How many of you are participating in Amazon Prime Day? It’s coming at us from every angle. Even my credit card provider urged me to “use my points on Prime deals.”

Every year, the annual Prime Day metrics are jaw-dropping. It’s a showcase of behavioral design, consumerism, and enterprise-scale product engineering. Trillions of database requests and data transfers on an architecture built to seamlessly support concentrated traffic spikes on this random string of days in June. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautifully executed strategy where the retail giant created a holiday from thin air, and convinced us all that we need to buy.

And buy we do. The digital user experience has been streamlined to perfection to keep us in a loop of passive consumption.

Years of research, including a review of over 500 studies by Bekkers and Wiepking (2011), confirm what our intuition already knows, true and lasting happiness doesn’t come from what we receive. In fact, if you know me, you know I love to point to research by Aknin et al. (2012) that demonstrates that the desire to give is innate, observing that toddlers experience greater happiness when giving treats to a puppet than when receiving them.

We are wired to give. So why aren’t we?

Nonprofits exist to fill the critical gaps left by government organizations. 11.1% of Americans are living below the federal poverty level according the most recent U.S. Census Bureau (Census.gov, 2023). Nonprofits are a safety net that provide basic needs and advocate for policies for the marginalized. They provide funding for life saving research and act as lifelines and sources of hope for people living with incurable diseases.

Why does it feel that supporting such critical efforts is something to do on occasion with a portion of your disposable income, but hopping on Amazon today to buy the shirt you didn’t know you needed yesterday can be done without a second thought?

In a RetailMeNot survey, 20% of respondents said that finding a deal made them as excited as going on vacation (Rockland Trust, n.d.). Our brains are wired to release dopamine when we trigger these reward systems. Humans want their choices and actions to matter. The behavioral momentum is already there, imagine if it was directed to a cause instead of the next gadget. Imagine if the same behavioral psychology used by big retailers connected donors to a cause instead of the next gadget.

That is the product (and might I add societal) challenge of our generation, an infrastructure that unlocks human generosity at scale. Give yourself a true hit of dopamine and donate the equivalent of your non-essential purchases today to a charity making a real difference.

References

Aknin, L. B., Hamlin, J. K., & Dunn, E. W. (2012). Giving leads to happiness in young children. PLoS ONE, 7(6), e39211. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039211

Bekkers, R., & Wiepking, P. (2011). Who gives? A literature review of predictors of charitable giving Part One: Religion, education, age and socialisation. Voluntary Sector Review, 2(3), 337–365. https://doi.org/10.1332/204080511X6087712

Rockland Trust. (n.d.). The psychology of a deal. Rockland Trust Learning Center. https://www.rocklandtrust.com/everyday-finances/the-psychology-of-a-deal

U.S. Census Bureau. (2023). Poverty in the United States: 2023. U.S. Government Publishing Office. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-283.html