In late
August, Erin Alexander, 57, sat in the parking lot of a Target store in
Fairfield, California, and wept. Her sister-in-law had recently died, and
Alexander was having a hard day.
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A barista working
at the Starbucks inside the Target was too. The espresso machine had broken
down and she was clearly stressed. Alexander — who had stopped crying and gone
inside for some caffeine — smiled, ordered an iced green tea, and told her to
hang in there. After picking up her order, she noticed a message on the cup:
“Erin,” the barista had scrawled next to a heart, “your soul is golden”.
“I’m not sure I
even necessarily know what ‘your soul is golden’ means,” said Alexander, who
laughed and cried while recalling the incident.
But the warmth of
that small and unexpected gesture, from a stranger who had no inkling of what
she was going through, moved her deeply.
“Of course, I was
still really sad,” Alexander said. “But that little thing made the rest of my
day.”
New findings, published
in the
Journal of Experimental Psychology in August, corroborate just how
powerful experiences such as Alexander’s can be. Researchers found that people
who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the
recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold
many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.
“We have this
negativity bias when it comes to social connection. We just don’t think the
positive impact of our behaviors is as positive as it is,” said Marisa Franco,
a psychologist and author of “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help
You Make — and Keep — Friends,” who did not work on the recent research.
“With a study like
this, I hope it will inspire more people to actually commit random acts of
kindness,” she said.
Underestimating the
power of small gestures
The recent study comprised
eight small experiments that varied in design and participants. In one, for
example, graduate students were asked to perform thoughtful acts of their own
choosing, such as giving a classmate a ride home from campus, baking cookies,
or buying someone a cup of coffee.
In another, researchers recruited 84 participants on
two cold weekends at the ice skating rink at Maggie Daley Park in Chicago. They
were given a hot chocolate from the snack kiosk and were told they could keep
it or give it to a stranger as a deliberate act of kindness. The 75
participants who gave away their hot chocolate were asked to guess how “big”
the act of kindness would feel to the recipient on a scale from 0 (very small)
to 10 (very large), and to predict how the recipient would rate their mood
(ranging from much more negative than normal to much more positive than normal)
upon receiving the drink. The recipients were then asked to report how they
actually felt using the same scales.
In that experiment — and across all others — the
people doing the kind thing consistently underestimated how much it was
actually appreciated, said one of the study’s authors, Amit Kumar, an assistant
professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.
“We believe these mis-calibrated expectations matter
for behavior,” he said. “Not knowing one’s positive impact can stand in the way
of people engaging in these sorts of acts of kindness in daily life.”
Another experiment in the study was devised to help
researchers better understand this tendency to underestimate the power of our
own kind acts. In it, Kumar and his team recruited 200 participants in Maggie
Daley Park. A control group of 50 participants received a cupcake simply for
participating in the study and rated their mood. Another 50 people who did not
receive a cupcake rated how they thought the receivers would feel after getting
a cupcake.
A third group of 50 people were told they could give
a cupcake away to strangers, and were asked to rate their own mood as well as
how they believed the recipients would feel. Once again, the researchers found
that those who got a cupcake as a result of a random act of kindness felt better
than the person on the giving end thought they would.
Also, people who got a cupcake because of an act of
kindness rated themselves higher on a happiness scale than those who got one
simply for participating in the study, suggesting they got an emotional boost
from the gesture, in addition to the cupcake itself.
How to show others
you care
The notion that kindness can boost well-being is hardly new. Studies have
shown that pro-social behavior — basically, voluntarily helping others — can
help lower people’s daily stress levels, and that simple acts of connection,
such as texting a friend, mean more than many of us realize. But researchers
who study kindness and friendship say they hope the new findings strengthen the
scientific case for making these types of gestures more often.
“I have found that
kindness can be a really hard sell,” said Tara Cousineau, a clinical
psychologist, meditation teacher and author of “The Kindness Cure: How The
Science of Compassion Can Heal Your Heart and Your World.” “People desire
kindness yet often feel inconvenienced by the thought of being kind.”
An act of kindness
is unlikely to backfire, she said, and in some instances, it can beget even
more kindness. Jennifer Oldham, 36, who lost her nine-year-old daughter,
Hallie, in July after a tree fell on the car she was in during a storm,
recently created a Facebook group — Keeping Kindness for Hallie — that
encourages participants to engage in random acts of kindness. People have
bought groceries and baby formula for others in Hallie’s honor. They’ve donated
school supplies and given hydrangeas to strangers.
“No small act goes
unnoticed,” Oldham said. “It will help your own heart, maybe even more than the
recipients.”
If you are not
already in the habit of performing random kind acts — or if it does not come
naturally to you — Franco said to start by thinking about what you like to do.
“It’s not about you
being like, ‘Oh, man, now I have to learn how to bake cookies in order to be
nice,’” she said. “It’s about: What skills and talents do you already have? And
how can you turn that into an offering for other people?”
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