You have probably felt it: the small lift after you carry a stranger's bag up the stairs or slip a friend lunch money. In the late 1980s a volunteer leader named Allan Luks gave that feeling a name, the "helper's high." Two decades later a three-person team at the University of British Columbia and Harvard tested a version of it with envelopes of cash. Here is what they found, and how well it has held up.

Where the phrase came from

Luks wrote about the idea in an October 1988 Psychology Today article, describing "a sense of calm and enhanced self-worth" observed in a study of more than 1,700 women who regularly helped others. Physician David Fryburg, writing on Psychology Today decades later, summarizes Luks's two phases: first "that uplifted, euphoric mood," then a longer-lasting calm. Fryburg adds that the greatest effect was seen when people helped strangers.

Keep in mind that this was survey work. People reported how helping made them feel, and the people who volunteer regularly may simply differ from those who don't. A survey can't show that helping caused the good feeling. For that you need an experiment.

The $5-or-$20 experiment

In 2008, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton published a short paper in Science titled "Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness." As the Harvard Gazette reported, it had three parts. A survey of 632 Americans found that people who spent more on others reported more happiness, while spending on themselves made no difference. Sixteen employees at a Boston company who got a profit-sharing bonus were happier the more of it they spent on other people. "All that mattered was the percent spent on other people," Norton told the Gazette.

The part everyone remembers is the experiment. Students on the UBC campus got an envelope holding $5 or $20 and were told to spend it by the end of the day, either on themselves or on someone else. That evening, the ones who had spent on others felt happier. The amount didn't matter. "It was only how people spent it that made them happier," Norton said.

Did it hold up? Mostly, with smaller numbers

That experiment had just 46 participants, a small sample by today's standards. In 2022 a team led by Garam Kim and Minah Jung reran it in PLoS ONE with 133 Berkeley undergraduates, each given $10. Using the original analysis, they "did not observe a significant difference." But a simpler question, how happy people felt right after spending, did show a significant effect in the original direction.

The original authors also tested themselves. A 2020 registered replication report by Aknin, Dunn and colleagues ran large, pre-registered studies of the main paradigms. The 2022 paper describes those results as "somewhat mixed, but largely supportive": the study closest to the original, with 730 people, found the effect, one recall-based study found none, and another with more than 5,000 people found a small effect.

A wider lens points the same way. A 2018 meta-analysis in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology pooled 27 experiments on performing acts of kindness, with about 4,000 participants. It found that "the overall effect of kindness on the well-being of the actor is small-to-medium."

So the honest summary: giving does seem to make most people a little happier. It is not a guaranteed euphoria, and the early headline numbers were probably larger than the real effect. For more on the research, see our guide to the science of giving.

Today's act

Sources

1. ReligionLink — Helper's high: Volunteering makes people feel good (cites Luks, Psychology Today, Oct. 1988)
2. Psychology Today — David Fryburg, Why Do Volunteers Live Longer? (May 2019)
3. Science — Dunn, Aknin & Norton, Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness (2008)
4. Harvard Gazette — Money spent on others can buy happiness (April 2008)
5. PLoS ONE — Kim et al., Prosocial spending encourages happiness: A replication of the only experiment reported in Dunn, Aknin, and Norton (2008) (2022)
6. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — Aknin, Dunn et al., Does spending money on others promote happiness?: A registered replication report (2020)
7. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology — Curry et al., Happy to help? A meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor (2018)