The Kindness of Gifting Strangers

"[These] miscalibrated expectations [may impede the likelihood that future] prosocial [behaviours will be performed]."

"Performers are not fully taking into account that their warm acts provide value from the act itself."

"The fact that you're being nice to others adds a lot of value beyond whatever the thing is."

"People aren't way off base. They get that being kind to people makes them feel good. What we don't get is how good it really makes others feel."

"It turns out generosity can actually be contagious. Receivers of a prosocial act can pay it forward. Kindness can actually spread."

Amit Kumar, assistant professor of marketing, Austin McCombs School of Business, University of Texas

earth.com

 

Research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General concludes that random acts of kindness tend to be relatively rare as a result of people underestimating how satisfying deeds in this category make those who benefit from them are made to feel. This lack of awareness of the beneficial result of an act of kindness to the recipient stems, apparently, from the impression people performing a good deed focus on the action or object they provide when receivers fixate on feelings of warmth the act itself generates.

 

In studying the issue, investigators recruited 84 study subjects from Maggie Daley Park in Chicago whee participants were requested to give a cup of hot chocolate from the park's kiosk to a stranger or alternatively reserve it for themselves. Of the total participants, seventy-five decided they would share the hot chocolate, delivered to the strangers by a researcher informing the recipients of the good deed's source.

 

In exchange, recipients were asked to describe their mood when the beverage was given them, while the givers were asked to rate how they thought recipients would feel -- on a scale from -5 (more negative than normal) to 5 (more positive than normal). Consistent underestimates of how good recipients of such an act of kindness would feel on the part of the givers was general, while rating their own expected mood on receiving the gift at an average of 2.7 compared to the actual average of 3.5 reported by recipients personally.

Another experiment taking place in the same venue saw researchers recruit two groups of 100 people. 50 of those in the control group were given a cupcake for participating, then asked to rate their mood. The remaining 50 participants were asked to rate thoughts of the people who received a cupcake. 50 participants in the second group of 10 were asked to give their cupcake to a random stranger, then to rate their own mood as well as how they felt recipients might feel on receiving a cupcake.

Participants judged, according to the ratings they came up with, that people who received cupcakes would be happy whether the cupcakes came from a researcher or a random act of kindness. In actual fact, whose who benefited from a random act of kindness were more pleased than those who were chosen by a researcher. 

A final experiment was geared to assess the consequences of kindness, where participants in a laboratory were given a gift from either the lab store or another participant before engaging in a game requiring them to divide $100 between themselves and an unknown study participants. Those who received a gift from another participant turned out more generous to others during the game, distributing an average of $48.02 in comparison to $41.02 from those who received a store gift.

People are touched by small kindnesses and led to greater generosity, new research shows.  Based on the research of Amit Kumar, Texas McCombs