A few weeks ago, I wrote about new data from the World Happiness Report on the impacts of sharing meals. I encourage everyone to go read the full report in that post, but in case you haven’t already done that I wanted to talk about another finding I found interesting.
Chapter Six of the report focuses on the connection between prosocial behavior and deaths of despair. For context, “prosocial behaviors” are activities like volunteering, donating, and offering help to strangers. “Deaths of despair” is a term for deaths due to suicide, alcohol abuse, and drug overdose.
In the United States, we have a particular problem with deaths of despair. Between 2000 and 2019, the United States had the largest increase in the rate of deaths of despair among countries in the World Happiness Report. Among the countries that the World Happiness Report has data for, the United States does not have the highest rate of deaths of despair, but most other countries saw decreases in their rates over this same time period. Even if we include the rise in deaths of despair in the United States, the average rate across the globe has decreased.
The new research highlighted in the report finds a connection between the rates of prosocial behavior and the rate of deaths of despair. Their regression analysis estimated that for every 10 percentage point increase in the share of people participating in prosocial activities, there is one fewer death of despair per 100,000 people. People age 60+ benefit even more, with an effect size nearly double compared to the general population.
Those numbers are a bit hard to understand, so let's put it into context. In high income countries like the United States, about 35% of people participate in prosocial behaviors. If we increased that by 10 percentage points to 45%, that would mean an extra 34 million people engaging in prosocial activities. That would result in one fewer death of despair per 100,000 people, or about 3,400 per year across the country.
Simplifying the math a bit further, for every 10,000 additional people who participate in some type of prosocial activity, one fewer person will suffer a death of despair each year. That seems like a pretty achievable goal to me.
From an economic perspective, encouraging people to participate in prosocial behaviors seems like a very efficient way to decrease deaths of despair. Helping a stranger is often a very low cost activity, sometimes only taking seconds out of your day.
Unfortunately, this is not necessarily something that policymakers have a lot of influence over. This is the same issue with trying to encourage people to share meals with each other: public policy is not very effective at changing social behaviors.
Still, there are some things policymakers could explore to help encourage prosocial behavior. We’ve done past research that shows similar interventions are beneficial to the public. There also already exist tax incentives for people to donate money. Maybe there could be a way to incentivize people to volunteer their time in a similar way, like the Illinois volunteer emergency worker credit.
Hopefully this information can encourage more people to go out of their way to help people in their communities. I know that I probably don’t engage in enough prosocial behavior myself, and I want to change that. Small changes in behavior add up in major ways. Helping each other out can actually save lives.