Pursuing concrete goals, like making a friend smile, rather than general ones, like making a friend happy, is a path to happiness, say researchers.
When you pursue concretely framed goals, your expectations of success are more likely to be met in reality. On the other hand, broad and abstract goals may bring about the dark side of happiness—unrealistic expectations.
These are the conclusions of a study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Jennifer Aaker, a social psychologist and professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The pursuit of happiness is one of the most essential quests in life, and happiness is often considered a hallmark of psychological health. But it is more mysterious and complex than most people might imagine—and not always readily achievable, the researchers point out.
Acts of Benevolence
“Although the desire for personal happiness may be clear, the path to achieving it is indefinite. One reason for this hazy route to happiness is that although people often think they know what leads to happiness, their predictions about what will make them happy are often inaccurate,” Aaker says.
One underappreciated way to increase one’s own happiness is to focus on elevating the happiness of others. The researchers conducted six experiments involving 543 people from laboratory studies and national survey pools. The level of abstraction of one’s “prosocial” goal—voluntary behavior intended to benefit someone else—was the critical factor of interest.
‘Concrete’ Happiness
The results show that acts designed to improve the well-being of others will lead to greater happiness for givers when these acts are associated with concretely framed, prosocial goals as opposed to abstractly framed prosocial goals—despite people’s intuitions to the contrary.
For example, an experiment involving bone marrow transplants focused on the whether giving those who need bone marrow transplants “greater hope”—the abstract goal—or giving those who need bone marrow transplants a “better chance of finding a donor”—the concrete goal—made a giver more happy.
The answer: Helping someone find a donor resulted in more happiness for the giver. This, the researchers wrote, was driven by givers’ perceptions that their actual acts better met their expectations of accomplishing their goal of helping another person.
Expectations vs. Reality
Aaker and coauthors show that these “happiness effects” are due to smaller gaps between one’s expectations of achieving the goal and the actual result when one’s goal is framed more concretely. Simply, the more abstract goals are often more unrealistic.
Is prosociality always a good goal to chase? According to this study, it depends. Sometimes people pursue prosociality in a way that is less than optimal.
“Discrepancies between aspirations and reality can be critical factors that, in extreme cases, may even lead the act of helping to eventually becoming a source of unhappiness,” explains lead author Melissa Rudd, Aakers’ former student who is currently an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Houston.
For example, when people pursue abstract prosocial goals and expect their relentless giving to result in tremendous and rapid change for the better—and it fails to materialize—they can suffer from “helper burnout,” which can negatively impact happiness.
But, encouraging givers to “reframe their prosocial goals in more concrete terms” would allow expectations to be better calibrated, increasing personal happiness, the researchers argue.
Givers are likely to experience greater happiness if they frame their prosocial goals in concrete rather than abstract terms.
Business Nuances
The results have implications for the world of business. For instance, marketing or products that claim to help consumers achieve abstractly framed goals—like making someone else happy—might not be the best business decision. Instead, it might be wiser to reframe these promised goals in more specific, concrete terms.
Consider, for example, Tom’s Shoes. The company promises that if a customer buys a pair of shoes, they will deliver another pair to a child in need.
“Concrete initiatives such as this may be a more realistic way to accurately set consumers’ expectations from the outset and leave them happier in the end,” Aaker says.
Boosting Happiness
Ultimately, people seek to be happy, and one clear path toward happiness is through prosocial behaviors.
“A prosocial act can not only boost the happiness of the recipient, but it can boost the happiness of the giver as well,” Aaker explains.
“However,” cautions Rudd, “not all prosocial goals are created equal.”
The researchers hope that future work will yield a deeper understanding of how to harvest happiness—such as by helping others—and how to avoid any unhappiness traps along the way. Sometimes, people pursue happiness ineffectively—as in giving to well-intentioned but broadly defined causes—which may leave them dissatisfied.
As Aaker notes, people often do not realize why they are left feeling unfulfilled— leading them to repeat their mistakes in the future.
But, on the bright side, greater happiness is just within reach when the goal of giving is realistically focused and viewed through a concrete lens.
Michael Norton, an associate professor of business at Harvard University, coauthored the study.
Source: Stanford University. Republished from Futurity.org under Creative Commons License 3.0.
*Image of “take a smile“ via Shutterstock
