Daily Ups and Downs

What is it about?

Numerous studies have shown that acting prosocially promotes the altruist’s well-being.What has been less clear, however, is when the effect is the strongest and what mechanism is behind the well-being benefits of prosocial action. We asked a community sample (N = 383) to record their prosocial engagement, well-being levels, and autonomy, relatedness, and competence 4 times daily for 2 weeks using an app-based event-sampling method.We found that only one’s competence—and neither autonomy nor relatedness—at one time point (t -1) moderated the effect of prosocial engagement on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being at a subsequent time point (t). Specifically, when participants reported lower competence levels at t -1, the relationship between acting prosocially and well-being was stronger at t. We further demonstrated that this interaction was mediated by competence levels at t.

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Why is it important?

Research on well-being has an ultimate goal of developing interventions that can help people improve and sustain higher well-being. Our work helps build toward that goal by highlighting a specific mechanism in the prosocial context that within- person variabilities and satisfaction of state-like competence, but not autonomy or relatedness, contribute most to the well- being boost. Our findings—in addition to future work examin- ing its edge cases—thus help provide the bedrock for more personalized, adaptive well-being interventions. We view the future of well-being interventions as bright, with many oppor- tunities to augment people’s experiences through careful learning algorithms predicated on basic research.