and half got clear instructions on how to spend it. Those who spent the money on someone or something else reported feeling happier about it.
“These findings suggest that very minor changes in spending allocations-as little as $5 may be enough to produce real gains in happiness on a given day,” Dunn said.
小题1:What is the general idea of the passage?
A．The more you earn, the greater happiness you will get.
B．Spending more money on yourself will make you happier.
C．Money can buy happiness, but only if you spend it on someone else.
D．You can spend only $5 a day on someone else to get happiness.小题2:The underlined work “boost” in the first paragraph probably means .
A．help to find
B．help to increase
C．help to bring
D．help to get小题3:Which of the following statements is NOT true according to the passage?
A．Those who spend more money on others can get much more bonus.
B．People usually think spending money on themselves will make them happier.
C．Very small changes in spending your money may be enough to gain happiness.
D．Researchers think that how people spend their money is at least as important as how much money they earn.小题4:Dunn is .
A．a reporter in a journal
B．a volunteer in the experiment
C．an employee in a company
D．a psychologist at a university小题5:It can be inferred from the 6th paragraph that .
A．the volunteers not given $5 or $20 spent their own money on themselves
B．those who spent the money on someone or something else felt happier about it
C．the volunteers were given $5 or $20 as a reward for the experiment
D．half of the volunteers could spend the money as they liked
