The floral feel-good factor - Telegraph Yes, it's true - as I always suspected, gardening can make you a better person. And what's more, I can prove it. But you will have to bear with me a bit, since what I'm going to tell you may not, at first, seem to have much to do with gardening. But trust me, it does. Psychologists have known for a long time that people generally behave more generously and co-operatively than pure self-interest would suggest. A common way of showing this is the so-called dictator game (although to be honest it's hardly a game). One of two players (the dictator) is given a sum of money and asked how he would like to split it with the other player (the receiver). That's it - you see, not much of a game. Simple economic self-interest says the dictator keeps the money, all of it. But in reality shedloads of data show that on average, dictators give around 28 per cent of the money to the receiver. Lots of things determine exactly how much money is given away, but one very important factor is anonymity, or the lack of it. Unsurprisingly, dictators who are being watched, or think they may be being watched, give away more than those who remain anonymous. So powerful is this effect that a simple image of a pair of watching eyes is enough to increase the size of the donation; no real observer is necessary. Which brings me to some recent research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The researchers were looking again at the dictator game, using a large number of players from all over the world, recruited using the online labour market Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk.com; worth a look, incidentally, if you have time on your hands and could use some extra cash). Dictators were, as usual, asked to share (or not) a small sum with an anonymous receiver. One group saw a pair of watching eyes on the screen, while three other groups saw either nothing, a plain black square, or an image of flowers. The expectation was simple: the "watched" group would donate more, while the others would all give more or less the same. But the results were surprising. Dictators who saw nothing, or a black square or eyes, did not differ, although they were all rather generous: the most frequent response was simply to split the money 50/50, and on average they gave away 32 per cent. One possible reason for this greater than normal generosity is that academics traditionally round up undergraduates for this kind of study, and students are notoriously mean (or maybe just notoriously poor). In contrast, most of the participants in this study were not students. But those who saw a picture of flowers gave away significantly more - 38 per cent on average. This result is consistent with other evidence showing a link between viewing nature and a positive emotional state. For example, patients convalescing from surgery recovered faster and required fewer painkillers if their hospital bed had a natural view, compared to patients with only a brick wall to look at. More generally, viewing natural as opposed to urban scenes can promote feelings of pleasure and enhance attention, and reduce negative emotions such as anger or anxiety. Positive emotional state, in turn, has been linked to increases in sociable and co-operative behaviour. Thus, as the authors conclude, "We suggest that flower images might have induced positive emotional states in our dictator game players, resulting in the tendency for dictators to donate more to receivers when presented with flower images." In other words, looking at flowers (a key aspect of gardening, although of course usually preceded by growing them) increases the stock of human kindness and generosity and thus, I submit, happiness in general. You can't ask for more than that, can you?