Nice try: Good deeds do, in fact, go unpunished
Friday's print column:
When the conversation turned to New Year’s resolutions at a recent neighborhood gathering, a friend mentioned one that sounded so unambitious I thought she just might stick to it:
Perform three acts of kindness a week.
She and her family had just started, she said. Their definition is loose. A “kindness” has to be something out of the ordinary — not a routine household chore or daily obligation. Yet it needn’t otherwise be extraordinary — a friendly word, a little favor or even a courteous gesture can qualify. And at least two of the three have to be accomplished outside the home.
An awfully low bar? Surely most decent people would have three kindnesses in the bank by Tuesday afternoon and then be able to take the rest of the week off.
Well, the bar is evidently high enough.
That study, I learned when she later forwarded me a copy, was performed over four weeks last spring in 19 public school classrooms in Vancouver, British Columbia. Psychologists from the University of British Columbia and the University of California at Riverside randomly split a group of 400 9- to 11-year-olds and assigned half of them to visit three places a week and half of them to perform three kindnesses a week.
The kindness cohort received these examples by way of instruction:
Helping your parents cook dinner, helping your sister or brother clean their room, helping a friend with homework, visiting a grandparent, helping a parent with a younger sibling or helping your teacher hand out materials.
The results, published last month in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science, showed that members of the “pro-social” group gained an average of nearly one more friend than members of the control group.
“Our study demonstrates that doing good for others benefits the givers, earning them not only improved well-being but also popularity,” the authors wrote. One reason this is important is that “well-liked pre-adolescents exhibit more inclusive behaviors and less externalizing behaviors” such as bullying.
These findings are eye-opening but not surprising. When people are mindful of being kind to others, they’re more likable. When they’re more likable, they’re more popular. When they’re more popular, they feel better about life. And when they feel better about life, they’re more likely to be kind to others.
It’s an unvicious circle.
Therefore, my family borrowed the idea. And now every night at dinner, I play kindness cop, interrogating my wife and our high school sophomore twins about any good deeds they might have done during the day to boost their tally.
The key, we’re finding, is to keep standards low. For example, I took credit for stopping and waving to allow a car coming the other direction to turn in front of me and for picking two pieces of windblown litter off a neighbor’s yard. My daughter took credit for giving an encouraging “good job!” to a fellow driver’s education student who had not, in fact, done a very good job.
So far, the scorekeeping feels a bit forced and phony, giving even these banal good deeds a mercenary quality. Making a mental tally mark every time you perform a kindness diminishes the purity of the act, turning it at least a wee bit selfish.
But isn’t that the way with many good habits? You feel awkward, unnatural and self-conscious at first, sometimes almost paralyzed by the sense of being false to yourself.
But then, after a while, after the rewards become obvious, they become second nature — having good table manners, offering compliments when they’re earned, saying “please” and “thank you” — and the mindfulness disappears. You’re no longer trying to be a better person, you actually are a better person.
Starting with just three little kindnesses a week?
Maybe not, but it couldn’t hurt.
Kindness Counts: Prompting Prosocial Behavior in Preadolescents Boosts Peer Acceptance and Well-Being, December 26, 2012, PLOS ONE:
In a longitudinal experiment conducted in 19 classrooms in Vancouver, 9- to 11-year olds were instructed to perform three acts of kindness (versus visit three places) per week over the course of 4 weeks. Students in both conditions improved in well-being, but students who performed kind acts experienced significantly bigger increases in peer acceptance (or sociometric popularity) than students who visited places....Our study demonstrates that doing good for others benefits the givers, earning them not only improved well-being but also popularity. ...well-liked pre-adolescents exhibit more inclusive behaviors and less externalizing behaviors (i.e., less bullying) as teens
How did the researchers define "kindness" for the children? I wrote to Kristin Layous, a psychologist at University of California, Riverside, one of the authors, and she provided me with this:
From time to time, all of us perform acts of kindness for other people. An act of kindness is when we do something nice for someone else. Sometimes our generous (nice) act may be large (e.g., collecting clothes for the poor), and sometimes these acts may be small (e.g., opening a heavy door for someone). Sometimes, the person for whom we are doing it may know that it’s us (e.g., we help a friend carry her books), and sometimes they don’t (e.g., we leave a treat – like a nice snack - on a classmate’s desk). Examples of kind acts include helping your parents cook dinner, helping your sister or brother clean their room, helping a friend with homework, visiting a grandparent, helping a parent with a younger sibling, or helping your teacher hand out materials.