Undervaluing kindness starts early

Acts of kindness make the giver, as well as the recipient, feel good. But research also shows that we systematically underestimate how well other people will respond to a range of positive acts, including giving compliments, expressing gratitude, providing social support, and performing a random act of kindness. This may result in us unnecessarily holding back from doing things that would boost other people's wellbeing, as well as our own.

So far, much of the research focusing on undervaluing kindness has been on adults. Now, though, Margaret Echelbarger at Stony Brook University and Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General that even children as young as four make the same mistake. The findings lead the authors to suggest that "miscalibrated psychological barriers to social connection may emerge early in life."

In the first of two experiments, the team recruited 50 children aged 8 to 17 as well as 50 adults at a museum. The participants were given two pencils or pens as a thank you for completing a task in another experiment, and agreed to give one to another museum visitor of their choice — a stranger, but from their same age group. After picking out the recipient, they used a scale of 1–10 to predict 'how big an act of kindness' this person would perceive their act to be, and also how much this would change the way they were feeling. 

The experimenter then approached the recipient, or an accompanying adult, when the recipient was a child. They explained that another visitor had decided to gift them the pencil or pen as a random act of kindness. Using the same scales as before, the recipient then reported 'how big' this act was to them and also its effect on their mood. The givers also reported any change to their own mood after making the gift. 

Echelbarger and Epley found that the children, as well as the adults, underestimated recipients' perceptions of scale of the act, and how much it improved their mood. As expected, the act of giving boosted the mood of both the children and adults participating.

In a second experiment that was very similar, but adapted for younger children, 51 givers aged 4 to 7 were paired with 51 recipients, aged 4 to 15, and a fresh group of adults was also recruited. Again, both child and adult givers underestimated how big their act of kindness would seem, and the boost it would make to the recipient's mood. As before, both children and adults also felt better after performing this random act of kindness. 

There were a few differences in the ratings given by children versus adults in these experiments. Overall, the children predicted — and experienced — the act of giving as being bigger than the adults did. Also, among the children, younger children felt even better after receiving the gift than older children, or adults. 

However, the main finding suggests that underestimating the value of kindness starts early in life. It might seem surprising that it should ever develop, but, as the team notes, there are other ways in which we fail to properly appreciate the positive effects of social interactions. For example, there's work finding that strangers who have just had a conversation tend to underestimate how much the other person liked them, and recent work found that this 'liking gap' affects children, as well as adults. 

In everyday life, there are all kinds of opportunities to be kind to other people. If children, as well as adults, can be taught that these acts have a bigger impact than we imagine, and change their behaviour accordingly, everybody should benefit. Christmas, which is traditionally a time of gift-giving, gratitude and support, could be the perfect time to start — but not stop. 

Read the article in full: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001433