By Ustaz Mark Bang<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a stereotype about people seeking happiness\u2014that all they care about is themselves. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n They look at the world through rose-colored glasses, and so they refuse to see suffering. If we want to motivate people to care about righting social wrongs, the thinking goes, then we must stoke people\u2019s anger and fear.<\/p>\n Now a new study refutes that narrative. According to the study\u2019s findings, happier people seem to be more likely to take social action than their less happy peers. Researchers surveyed three different groups of people to see how generally happy they were, then gauged how much they cared about a particular social issue.<\/p>\n They also had people report on actions they\u2019d taken in response to the issue, their future plans to take action, and, in some cases, their willingness to sign up on the spot to participate in social action. The first group consisted of students at the University of Virginia. Following the violent Unite the Right rallies in the summer, students reported on how often they experienced positive and negative emotions over the previous four weeks.<\/p>\n Then they were told to write about the thoughts and emotions the rallies had inspired before filling out the questionnaire again, with a focus on how the rallies made them feel. Afterwards, the students were given a list of 10 possible actions to take in response to the rallies\u2014like writing blog posts, participating in protests, or giving money to a cause\u2014and asked if they had already done the action, planned to do it, or had no intention of doing it. The students were also given an opportunity to join \u201ca community of peers\u201d who were supporting and assisting others encountering racism\u2014a measure of their current interest in activism.<\/p>\n After analyzing the results, researchers found that generally happier students showed more concern about the rallies and were more willing to take part in current action to help the affected community than less happy people\u2014a finding that stands in contrast to many people\u2019s expectations. \u201cThere\u2019s a na\u00efve belief out there that maybe we shouldn\u2019t be focused on making people happier or increasing their well-being because they won\u2019t be motivated to do anything,\u201d says lead researcher Kostadin Kushlev. \u201cBut the findings suggest the opposite: Being happier links to more action, not less.\u201d To corroborate this, Kushlev and his colleagues did two other experiments. One involved a wider, more diverse group of participants. But, instead of selecting an issue for them, the researchers asked participants to identify their own issue, like concerns about the environment or the current state of the government.<\/p>\n After following a protocol similar to the prior experiment, they found that happier people again showed more concern, were more likely to have taken action, and signed up to receive more frequent informative newsletters about their issue than less happy people. In other words, they were more socially involved.<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean that unhappy people didn\u2019t care or didn\u2019t want to take action, though. In fact, less happy people were more willing to act in the future than happier people were. But, as Kushlev notes, it\u2019s hard to know whether or not they would have actually followed through. \u201cYou may say you want to do something in the future but become too overwhelmed by negative emotion and not actually end up doing that thing,\u201d he says. How could this be? Kushlev says he believes people who experience more joy and happiness probably have more energy and more resources to be able to give to causes they care about. So, their intention to act is more likely to translate into action. They may also be better able to connect to a sense of hope\u2014the belief that their actions will make a difference\u2014while less happy people may be more likely to believe that we\u2019re all screwed, so why bother? While these findings don\u2019t mean that happiness causes social action, they do refute the idea that happiness is associated with selfishness, apathy, and shortsightedness, says Kushlev.<\/p>\n If anything, being happy seems to increase people\u2019s willingness to take action\u2014even when accounting for things like their income or their level of concern. \u201cGiven that we did three different studies and saw the same pattern over and over again, it\u2019s pretty clear that positive emotions are not bad for social action,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n All of this is good news for those of us who want to be happier but worry that it will interfere with our social and political activism. Perhaps taking care of our own well-being really will help us to take care of the world. Thanks for reading this article. “Public Staunchest Ally.”<\/p>\n The author\u00a0 of this article is a human rights activist, writer and professional teacher.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Ustaz Mark Bang There\u2019s a stereotype about people seeking happiness\u2014that all they care about is themselves. They look at the world through rose-colored glasses, and so they refuse to see suffering. If we want to motivate people to care about righting social wrongs, the thinking goes, then we must[Read More…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":33139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oped","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Ustaz-Mark-Bang-2.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33140,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33138\/revisions\/33140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onecitizendaily.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nFor the last experiment, they analyzed data from the 2010 U.S. General Social Survey to see how \u201cnot too happy,\u201d \u201cpretty happy,\u201d and \u201cvery happy\u201d people reported on their concern for the environment, their efforts to protect the environment (through recycling, avoiding environmentally harmful products, reducing fuel consumption, etc.), and their willingness to sacrifice in the future for the good of the environment (through measures like paying higher taxes or accepting a lower living standard). While very happy people were less concerned about the environment than less happy people in this experiment, they were still more likely to have taken action to protect the environment and more willing to sacrifice for the future than less happy folks.
\n\u201cPeople who experience more joy and happiness probably have more energy and more resources to be able to give to causes they care about.\u201d \u2015Jill Suttie.<\/p>\n