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Altruistic people tend to score higher on many measures of life satisfaction. Yes, that seems counterintuitive, and such scales can admittedly be subjective. So a research team decided to explore the relationship between selflessness and two outcomes we are evolutionarily programmed to desire: wealth and procreation.

It reports generous people have more children than selfish ones. What’s more, as a rule, they also earn more money.

It further finds “people generally expect selfish individuals to have higher incomes,” an unsupported belief that can inspire bad behavior. In fact, writes a research team let by Kimmo Eriksson of Stockholm University, being socially conscious literally pays dividends.

In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the researchers describe five studies that explore this connection. They analyzed four large-scale data sets, including two that tracked individuals and families over a period of years.

One was the U.K. Household Longitudinal Study, a representative sample of British households. The researchers compared the responses people gave regarding altruistic behavior in 2010 with their income and number of children in 2016. […]