It’s the Recipient That Counts: Spending Money on Strong Social Ties Leads to Greater Happiness than Spending on Weak Social Ties Lara B. Aknin1*, Gillian M. Sandstrom1, Elizabeth W. Dunn1, Michael I. Norton2 1 Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2 Marketing Unit, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America Abstract Previous research has shown that spending money on others (prosocial spending) increases happiness. But, do the happiness gains depend on who the money is spent on? Sociologists have distinguished between strong ties with close friends and family and weak ties—relationships characterized by less frequent contact, lower emotional intensity, and limited intimacy. We randomly assigned participants to reflect on a time when they spent money on either a strong social tie or a weak social tie. Participants reported higher levels of positive affect after recalling a time they spent on a strong tie versus a weak tie. The level of intimacy in the relationship was more important than the type of relationship; there was no significant difference in positive affect after recalling spending money on a family member instead of a friend. These results add to the growing literature examining the factors that moderate the link between prosocial behaviour and happiness. Citation: Aknin LB, Sandstrom GM, Dunn EW, Norton MI (2011) It’s the Recipient That Counts: Spending Money on Strong Social Ties Leads to Greater Happiness than Spending on Weak Social Ties. PLoS ONE 6(2): e17018. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0017018 Editor: Matjaz Perc, University of Maribor, Slovenia Received November 15, 2010; Accepted January 19, 2011; Published February 10, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Sandstrom et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number: 410-2008-2509). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: laknin@psych.ubc.ca Introduction If you found a $10 bill in the pocket of an old jacket, what would be the best way to spend this money in order to maximize your happiness? Past research has shown that people are happier after spending money on others rather than spending on themselves [1]. Further, people benefit more from spending money on others when doing so provides them with the opportunity to spend time with another person (Aknin, Dunn, Sandstrom & Norton, submitted). However, no research has examined whether the happiness benefits of spending on someone else differ depending on who, specifically, the money is spent on. More broadly, little research has looked at the moderators that influence the affective boosts that people gain from performing acts of prosocial behaviour. Are people better off spending their newly found $10 bill buying coffee for their best friend, or for a friendly acquaintance from yoga class who they would like to know better? There are many ways to classify the people and relationships in our lives. Perhaps one of the most obvious and straightforward ways is to group people by relationship type and use categories such as ‘‘family’’, ‘‘friend’’ or ‘‘colleague’’. While this relationship-based labeling system seems intuitive, it is somewhat limited because individuals within a particular category are not necessarily equivalent on dimensions such as closeness. For example, we would expect a relationship with a twin sister to be much different than a relationship with a rarely seen cousin, though both are family members. Another common way to classify social relationships is by level of intimacy [2]. Indeed, sociologists label relationships that involve less frequent contact, lower emotional intensity, and limited intimacy as weak ties [3]. These relationships are often considered in contrast to strong ties with close friends and family. Considering this classification of our social relationships, one might wonder whether engaging in prosocial behaviour that involves strong versus weak social ties will lead to different happiness returns. While there is little research directly investi- gating this question, there is copious research examining the benefits of social relationships. A large body of evidence suggests that people enjoy interacting with strong ties; we are happier when we have satisfying relationships with close friends and family. A recent meta-analysis, which examined 22 studies with a range of well-being measures, touted the connection between well-being and social relationships as ‘‘…one of the most robust findings in the literature on well-being’’ [4]. However, researchers usually test for associations between well-being measures and prototypical strong tie measures such as marital satisfaction, or number of close friends; the effect of relationships with weak ties on well-being has seldom been explored. While it may seem intuitive that strong ties have consequences for our well-being, research has also shown that our relationships with weak ties, and even strangers, can affect our happiness. Using a large-scale, longitudinal dataset, Fowler and Christakis [5] suggested that happiness spreads throughout social networks, extending up to three degrees of separation: a person becomes happier if their friend’s friend’s friend becomes happier, even if they don’t know that person (see also [6]). Given that the presence of weak ties in our social network affects our happiness, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that prosocial behaviour directed towards weak social ties can provide similar affective benefits. PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 February 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 2 | e17018