Subjective Well-Being and Prosociality Around the Globe: Happy People Give More of Their Time and Money to Others

Subjective well-being (SWB) is positively related to helping others, but so far research has not explored the association of individual aspects of well-being with prosocial behavior across the world. We used a representative sample (N = 1,433,078) from the Gallup World Poll (GWP) to explore the relationship between each aspect of well-being and prosocial behavior. We explored these associations between and within 161 countries. We found that different aspects of SWB are not equally associated with prosocial behavior: While life satisfaction and positive affect consistently predicted being more prosocial, negative affect did not consistently predict being less prosocial. Our findings underline the importance of studying the effects of the different components of SWB separately, indicating that, across the globe, it is satisfaction and positive emotions—not the lack of negative emotions—that are associated with being prosocial.