Acts of kindness may not be so random after all. Science says being nice pays off.
Research shows that acts of kindness make us feel better and healthier. Kindness is also key to how we evolve and survive as a species, scientists say. We are programmed to be kind.
Kindness “is as nurtured in our bones as our anger, our lust, our pain, or our desire for revenge,” said University of California San Diego psychologist Michael McCullough, author of the upcoming book “Kindness from Strangers.” . It is also, he said, “the main feature we take for granted.”
Scientific research is booming in human goodness and what scientists have found so far speaks volumes about us.
“Kindness is much older than religion. It seems to be universal, “said Oxford University anthropologist Oliver Curry, research director at Kindlab.” The basic reason people are kind is that we are social animals. “
We value kindness over any other value. When psychologists grouped values into ten categories and asked people what was more important, benevolence or kindness, he stood out, overcoming hedonism, having an exciting life, creativity, ambition, tradition, security, obedience, seeking justice. social and seeking power, he said. Psychologist from the University of London, Anat Bardi, who studies value systems.
“We are kind because in the right circumstances we all benefit from kindness,” said Oxford’s Curry.
When it comes to the survival of a species, “goodness pays, kindness pays,” said Duke University evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare, author of the new book “Survival of the Friendliest.”
Kindness and cooperation work for many species, be they bacteria, flowers, or our fellow primate bonobos. The more friends you have, the more people you will help, the more successful you will be, Hare said.
For example, Hare, who studies bonobos and other primates, compares aggressive chimpanzees, which attack strangers, with bonobos where animals do not kill but help strangers. Male bonobos are much more successful at mating than their male chimpanzee counterparts, Hare said.
McCullough sees bonobos as more exceptions. Most animals are not friendly or helpful to strangers, they are only close relatives, making it one of the traits that set us apart from other species, he said. And that, he said, is due to the human ability to reason.
Humans realize that there is not much difference between our close relatives and strangers and that strangers may one day help us if we are kind to them, McCullough said.
Reasoning “is the secret ingredient, that’s why we donate blood when disasters strike” and why most industrialized nations spend at least 20% of their money on social programs such as housing and education, McCullough said.
Duke’s Hare also draws moms-bears to understand the evolution and biology of kindness and its aggressive and unpleasant downside. She said studies point to certain areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, the temporal parietal junction, and other spots activated or damped by emotional activity. The same places give us the ability to nurture and love, but also to dehumanize and exclude, he said.
When mother bears are feeding and raising their cubs, these areas in the brain become activated and allow them to be generous and loving, Hare said. But if someone approaches the mother bear at that time, it sets the brain’s threat mechanisms in the same places. The bear itself becomes the most aggressive and dangerous.
Hare said he sees this in humans. Some of the same people who are generous to family and close friends, when they feel threatened by strangers, get angrier. It signals the current polarization of the world.
“The more isolated groups are more likely to feel threatened by others and are more likely to morally exclude, dehumanize,” said Hare. “And that opens the door to cruelty.”
But overall, our bodies are not only programmed to be nice, but they reward us for being nice, the scientists said.
“Doing kindness makes you happier and being happier makes you do kind deeds,” said labor economist Richard Layard, who studies happiness at the London School of Economics and wrote the new book “Can We Be Happier?”
University of California professor of psychology Riverside Sonja Lyubomirsky has tested that concept in numerous experiments for 20 years and has repeatedly found that people feel better when they are kind to others, even more so than when they are kind to themselves. themselves.
“Acts of kindness are very powerful,” said Lyubomirsky.
In one experiment, he asked subjects to do three additional acts of kindness for others per week, and asked a different group to do three acts of kindness. They could be small, like opening a door for someone, or large. But people who were kind to others became happier and more connected to the world.
The same was true with money, using it to help others instead of helping yourself. Lyubomirsky said he believes it is because people spend too much time thinking and caring for themselves and when they think of others while doing acts of kindness, it redirects them away from their own problems.
Oxford’s Curry looked at peer-reviewed research like Lyubomirsky’s and found at least 27 studies that show the same thing: Being nice makes people feel better emotionally.
But it is not just emotional. It is physical.
Lyubomirsky said a study of people with multiple sclerosis found that they felt better physically when they helped others. He also found that in people who do more acts of kindness, the genes that trigger inflammation are rejected more than in people who don’t.
And he said that in future studies, he has found more antiviral genes in people who performed acts of kindness.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears.
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