Science says it makes us both happier, healthier

Acts of kindness may not be that random after all. Science says being kind pays off.

Research shows that acts of kindness make us feel better and healthier. Kindness is also key to how we evolved and survived as a species, scientists say. We are hardwired to be kind.

Kindness “is as bred in our bones as our anger or our lust or our grief or as our desire for revenge,” said UC San Diego psychologist Michael McCullough, author of the forthcoming book “Kindness of Strangers.” It’s also, he said, “the main feature we take for granted.”

Scientific research is booming into human kindness and what scientists have found so far speaks well of us.

“Kindness is much older than religion. It does seem to be universal,” said University of Oxford anthropologist Oliver Curry, research director at Kindlab. “The basic reason why people are kind is that we are social animals.”

We prize kindness over any other value. When psychologists lumped values into 10 categories and asked people what was more important, benevolence or kindness, comes out on top, beating hedonism, having an exciting life, creativity, ambition, tradition, security, obedience, seeking social justice and seeking power, said University of London psychologist Anat Bardi, who studies value systems.

“We’re kind because under the right circumstances we all benefit from kindness,” Oxford’s Curry said.

When it comes to a species’ survival “kindness pays, friendliness pays,” said Duke University anthropologist Brian Hare, author of the new book “Survival of the Friendliest.”

The more friends you have, the more individuals you help, the more successful you are, Hare said.

UC Riverside psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky has put that concept to the test in numerous experiments over 20 years and repeatedly found that people feel better when they are kind to others, even more than when they are kind to themselves.

“Acts of kindness are very powerful,” Lyubomirsky said.

In one experiment, she asked subjects to do an extra three acts of kindness for other people a week and asked a different group to do three acts of selfkindness. They could be small, like opening a door for someone, or big. But the people who were kind to others became happier and felt more connected to the world.