14 DAY TRIAL // The motives are often more important than the action itself, a new research from scientists at the University of Michigan seems to confirm. The team here found that people who help others for truly unselfish reasons live more than those who aid with the goal of helping themselves.
This interesting difference in lifespan is valid and recognizable even among people who volunteer and help others often. The extension the team identified only applies to altruistic persons who do not think about returns or personal gains when helping others.
This study therefore raises the interesting prospect that the motives themselves are the triggers for a prolonged lifespan, which is certainly an idea few investigators ever considered entertaining before.
In order to tease out this connection, the U-M team applied questionnaires to people who regularly volunteer for any number of activities. All test participants were asked to list the main reasons why the engaged in such activities.
Those who exhibited the most prolonged lifespan extension were those who wrote that they were guided by either altruistic values or the will to create new social connections. Simply helping the other person with no thought of one's self appear to have positive consequences on both body and mind.
Experts published a paper detailing the findings in the latest online issue of the American Psychological Association journal Health Psychology. The paper shows that those who volunteered for personal satisfaction – a selfish reason – did not receive any positive effect from this.
“This could mean that people who volunteer with other people as their main motivation may be buffered from potential stressors associated with volunteering, such as time constraints and lack of pay,” U-M professor and lead study author Sara Konrath, PhD, explains.
Data the researchers used for this investigation were collected from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which began in 1957 on a random sample of 10,317 Wisconsin high school students. Of the sample the researchers used, 51.6 percent were female, with an average age of 69.16 years in 2008.
All participants reported how often and for what reason they volunteered over the past 10 years. Experts took all those instances and motivations into account when drawing their statistical projection, PsychCentral reports.
“It is reasonable for people to volunteer in part because of benefits to the self; however, our research implies that, ironically, should these benefits to the self become the main motive for volunteering, they may not see those benefits,” paper coauthor Andrea Fuhrel-Forbis concludes.