Religions and self-help books tell us that money can’t buy happiness. For example, what happens to most people when they win the lottery? It turns out people think when they win the lottery their lives are going to be amazing. In fact, their lives get ruined. What happens when people win the lottery is: they spend all the money and go into debt, and all of their friends and everyone they’ve ever met find them and bug them for money. And it ruins their social relationships, in fact. So they have more debt and worse friendships than they had before they won the lottery. Also, money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things only for ourselves. Michael I. Norton – a Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit at the Harvard Business School – posits that maybe the reason that money doesn’t make us happy is that we’re always spending it on the wrong things, and in particular, that we’re always spending it on ourselves. What would happen if people spend more of their money on other people. So instead of being antisocial, what if we were a little more prosocial with our money? Watch the video and see what he learnt from an experiment he conducted on the campus at University of British Columbia and data from surveys.
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