Underestimating Kindness Can Hinder Us From Being Kind

Sincere gift giving is a pleasure for both the recipient and the giver. Fei Meng

Kindness can be as simple as cheerfully saying good morning to the bus driver, giving your colleagues a box of chocolate to boost the office’s mood, or reaching out to a struggling friend. When we look closely enough, opportunities to be kind are present all around us. But sometimes, we miss out on them as we are concerned about other people’s responses, or undervalue how much of a difference they could make.

A new study published by the Association for Psychological Science revealed that both children and adults tend to underestimate the positive impact of kindness.

In an experiment, researchers asked 101 children and 99 adults to perform an act of kindness in a museum in Chicago. They were given two museum-branded pencils and were offered an opportunity to give one to another person in the museum.

If participants chose to give the item away, they could choose a visitor they did not know from their same age group and then complete an online survey. This survey asked givers to predict “how big an act of kindness” seemed to them and how they expected their recipient would feel.

What better gift this Christmas than a peace offering? JESHOOTS.COM/Unsplash

Once the participants gave out the pencils, researchers would approach the recipient and explain that another participant chose to give a pencil to them as a random act of kindness. Recipients then answered “how big” the act of kindness seemed to them and reported their mood.

The authors then compare the two surveys and found that both children as young as four–seven years and adults “significantly” underestimated how much their recipient would value their act of kindness and how positive they would feel afterwards. Notably, the positive mood experienced by recipients who received gifts from children even doubled the expectations of the children themselves. However, children and adolescents often rated the act as bigger than adults.

Psychological Barriers to Social Connection

The researchers, Margaret Echelbarger from the State University of New York and Nicholas Employ from the University of Chicago, said that the result shows “miscalibrated expectations” from prosociality—another term for acts of kindness—arise early in development.

They argued that “psychological barriers” to random acts of kindness may impede such actions and that “social cognition may create a misplaced barrier to social connection.”

Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

“These results suggest that even if the givers in our experiments had been able to interact with their recipients while performing their act of kindness, they may still not have been able to recognize how positive recipients felt,” the authors noted.

“Positive social connections are critical for happiness and health among children, adolescents, and adults alike, and yet reaching out to connect with others can sometimes be hindered by concerns about how a recipient might respond.

“Expectations that encourage avoidance may keep people from having the very experiences that would calibrate their expectations.

“In addition, people may not recognize the positive impact they have had on another person even after going through an interaction with them. Strangers who have just had a conversation tend to underestimate how much their partner actually liked them … another social cognitive bias that has recently been documented in young children over age five as well (but not among four-year-olds).”

Underestimating the Good, Overestimating the Awkwardness

This is not the first study that looked into how our minds perceive acts of kindness.

In a paper published in June 2018, published on Psychological Science, researchers conducted similar experiments about writing gratitude letters. Expressers were asked to predict how “surprised, happy, and awkward” recipients would feel, while recipients were asked to report how receiving an expression of gratitude actually made them feel.

If you keep old letters, you are giving a gift to historians of the future. Shutterstock

The result was interesting: The authors said people who wrote letters “significantly underestimated how surprised recipients would be about why expressers were grateful, overestimated how awkward recipients would feel, and underestimated how positive recipients would feel.”

The researchers went on to say that expected awkwardness and mood were both correlated with participants’ willingness to express gratitude.

“Wise decisions are guided by an accurate assessment of the expected value of action,” the study said.

“Underestimating the value of prosocial actions, such as expressing gratitude, may keep people from engaging in behaviour that would maximize their own—and others’—well-being.”

While it feels good to be good to others, people can be reluctant to be good to others or undervalue such actions due to a difference in perspectives.

Divergence in Perspectives

Another study by Epley published in February on Current Directions in Psychological Science looked more closely into why this is the case.

The authors found that those who carry out acts of kindness often attend more to “the competence of their actions, whereas recipients attend relatively more to the warmth conveyed.”

“Failing to fully appreciate the positive impact of prosociality on others may keep people from behaving more prosocially in their daily lives to the detriment of both their own and others’ well-being,” the authors noted.

“Miscalibrated social cognition not only could make people appear more selfish than their actual prosocial motivation would lead them to be, but also could lead people to miss easy opportunities to enhance both their own and others’ well-being.”