Studies of charitable decisions have found activity in brain regions involved in reward and social processing. These experiments do not establish that every gift releases a particular amount of dopamine or oxytocin, produces four separate rewards, or makes wishlist users happier. Brain-imaging results describe responses under specific experimental conditions; practical advice about choosing a gift remains an interpretation, not a tested effect of WishlyBox.
Study 1: The NIH Discovery: Giving Activates Reward Circuits (Plus Something Extra)
In 2006, neuroscientist Jorge Moll and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health published a landmark study in PNAS that changed how we think about human generosity.
Study 2: The Oregon Tax Experiment: Pure Altruism vs. Warm Glow
A year later, economists William Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel Burghart at the University of Oregon designed an elegant experiment published in Science that answered a question economists had been debating for decades: do people give because they genuinely care about others, or just because giving makes them feel good?
Study 3: The Generosity-Happiness Link in the Brain
Fast forward to 2017, and a team led by Soyoung Park at the University of Lubeck published a study in Nature Communications that connected the neural dots between generosity, brain activity, and subjective happiness.