Y11W19WR The generosity experiment

Observational
The writing prompt

Examine your own giving — what you give, to whom, what you notice about your own response — and reflect on whether the research’s finding matches your experience.

1Retrieval check

Q1.What did Dunn, Aknin and Norton’s 2008 study find?

  • ASpending on yourself produces more happiness
  • BPeople randomly assigned to spend money on others reported higher happiness than those spending on themselves
  • CMoney doesn’t affect happiness at all
  • DThe effect only appeared in wealthy countries

Q2.What is the article’s counter-thread about generosity?

  • AAll generosity produces the happiness effect
  • BForced or self-sacrificial giving doesn’t produce the effect; freely-chosen small gifts do
  • CGiving is always harmful
  • DThe research has been retracted
Show answer key

Q1 → B. People randomly assigned to spend money on others reported higher happiness than those spending on themselves.The effect is small but robust and replicates across countries and income levels, including in poor communities.

Q2 → B. Forced or self-sacrificial giving doesn’t produce the effect; freely-chosen small gifts do.The mechanism appears to be connection and perceived meaning — which forced giving short-circuits.

2Prompt deconstruction

Command verb
EXAMINE — notice the texture of your own response
You pick
specific instances of your own giving (money, time, attention, small gestures) and withholding
Goal
hold the question of whether the research generalises to you — not in abstract, but in cases you can examine
Must reference
the generosity research AND the article’s caveat about forced giving

3Pick nudge

Which giving or withholding moments will show the real pattern in your behaviour?

Freely-chosen giving
Something you gave without obligation
Obligated giving
Something you gave because you felt you had to
Withholding
A moment you could have given and didn’t

4Planner — for each of your picks

Instance
What I gave / didn’t
#1
#2
#3

5Sentence stems

  • I noticed that ___ when ___.
  • The specific moment it stood out was ___.
  • Before paying attention, I had been assuming ___.
  • [Researcher’s] finding that ___ captures what I saw, because ___.
  • The pattern across my cases is ___.
  • What this tells me about [wider topic] is ___.

6Exemplar paragraph (not about this article)

(1) Three instances: (1-a) I bought a coffee for the friend who helped me revise last week — it was spontaneous, small, and I felt lighter for ten minutes afterwards. Dunn’s finding fits this one cleanly. (2) (1-b) I gave $20 to a school fundraiser that I had been asked three times to contribute to. (3) I felt nothing — closer to relief than to the wellbeing boost the research describes. (4) The article’s caveat about ‘forced’ giving fits. (1-c) A stranger asked me for change on Tuesday and I said no without thinking; for the next hour I felt oddly defensive. (5) The pattern: the effect is real for me, but conditional on the giving feeling chosen.

What this paragraph does, move by move

  1. Three specific instances.
  2. Distinguishes chosen from obligated giving.
  3. Describes the felt response precisely.
  4. Applies the article’s caveat to one case.
  5. Names the pattern as conditional, not universal.