Vicarious Happiness: starting to take a look at the science behind feeling joy from others’.

Have you ever felt an immense sense of happiness and satisfaction when someone you care about achieves something great? If you have, then you may have just experienced vicarious joy, which is the pleasure we feel from another person's success.

Vicarious joy is a powerful emotion that can bring us closer to the people we care about and enhance our own happiness. “Vicarious joy is the ability to feel happy about other people’s positive experiences” (Batson et al., 1991). When someone we know and deeply care about succeeds in something they have been trying to achieve, we feel proud of them and happy for their accomplishments. This type of happiness can make us feel more connected to the person and help us build deeper, more meaningful relationships.

Research has suggested that vicarious joy can have positive effects on our mental and physical wellbeing. It can often be accompanied by feelings of pride, admiration, and satisfaction. This emotion is also known as empathic joy, as it involves feeling and sharing the joy of others. Vicarious joy can further be conceptually defined by its focus on the other person’s positive experience rather than one’s own feeling of positivity, which is sometimes defined as warm glow (Andreoni, 1990; Batson et al., 1991). 

Vicarious joy may also be a contributor to increased inspiration in the sense that when we see someone we know achieve something purposeful, it can inspire us to strive for our own success and work towards our own achievement goals.

A broader concept is ‘vicarious happiness’, which encompasses all forms of positive emotions that we experience through others. This can include joy and excitement as well as other positive emotions that we feel when we witness the success, happiness, or wellbeing of others.

So while vicarious joy is a specific type of emotion, vicarious happiness is a more general term that covers a wider range of positive emotions. However, both emotions involve a degree of empathy and a sense of deep connection with others.

What we are learning is that vicarious happiness is associated with increased levels of empathy, which is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Further, individuals who experience vicarious happiness may have higher levels of empathy towards the person whose success they are witnessing, leading to stronger feelings of connection and social support.

From a leadership lens, both vicarious joy and happiness can be powerful tools for motivating and inspiring teams. When leaders experience vicarious joy or happiness through the success and wellbeing of their team members, they are more likely to feel connected to their team and motivated to support their growth and development. So could it be that leaders who experience vicarious happiness for their employees are more likely to engage in ethical behaviour and prioritise the wellbeing of their employees? Now that's another article for another day, but it will be written.

It is worth noting that this type of leadership may also be referred to as purpose-driven leadership. Purpose-driven leadership focuses on putting the needs and wellbeing of employees first, understanding that the responsibility of a leader are their people. Researchers and businesses are showing more interest in purpose-driven leadership in that the case may be made that purpose is key to transformational leadership and improved workplace culture as well as a potential pathway to greater wellbeing for all.

References:

1. Andreoni, J. (1990). Impure altruism and donations to public goods: A theory of warm-glow giving. The Economic Journal, 100, 464–477.
2. Batson, C. D., Batson, J. G., Slingsby, J. K., Harrell, K. L., Peekna, H. M., & Todd, R. M. (1991). Empathic joy and the empathy-altruism hypothesis, 61(3), 413–426.
3. Craig, N & Snook, S. A. (2014). “From purpose to impact”. https://hbr.org/2014/05/from-purpose-to-impact