You may live longer if others are kind to you. Others may live longer if you show them kindness in turn. If both sides are kind, we may all live longer. It seems we are past the days when this was a mere philosophical idiom, as now the science is in, telling us: kindness matters.
Proving the very unscientific-sounding saying, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” was probably not the initial purpose of the researchers’ who reached the above conclusions in a study; the various tests involved heart health, addiction, and the longevity of our DNA. But the truth about the power of kindness somehow managed to shine through anyway, and some chose not to ignore it. They then put their findings to the test in a more deliberate way.
The first to gain any meaningful traction, perhaps, was a study revolving around rabbits. Initially, it had nothing to do with the social environment of its subjects, but the way living beings treat one another soon came to the fore. In 1977, rabbits were fed high-cholesterol diets and tested for plaque buildup in the aorta and a shocking revelation emerged when one of the scientists who fed them, unwittingly treated them—with love.
When the results came in and were skewed beyond all understanding, the team was baffled at first. Somehow, one group of rabbits developed 60 percent less buildup than the rest and, although it took some figuring out, they eventually realized it was the researchers themselves who were affecting the outcome. And they started paying attention to the details.
The researcher in question “was an unusually kind and caring individual,” according to Kelli Harding, author of “The Rabbit Effect,” who wrote that “she talked to them, cuddled them and petted them” when she fed them. “She couldn’t help it. It’s just who she was.”
Then in 1978, a spa for rats opened our eyes to other impacts that our social environment has on our health. In studies of addiction, rats were found to self-administer morphine opioids more in austere lab cages than in enriched environments with more rats. Rat Park was built as a rodent housing colony 200 times the size of those tiny cages, based on the hypothesis that solitary confinement was actually causing more morphine consumption, thus confounding the data. Between 16 to 20 rats of both sexes lived in Rat Park, introducing socialization. There were food, toys, wheels, and room for mating.
Sweetened water laced with morphine was offered alongside plain water, and four groups of rats were allowed to drink what they pleased. Some lived in lab cages. Some lived in Rat Park. Some began their lives in Rat Park and were later placed in cages, and some vice versa. Ultimately, isolated caged males drank 19 times more morphine than those in the colony, leading researchers to conclude that the cages were a factor to consider in the self-administration of morphine.
Some have taken this experiment to mean something more. Author Johann Hari shared in a TED talk that the results spoke less about addiction and more to the need for social relationships, lending credence, perhaps, to the impact of kindness.
Nobel prize winners in this century have said as much. In the search to understand aging and anti-aging and factors affecting our DNA, Elizabeth Blackburn has studied the all-important protective caps guarding the ends of our chromosomes, preventing them from deteriorating when dividing. These caps are called telomeres. The enzymes that produce them are called telomerases.
“There is a general trend for longer telomeres among married people or those with partners. But we have also studied women who were formerly in relationships where they were domestically abused. Their telomeres were shorter, and the amount they were shorter related quantitatively to the number of years they were in the relationship. It probably relates to the stress of being in a threatening situation for a long period of time. One preliminary study has suggested having children may help telomere health but it has not yet been independently repeated, so it is early days.”
Critics point out that scientists have tried and failed to reproduce the results shown in both “The Rabbit Effect” and Rat Park experiments. Essentially the same trials may be contradictory in their results “solely because of a difference in socio-psychological environment,” the authors of the rabbit study noted. Some may snicker at the notion of this being a “paradigm shift,” preferring simply “a factor” instead.
While kindness may be subjective and not easily measured, its tangible impacts resound through history, across myriad cultures. Maybe soon it will whisper its way into science.
