Summary: People often underestimate how much positive emotion recipients experience when they receive random acts of kindness.
Source: UT Austin
New research from The University of Texas at Austin shows that small, everyday acts of kindness—like giving a friend a ride or bringing a meal to a sick relative—boost happiness for recipients more than givers expect. That gap in expectations helps explain why such prosocial behaviors can be rarer than their benefits would warrant.
Amit Kumar, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the UT Austin McCombs School of Business, together with Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, found that people who perform kind acts tend to focus on the physical object or task they provide, while recipients focus on the warm, social feeling the act conveys. This difference in perspective leads givers to systematically underestimate how much value their kindness creates for others, creating what the authors call “miscalibrated expectations.”
The study is published in advance online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and reports a mix of field and laboratory experiments designed to measure expectations, experienced emotions, and downstream behavioral consequences of kindness.
In one field study at Chicago’s Maggie Daley Park, researchers recruited 84 park visitors and offered them the choice to either keep a cup of hot chocolate from a kiosk or give it away to a stranger. Seventy-five participants chose to give their drink away. The researchers then delivered the hot chocolate to the designated strangers, informed them that the drink had been given by the study participant, and asked recipients to report their mood. The original givers also predicted how they thought the recipients would feel.
Givers underestimated the positive effect of their gesture. On a scale from -5 (much more negative than usual) to +5 (much more positive than usual), givers predicted recipients’ mood at an average of 2.7, while recipients reported an average mood of 3.5. “People aren’t way off base,” Kumar says. “They get that being kind to people makes them feel good. What we don’t get is how good it really makes others feel.”
A second field experiment using cupcakes confirmed these findings. The research team recruited 200 participants and divided them into groups to compare situations in which people received a treat directly from the experimenters or received one because another participant chose to give it away. Across conditions, recipients’ happiness was similar whether the cupcake arrived via a researcher or through someone’s voluntary act of kindness, and recipients who got a cupcake from a giver were happier than control recipients who simply received a treat as part of participation. Observers who predicted recipients’ feelings again underestimated how positive recipients actually felt.
The researchers interpret these results to mean that givers focus on the concrete object—the cup of hot chocolate or the cupcake—while recipients place extra weight on the interpersonal warmth signaled by the gesture. That added warmth increases recipients’ positive reactions beyond the value of the item itself.
Kumar and Epley also ran laboratory experiments to test whether receiving kindness changes subsequent behavior. In one lab study, participants either received a gift from the lab store or received a gift donated by another participant; afterward, all participants were asked to divide $100 between themselves and an anonymous recipient as part of a game. Those who had received a gift through another person’s random act of kindness allocated money more generously, splitting the $100 more evenly—on average giving away $48.02 compared with $41.20 from recipients who received a gift directly from the lab.
These findings suggest that kindness has ripple effects: recipients of prosocial acts not only feel better but can also become more prosocial themselves. “It turns out generosity can actually be contagious,” Kumar notes. “Receivers of a prosocial act can pay it forward. Kindness can actually spread.”
About this psychology research news
Author: Press Office
Source: UT Austin
Contact: Press Office – UT Austin
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.
Title: “A little good goes an unexpectedly long way: Underestimating the positive impact of kindness on recipients” by Amit Kumar et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Abstract
A little good goes an unexpectedly long way: Underestimating the positive impact of kindness on recipients
Performing random acts of kindness increases happiness for both givers and receivers, but givers consistently undervalue the positive impact their actions have on recipients. Across field and laboratory studies, people who performed acts of kindness predicted recipients would feel positively but systematically underestimated how positive recipients actually reported feeling. This miscalibration stems partly from an egocentric bias: givers evaluate the act in terms of the object or action, whereas recipients emphasize the interpersonal warmth conveyed. Underestimating this impact also leads givers to underpredict downstream effects—recipients who experience generosity are more likely to act generously toward others—suggesting that miscalibrated expectations may reduce the frequency of everyday prosocial actions and cause people to miss chances to improve collective well-being.