The Influence Of Pro-social Spending Motivated By Autonomous And Controlled Motivation On Happiness

Confucianism has deeply influenced Chinese social behavior,like “The fragrance always remains on the hand that gives the rose”,but “face-assertion” is also one of our typical personality characteristics.Recent researches suggest that comparing with personal spending(spending money on themselves),pro-social spending(spending money on others)can elevate happiness more.However,if there were different motives behind pro-social spending,and what kind of results would produce? We explored whether autonomous and controlled motivations’ pro-social spending have different impact on individuals’ happiness for the first time(This study adopted the composite index of happiness including emotional variables,so positive affect(PA)and negative affect(NA)also were analyzed).The participants were all undergraduates.There were three experiments in this research,Experiment 1 explored the influence of the experience of different spending ways on happiness,PA,NA and analyzed the proportion of different motives’ pro-social spending(autonomous motivation vs.controlled motivation)on month total spending;In experiment 2,we adopted the experimental design--3(autonomous pro-social spending vs.controlled pro-social spending vs.personal spending)× 2(￥ 20 vs.￥ 100)between-subjects design to test the impact of spending types and spending amount on happiness,PA,NA;Finally,We observed whether autonomous and controlled pro-social spending had different influence in real life and explored whether basic psychological needs exist mediating effect between spending types and happiness,PA,NA in experiment 3(in this experiment,participants would conduct real spending behaviors).Major results are as follows:(1)Compared with controlled pro-social spending and personal spending,autonomous pro-social spending would make individuals much happier,more PA,less NA and it is not influenced by spending amount under the different experimental conditions;(2)The proportion of autonomous pro-social spending(12%)was higher than controlled pro-social spending(7.6%)forundergraduates;(3)Basic psychological needs exist fully mediating effect between spending types and happiness.We should encourage students to conduct pro-social spending(e.g.charitable donation),and cultivate the spirit of autonomous,voluntary spending actively to make them have higher levels of happiness and promote better development of physical and mental health.