In late August, Erin Alexander, 57, was standing in the parking lot of a Target store in Fairfield, Calif., crying. His sister-in-law had recently died and Alexander was having a rough day.
A barista who worked at Starbucks inside the establishment as well. The espresso machine had broken down and she was clearly stressed. Alexander – who stopped crying and went in for some caffeine – smiled, ordered an iced green tea and told the girl to hang on. After receiving her order, she noticed a message on the glass: “Erin, your soul is golden” – the barista scribbled next to a heart.
“I’m not sure I know exactly what ‘your soul is golden’ means,” said Alexander, who laughed and cried as he recalled the incident.
But the warmth of that small, unexpected gesture, coming from a stranger who had no idea what she was going through, touched her deeply.
“Of course I remained very sad,” he said. “But that little thing made the rest of my day better.”
New findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in August, confirm that experiments like Alexander’s can be powerful. Researchers have found that people who perform random acts of kindness tend to underestimate how much recipients will appreciate them. And they believe that a miscalculation can prevent many people from doing good 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 psychologist Marisa Franco, author of “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make –and Keep– Friends”, which did not work on the research cited.
“I hope that a study like this one will inspire more people to actually do random acts of kindness,” she said.
The great power of small gestures
The recent study included eight small experiments that varied in design and number of participants. In one, for example, graduate students were asked to perform thoughtful acts of their own choosing, such as giving a classmate a ride, baking cookies, or buying someone a cup of coffee.
In another, researchers recruited 84 participants over two cold weekends at the Maggie Daley Park ice skating rink in Chicago. They were given a hot chocolate from the snack kiosk and told they could keep it or give it to a stranger as a deliberate act of kindness.
The researchers asked the 75 participants who donated their hot chocolate to guess how “big” the act of kindness would be for the recipient on a scale of 0 to 10 and to predict how the recipient would rate their own mood (ranging from much more negative than normal to much more positive than normal) when receiving the drink. They then asked those who received the hot chocolates to report how they really felt using the same scales.
In that experiment — and all others — people who practiced kindness consistently underestimated how much kindness 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 that these miscalibrated expectations are important for behavior,” he said. “Not knowing your own positive impact can get in the way of people who practice these kinds of kindnesses in everyday life.”
Another experiment in the study was designed to help researchers better understand this tendency to underestimate the power of our own acts.
In it, Kumar and his team recruited 200 participants in Maggie Daley Park. A control group of 50 participants received cupcakes simply for participating in the study and assessing their mood. Another 50 people who did not receive cupcakes rated how they thought recipients would feel after receiving the cupcakes.
A third group of 50 people were told they could give cupcakes to strangers, rate their own mood and say they believed the recipients would feel. Once again, researchers found that those who received cupcakes as a result of a random act of kindness felt better than the givers thought they would.
In addition, people who received cupcakes as a result of an act of kindness rated higher on a happiness scale than those who received them simply for participating in the study, suggesting that they received an emotional boost from the gesture in addition to the cupcakes themselves.
“People tend to think that what they’re giving away is small, maybe it’s relatively inconsequential,” Kumar said. “But recipients are less likely to think that way. They consider the gesture significantly more important because they are also thinking about the fact that someone has done something nice for them.”
How to show that you care
The idea that kindness can increase well-being is not new. Studies have shown that prosocial behavior—basically, helping others voluntarily—can help lower people’s daily stress levels, and that simple acts of connection, like texting a friend, mean more than just that. that many of us imagine.
But researchers who study kindness and friendship say they hope the new findings will strengthen the scientific case for making these gestures more often.
“I found that kindness can be very hard to sell,” said Tara Cousineau, clinical psychologist, meditation teacher, and author of “The Kindness Cure: How The Science of Compassion Can Heal Your Heart and Your World.” how the science of compassion can heal your heart and your world, in Portuguese).
“People desire goodness, but are often uncomfortable with the idea of being good.”
Stress can also keep people from being nice to others, she said, just as the “little judgmental voice” in some people’s heads makes them question whether their gesture or gift will be misunderstood or will make the recipient feel pressured to do so. to give back.
“When the impulse of kindness arises, we think too much,” Cousineau said.
But an act of kindness is unlikely to have the opposite effect, she said, and in some cases it can generate even more kindness.
Jennifer Oldham, 36, who lost her 9-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 , in Portuguese)– which encourages participants to engage in random acts of kindness. People bought groceries and infant formula for others in Hallie’s honor, donated school supplies and gave hydrangeas to strangers.
“No small act goes unnoticed,” said Oldham. “It will help your own heart, perhaps even more than the recipients.”
Sometimes it’s something much more silly. When Kimberly Britt, president of Phoenix College in Arizona, left for a week’s vacation in July, her vice president of student affairs hid 60 rubber chickens in her office.
“She made it so that I wouldn’t find them right away, and it took me a while,” she said. “But it was supposed to bring a smile to my day when I got back.”
It worked, and has since inspired Britt to start a random acts of kindness challenge on campus. They have recorded 200 acts of kindness so far: a teacher who went out of his way to talk to a student who was having emotional problems, a staff member who brought food to the office, another who made coffee for all of his colleagues.
If you’re not already in the habit of performing random kind acts — or if it doesn’t come naturally to you — Franco said to start by thinking about what you enjoy doing.
“It’s not like, ‘Oh, gosh, now I have to learn how to bake cookies to be cool,'” she said. “It’s about: what skills and talents do you have? And how can you turn them into an offering to other people?”
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
I have over 3 years of experience working in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have been an author at News Bulletin 247 for the past 2 years. I mostly cover technology news and have a keen interest in keeping up with the latest trends in the industry. I am a highly motivated individual who is always looking to improve my skills and knowledge.
