When people are less focused on self and the problems of the self, there is a kind of alleviation of stress.  There Is nothing like reaching out and contributing to the lives of others to give a person, first of all a sense of significance and purpose. We actually do have a kind of flourishing when we even think, notice this is a laboratory, so people are not really shelling out their dollars, but in the laboratory environment, people simply contemplate the idea of contributing to other merely on a financial level, let along a face-to-face, there is this kind of a benefit.

Stephen Post is a Professor of Preventive Medicine and the Director and Founder of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University. He was previously a professor in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University and a Senior Research Scholar at the Becket Institute of St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University.