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from the you-got-to-try-a-little-kindness dept.
People are touched by small kindnesses and led to greater generosity, new research shows:
Anyone who has given a friend a ride, baked cookies for a sick family member, or even bought a stranger a cup of coffee knows acts of kindness can enhance happiness.
But such random acts of kindness are still somewhat rare. Texas McCombs Assistant Professor of Marketing Amit Kumar set out to discover why people don't engage in prosocial acts — such as helping, sharing, or donating — more often.
In a new study, Kumar, along with Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, found that people often underestimate how good these actions make recipients feel. Givers tend to focus on the object they're providing or action they're performing, while receivers instead concentrate on the feelings of warmth the act of kindness has conjured up. Givers' "miscalibrated expectations" — that receivers are solely concerned with the gift itself — can function as a barrier to performing more prosocial behaviors.
[...] The researchers' findings offer practical implications and advice for people going about their everyday lives. When people realize their small actions have a large impact, they can choose to be nicer and carry out more acts of random kindness, enhancing both their well-being and that of others.
"Positive interpersonal contact is a powerful source of happiness," Kumar says. "It will make you feel better and someone else feel better, even better than you think they'll feel. A little good doesn't just go a long way — it goes an unexpectedly long way."
See also: Friends Enjoy Being Reached Out to More Than We Think
Journal Reference:
Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2022). A little good goes an unexpectedly long way: Underestimating the positive impact of kindness on recipients. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 10.1037/xge0001271
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday August 22 2022, @05:34PM (5 children)
I have to wonder if this is why economic transactions work in the large-scale. if you have $20 and give it to someone else, and they give it to someone else, everyone gets a little bit of kindness. The money could even make it all the way back to the first person and while financially nothing changes, everyone's day might feel a little nicer. We obviously can't have that, which is why US income tax law takes a little bit out of every transaction, which evens things out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2022, @06:41PM
This^^ Another good reason to keep cash around. If your hypothetical $20 was a twenty dollar bill, it could circulate un-taxed. If it was some sort of electronic payment* with an app mediating each transaction, little fees would take some every time the favor was passed along.
*PayPal friend & family transfers, funded from a PayPal balance, might be one of the very few exceptions?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday August 22 2022, @07:10PM (1 child)
The reason why they do it that way is that it would be either incredibly complicated to figure out which dollars to tax at which place, or they'd have to ditch that system of taxation completely and go after things like possessions and activities. And that itself is also problematic.
Money circulates through a healthy economy regularly. The bills themselves are just a way of tracking where it's presently located so that people are able to split barter transactions between more parties and separate when you're giving a good or service versus the part party is getting or receiving a good or service.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday August 22 2022, @08:45PM
Also, perhaps, if you have people who don't get motivated by giving or receiving kindness, they have less of an innate motivation to circulate money regularly -- say, via paying out occasional bonuses to your home help or charitable acts in the small. Then people like that might just accumulate money and decrease money circulation, degrading the health of the economy.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by therainingmonkey on Tuesday August 23 2022, @04:25PM (1 child)
If I look after your dog while you're away and you lend me a powertool, we both feel a kind of debt to the other which doesn't exactly balance out, and we enter a reciprocal spiral. By introducing money, the debt is calculated exactly, paid off completely and forgotten about; therefore he suggests only non-financial exchanges build community.
I don't know how you'd test it, but that's only one of the many intriguing theses in a fascinating book.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday August 23 2022, @06:48PM
Ask women? I think they have more of a sense that the dog-watching and power-tool lending are (to mismangle a metaphor) have elements more like covalent bonds than ionic bonds, but that description is a little fuzzy. The dog-watching and power-tool lending do involve caretaking for important things belonging to each other as well.
One similar example is eBay reputation. You could buy and sell a bunch of Visa gift cards on the site and while no actual money would change hands, it would be simple enough to inexpensively grow your reputation. That reputation then makes you a more desirable buyer and seller, in a market model that encompasses buyers and sellers along with goods and services. Escrow services obviate the need for trust, but you could say that the option to not use them sort of "creates a market" in reputation or trust.