essay on kindness is contagious

July 26, 2016

Kindness Contagion

Witnessing kindness inspires kindness, causing it to spread like a virus

By Jamil Zaki

People imitate not only the particulars of positive actions, but also the spirit underlying them. This implies is that kindness itself is contagious, and that that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.

ImageSource (MARS)

Conformity gets a bad rap, and it often deserves one. People abuse drugs, deface national parks , and spend $150,000 on tote bags after seeing others do so. Peer pressure doesn’t have to be all bad, though. People parrot each other’s voting , healthy eating , and environmental conservation efforts, too. They also “catch” cooperation and generosity from others. Tell someone that his neighbors donated to a charity, and that person will boost his own giving, even a year later . Such good conformity appears promising, but also narrow. Prior experiments, for instance, focus almost exclusively on people who observe others engage in a particular positive action (say, recycling) and later imitate that same action.

In a set of new studies , my colleagues and I highlight a broader flavor of positive conformity. We find that people imitate not only the particulars of positive actions, but also the spirit underlying them. This implies is that kindness itself is contagious, and that that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way. To be a potent social force, positive conformity requires such flexibility. Not everyone can afford to donate to charity or spend weeks on a service trip to Haiti. Witnessing largesse in others, then, could inhibit would-be do-gooders who feel that they can’t measure up. Our work suggests that an individual’s kindness can nonetheless trigger people to spread positivity in other ways.

In our study, people were given a $1 “bonus” in addition to their payment for completing the study. They then viewed brief descriptions of 100 charities, and decided whether they wanted to give any of their bonus to each one. After making each donation, participants saw what they believed was the average donation made by the last 100 people in the study. In fact, we manipulated these “group donations” to influence our participants’ beliefs. Some people learned that they lived in a generous world, where people donated about three fourths of their bonus to charity. Others learned that they lived in a stingy world, where people donated only about one fourth of their bonus.

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Like other scientists, we found that participants who believed others were generous became more generous themselves. We then tested our real question: does kindness contagion transcend mere imitation? In a follow up study, people observed others donating generously or stingily, and then completed what they thought was an unrelated “pen pal” task. They read a note in which another person described the ups and downs of his last month, and wrote back. People who had watched others donate generously wrote friendlier, more empathic, and more supportive notes than those who had watched others behave greedily. This suggests that kindness evolves as it diffuses, “infecting” behaviors through which new individual can express it.

People in our studies didn’t even need to see others do anything in order to catch their kindness. In another follow-up, people read stories about the suffering of homeless individuals. After each story, they saw what they believed was the average level of empathy past participants had felt in response to its protagonist. Some people learned that their peers cared a great deal, and others learned they were pretty callous. At the end of the study, we gave participants a $1 bonus, and the opportunity to donate as much of it as they liked to a local homeless shelter. People who believed others had felt empathy for the homeless cared more themselves, and also donated twice as much as people who believed others had felt little empathy.

We still don’t fully understand the psychological forces that power kindness contagion. One possibility, supported by our own work, is that people value being on the same page with others. For instance, we’ve found that when individuals learn that their own opinions match those of a group, they engage brain regions associated with the experience of reward, and that this brain activity tracks their later efforts to line up with a group. As such, when people learn that others act kindly, they might come to value kindness more themselves.

Of course, conformity is not always a force for good. Indeed, the ill will now blanketing our country often reflects people following each other’s lead. People who hold extreme attitudes voice them loudly; when moderate individuals fall in line, groups grow more entrenched and further apart from each other. The expanding , embittering gulf between left and right in American politics highlights the volatile results of such polarization. Our work, however, suggests that conformity can drive not just animosity, but also compromise, tolerance, and warmth.

The battle between dark and light conformity likely depends on which cultural norms people witness most often. Someone who is surrounded by grandstanding and antagonism will tend towards hostile and exclusionary attitudes herself. Someone who instead learns that her peers prize empathy will put more work to empathize herself , even with people who are different from her. By emphasizing empathy-positive norms, we may be able to leverage the power of social influence to combat apathy and conflict in new ways. And right now, when it comes to mending ideological divides and cultivating kindness, we need every strategy we can find.

Jamil Zaki is an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory . He is author of The War for Kindness .

image: (c) Dr David R Hamilton

I’ve written, and I speak a lot, about how we are contagious, although not in the usual sense of the word where we catch the cold from each other, but in how our emotions are contagious.

Social network research shows that if you feel happy, for instance, you not only infect your friends with happiness, but you also infect your friends’ friends and even your friends’ friends’ friends – out to a radius of three social steps. This is partly facilitated through mirror neurons, specialised cells in the brain that mirror our physical expressions of emotion.

But I set out to research this field because I wanted to see if I could find evidence to support the idea that a small group of people with compassion and kindness in their hearts could change the world. I wanted to know, specifically, if kindness is contagious.

To me it is pretty obvious. If someone does something kind for you, you feel better and are more likely to help out someone else. So that person’s kindness has been contagious in that it has infected you. Similarly, each time you do something kind for anyone, whether it’s a family member, friend or a stranger, your kindness is also contagious. Please know that it doesn’t stop with that person.

As you go about the rest of your day, repercussions of your kind behaviour continue to ripple on, just as a pebble dropped in a pond creates waves that lift a lily pad at the other side of the pond.

I believe that kindness is contagious in three ways. The first is that we feel elevated when someone helps us. We’re on the crest of an emotional wave for a short time and from this state we feel inspired to help other people.

Depending upon the situation, we might also feel relieved when someone helps us, especially if the situation we’re in is stressful. This reduces the stress or worry and we feel a surge of relief. Stress and worry often obstruct our real nature, which contains strong undercurrents of compassion and kindness. When stress goes away and is replaced with a feeling of relief, we’re more likely to act on opportunities to help others.

The third way is that when we see someone being kind, something inside tells us that this is what we should be doing and so we are inspired by the observation of another’s kind behaviour. This is called social contagion.

Kindness is natural to us. It’s odd, but much business has traditionally been done based on the mistaken idea that humans are inherently selfish and look out only for themselves. This has played a role in establishing the competition business model and also made it OK to gain at the expense of another’s loss. This, in my opinion, has played a big role in the economic challenges that face us now.

But actually, what’s natural to us is cooperating with each other, working together, and showing heaps of compassion and kindness. Our genetic ancestors survived hundreds of thousands of years because they learned to work together and to help each other. They thrived because they cared when someone was hurt and because they helped each other. We are here today because they learned that the best way to thrive as a species was to be kind.

And we can see the genetic wiring quite clearly today. Oxytocin is a hormone heavily involved in empathy, compassion and kind behaviour. Kindness creates emotional bonds, which elevate oxytocin levels. Studies show that there are 15 variants, or ‘colours’, in just a small section of the oxytocin receptor gene (that’s the gene that produces the sites on the cells that oxytocin binds to). Those with a lighter shade, so to speak, tend to show more kind behaviour, whereas those with a darker shade are less likely to help others. It is evidence like this that confirms, scientifically, that being kind is a natural thing in us, that the tendency has a strong genetic component. We are not wired to be selfish. We are wired to be kind.

Thus, the solution for the world economy is not in more competition – being bigger, better, and stronger than everyone else – but in more cooperation, just like the solutions to many of our own challenges in our lives lies in cooperation. The seeds of the path ahead lie in kindness towards one another because cooperation builds upon kindness. We need to extend our hands to others.

And just how contagious is kindness? Well, just like emotions, a Harvard study found that kindness also affects our friends, our friends’ friends, and our friends’ friends’ friends. Kindness ripples out to a radius of three social steps.

The research, led by Professor Nicholas Christakis, asked volunteers to play a business game known as the ‘Public Goods’ game, where each person has to put money into a public pot to benefit the community. When one person made a larger donation into the public pot it caused some of those in the group to make larger donations in the next round of the game, which they played with different people. The people in that round, observing the larger donation, then went on to raise their donations in the following round. And similarly, those in that round raised their donations in the next round. The effect of one person’s kind behaviour affected the tone of the game for three successive rounds.

So consider this: this is the holiday season, the season where we traditionally show more goodwill towards each other than normal, so with each act of goodwill you show someone, pause for a second and reflect on the fact that your act of kindness will ripple far further than just the environment you’re in.

My experience shows me that when you have this in mind, you’re more likely to show even more goodwill, and more often, because you start to realise that you really can make a difference.

So with this is mind, can a small group of dedicated people with compassion and kindness in their hearts change the world?

What do you think? I think we can!

[…] 1 Hamilton, D. (2011). David R Hamilton PhD | How Kindness is ContagiousDavid R Hamilton PhD. Retrieved 23 January 2021, from https://drdavidhamilton.com/how-kindness-is-contagious/ […]

[…] bestselling author and kindness scientist Dr. David R Hamilton explains, it’s actually really […]

[…] to Dr. David Hamilton, when people receive kindness, they feel compelled to do the same thing to others. Hence, people […]

Is kindness contagious?

Yellow paper butterfly on blue background

Imagine that you’re approaching your favorite coffee shop, when your eyes are suddenly drawn toward an interaction between two strangers happening just outside its doors. One man sits, leaning against the glass window, knees drawn to his chest, a plastic bag of belongings on the sidewalk. Above him, a woman, hand tenderly outstretched, offers the man a few dollar bills.

As you walk past the scene and enter the coffee shop, do you consider looking in your own wallet to see whether you also have something to offer the man on the sidewalk? Do you pull out a few bills and walk outside to offer them to him, wishing you could do more?

In effect: Does the simple act of witnessing such an interaction make you feel better about your neighborhood and community?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, you’re probably feeling what social scientists from UCLA’s Bedari Kindness Institute call “elevation” — an uplifting emotion often accompanied by a warm feeling in the chest, goosebumps, sometimes even tears. Hopefully, that feeling comes part and parcel with some “prosocial contagion,” or contagious kindness. Researchers from the institute, founded in 2019, have studied whether kindness can be contagious.

What they found, in short, is yes.

In a world that today seems overloaded with fractured discourse, hate speech, hate crimes, tension and trauma (read the accompanying story on the new UCLA Initiative to Study Hate ), we might all benefit from the reminder that our own positive actions have ripple effects.

Daniel Fessler, director of the institute (which is housed in the UCLA College’s Division of Social Sciences), says, “Each of us is kind to someone, and therefore has the potential to be kind to everyone — even those with whom we differ.”

In the study, 8,000 people participated in 15 experiments. Eleven were conducted online, and four were done in person via on-the-street interviews in Los Angeles. Half of the participants watched a viral video titled “Unsung Hero,” which follows a young man as he goes through his daily routine, stopping often to help others. The other half watched a control video of a man performing impressive parkour stunts in a show of athleticism.

Those who participated in person received five $1 bills as payment for their time. At the end, researchers handed each a padded envelope and invited them to make a donation to UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital. The researchers then turned away so people could anonymously choose how much money, if any, to put inside before sealing the packet.

People who viewed the “Unsung Hero” video gave 25 percent more to the charity than those who saw the athletic-stunt video.

Those surveyed online also got the chance to show their propensity for contagious kindness. Each was asked a hypothetical question: If your employer were to match donations to a worthy cause, would you be inclined to give? Those who viewed the “Unsung Hero” video were significantly more likely to commit to charitable giving: Sixty-seven percent said they would donate to charities if backed by their companies. For people who only saw the parkour video, only 47 percent answered the same way.

The insights derived from the study continue to blossom into new projects that have the potential to make our world a kinder place. Most recently, researchers at the Bedari Kindness Institute teamed up with UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers and YouTube Kids to curate a series of videos derived from this research, in an effort to inspire K-12 kids to show kindness to others as a way to negate bullying.

Released during October’s anti-bullying month, the videos promote kind, caring behavior in everyday situations. Hosted by actress Tabitha Brown, the collection is anchored by two short animated films showing people doing good deeds, followed by videos of kids who describe witnessing or performing acts of kindness. Stacey Freeman, executive director of the institute, developed a parent resource guide to help inspire kindness in children’s everyday actions. She also recruited kids ages 6-12 to create selfie-style videos as a relatable way for kids to see other kids talking about the importance of kindness.

“As a scholarly organization,” she says, “we are always seeking to translate research and knowledge into real-world applications.”