Prosocial Spending And Happiness—the Recipients Perspective

From the recipients perspective,the current research explores key factors of recipients' happiness,basic psychological mechanisms underlining the enhancing recipients' happiness,and the influence of recipients' feedback on spenders' happiness in prosocial spending.The study of the above three research questions can contribute to fill three research gaps,namely recipients' happiness,basic psychological mechanisms underlining recipients' happiness,and the interacting of recipients' and spenders' happiness,which have always been ignored in past studies on prosocial spending and happiness,.Meanwhile,based on the study of these research questions,the current research proposes an integrated framework for future studies on prosocial spending.For practice,the current research also gives suggestions about how to better enhance both recipients' and spenders' happiness in prosocial spending and even in prosocial behaviors.Main innovation points of the current research are as follows:1)Key factors related recipients' happiness are found,and the same as their cooperative formation mechanism.The current research finds the positive impacts of gift attractiveness,positive perceived intention and recipients' willingness-to-accept on recipients' happiness.Furthermore,willingness-to-accept is found to be a key mediator:it fully mediates both the relationship between gift attractiveness and recipients'happiness,and the relationship between positive perceived intention and recipients'happiness.These findings have a pioneering contribution for studies on recipients,happiness.2)Feedback effect is preliminarily revealed in the interacting of recipients' and spenders happiness in prosocial spending.Based on Self-determination Theory and Goal Theory,the current research finds the positive impact of recipients' feedback on spenders' happiness,and spenders' competence satisfaction and relatedness satisfaction mediate this influence.Furthermore,the social ties(strong vs.weak social ties)between spenders and recipients moderate the mediating effect of relatedness satisfaction(only significant in the conditions of strong social ties).The above findings provide a new aspect for future studies on prosocial spending and happiness.3)The basic psychological mechanisms underlining the enhancing of recipients'happiness are revealed.Taking recipients' willingness-to-accept(the key factor of recipients'happiness)as an example,the current research finds that the key psychological mechanisms underlining the enhancing of recipients'happiness:willingness-to-accept positively influences recipients,happiness through recipients,competence satisfaction and relatedness satisfaction.The above findings contribute to preliminarily fill the research gap of basic psychological mechanisms underlining the enhancing of recipients' happiness.