IT PAYS TO BE KIND
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 hard-wired 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 University of California 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 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, kindness came 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,” Curry said.
When it comes to a species’ survival “kindness pays, friendliness pays”, said Duke University evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare, author of the new book Survival of the Friendliest.
Kindness and co-operation work for many species, whether it’s bacteria, flowers or our fellow primate bonobos. The more friends you had, the more individuals you helped, the more successful you were, said Hare, who studies bonobos and other primates. He compares aggressive chimpanzees, which attack outsiders, to bonobos where the animals don’t kill but help out strangers. Male bonobos are far more successful at mating than their male chimp counterparts.
McCullough sees bonobos as more the exceptions. Most animals weren’t kind or helpful to strangers, just close relatives, so it was one of the traits that separated us from other species, he said. And that, he said, was because of the human ability to reason.
Humans realised there was not much difference between our close relatives and strangers, and that someday strangers could help us if we were kind to them, McCullough said.
Reasoning “is the secret ingredient, which is why we donate blood when there are disasters” and why most industrialised nations spent at least 20% of their money on social programmes, such as housing and education, McCullough said.
Hare also points to mama bears to understand the evolution and biology of kindness and its aggressive nasty flip side. He said studies pointed to certain areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, temporal parietal junction and other spots as either activated or dampened by emotional activity. The same places gave us the ability to nurture and love, but also dehumanise and exclude, he said.
When mother bears were feeding and nurturing their cubs, those areas in the brain were activated and allowed them to be generous and loving, Hare said. But if someone came near the mother bear at that time, it set off the brain’s threat mechanisms in the same places. The bear becomes its most aggressive and dangerous.
Hare said he saw that in humans. Some of the same people who were generous to family and close friends, became angrier when they felt threatened by outsiders. He pointed to the polarisation of the world.
“More isolated groups are more likely to be feel threatened by others and they are more likely to morally exclude, dehumanise,” Hare said. “And that opens the door to cruelty.”
But overall, our bodies aren’t just programmed to be nice, they reward us for being kind, scientists said.
“Doing kindness makes you happier and being happier makes you do kind acts,” said labour economist Richard Layard, who studies happiness at the London School of Economics and wrote the book Can We Be Happier?
University of California Riverside psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky has put the concept to the test in numerous experiments over 20 years and repeatedly found that people felt better when they were kind to others, even more than when they were kind to themselves.
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 self-kindness. They could be small, like opening a door for someone, or big. The people who were kind to others became happier and felt more connected to the world.
The same occurred with money, using it to help others versus helping yourself. Lyubomirsky thought it was because people spent too much time thinking and worrying about themselves and when they thought of others while doing acts of kindness, it redirected them away from their own problems.
Curry analysed peer-reviewed research like Lyubomirsky’s and found at least 27 studies showing the same thing: being kind makes people feel better emotionally. But it’s not just emotional. It’s physical.
Lyubomirsky said a study of people with multiple sclerosis found they felt better physically when helping others. She also found that in people doing more acts of kindness the genes that triggered inflammation were turned down more than in people who didn’t. And she said in upcoming studies, she’s found more antiviral genes in people who performed acts of kindness.