Participants and design Fifty people from a national survey pool participated in exchange for a $5 Amazon.com gift card. The experiment used a 2 cell (Prosocial Goal: Smile vs. Happy) between-subjects design. Procedure Participants completed a two-part survey. In the first survey, they were informed that they would need to perform an act of kindness. To manipulate the prosocial goal of this act, participants randomly assigned to the happy [smile] goal condition were told, “In this study we ask you to accomplish a task: Do something to make someone else happy [smile].” All participants were instructed that they would have 24 h to accomplish their task, at which point they would take part in a follow-up survey. The follow-up survey, administered one day later, contained an item asking participants to briefly describe the act they performed, as well as filler items about the assigned task. Embedded in these filler items was the key measure of personal happiness. With regard to the act they performed, participants responded to the following item: “To what degree do you feel you created happiness in your own life?” (1 = not at all,7= very much). Last, as a manipulation check, participants reported the extent to which the act they performed was designed to elicit a smile (1 = not at all,7= very much) and happiness (1 = not at all,7= very much).
Discussion
Experiment 1 demonstrated that performing an act of kindness is better for personal happiness when it is performed in pursuit of the prosocial goal of making someone else smile versus making someone else happy. These results therefore support the hypothesis that performing an act designed to accomplish a prosocial goal will lead to greater personal happiness when that goal is framed more concretely (versus abstractly). The question of why the pursuit of certain prosocial goals leads greater personal happiness for givers was explored in Experiment 2.