Doing something nice for another person makes us feel good. Receiving an act of kindness also makes us feel good. So why doesn't it happen all the time? Experiments from Amit Kumar of the University of Texas-Austin and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago tackled the question by setting up random acts of kindness and evaluating the resulting feelings. It turns out the people who perform the act tend to undervalue its effects on the recipient. The students who acted kindly to a stranger rated the experience of the recipient to be an average of 2.32 on a five-point scale. However, those who were the target of a random act of kindness, in a voluntary followup survey, rated the experience at an average of 3.55.
The upshot of this and other experiments tells us that people are willing to be kind to strangers, but they are held back by a belief that their actions may be misconstrued, and that it isn't worth the risk. In the real world, random acts of kindness, which can range from helping to carry groceries to paying for someone's meal, makes a measurable positive impact. So we should go ahead and do it when the opportunity arises. Read about the experiments that led to these conclusions at Big Think. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Matt Zhang)
#kindness #volunteer