When we get older, we don’t just get wiser, according to behavioral studies. We become more caring and selfless. And it appears we’re happier, too.
Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. Read previous columnsLike many people in their 60s, I feel that I’m less driven and ambitious than I used to be. I find myself thinking more about helping my students and children and grandchildren. But do we really get more generous and altruistic as we get older? Two new studies suggest that we do and that this change in our motivations runs deep.
Earlier studies had already provided some evidence that this might be true, finding that older people donate more money to charity both in real life and in hypothetical experiments and, like me, say that they care more about others.
Julia Spaniol at Toronto’s Ryerson University and her colleagues tried to answer these questions earlier this year by combining 16 different studies with more than 1,000 participants in a “meta-analysis” in the journal Psychology and Aging.
Patricia Lockwood at the University of Birmingham and colleagues designed a very clever new experiment, published in the journal Psychological Science in April, to ask the same question. Instead of asking people how they felt, or getting them to donate money, the researchers got them to squeeze a “dynamometer,” a machine that measures the strength of your grip. Participants could choose whether to put in effort and squeeze harder to get more points.
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