Science proves kindness is contagious

Oh wretched, wretched humankind. What hope do we have? After reading McMafia, Misha Glenny’s book about global organised crime, it seemed to me there was nothing human beings wouldn’t do for money. If there was a sniff of a market, an unscrupulous opportunist would pop up to provide the merchandise – money, minerals, workers, guns, tobacco, fuel, drugs, women, wombs...

Nothing, it seems, is off-limits. And around the globe, governments were participants, or at least enablers, in enterprises which stripped everyone involved of something important. (In the case of the pillagers, it’s their own humanity.)

After I’d finished the book, I descended into an existential funk, a soup of melancholy, cynicism and WTF? Truly, what was the point?

Then, on a sweltering spring day, in a bush clearing where low-flying kereru¯ thwumped overhead, hope snuck back.

It was during a desperately sad occasion – my friend’s brother had died and we were celebrating his tooshort life. Hundreds had turned up to the ceremony and mourners had to form a queue to speak about his cleverness, his wit, his love for his family and – a recurring them – his kindness.

The final speaker, a young man with a slight accent I couldn’t discern, emotionally recounted how my friend’s brother had touched his life, made him the person he is today. Turns out, he’d been a refugee and the ongoing kindness shown by the man whose life we were celebrating, and his family, had had a profound effect.

Such kindness is a powerful thing, but it is also highly infectious, a bit like a plague for good. Jamil Zaki, Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, carried out studies which concluded that essentially, kindness begets kindness.

‘‘We find that people imitate not only the particulars of positive actions, but also the spirit underlying them,’’ he wrote in

Scientific American. ‘‘This implies that kindness itself is contagious, and that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.’’

My friend’s brother did not leave mansions with helipads, a property portfolio he’d been assembling since he was 12 or a fleet of vanity vehicles. He left something altogether more valuable. His kindness not only affected those whose lives he bettered, it also spread into the world like a positive virus, helping all of us to become better people. The best legacy of all.