The Costs and Benefits of Kindness

Abstract

What is kindness, and what makes an act kind? Previous theoretical and empirical research suggests that the kindness of an act depends not only on the benefits the act provides, but also the costs incurred to provide those benefits. Here we test these predictions by having 1,692 candidate acts of kindness (for family, friends, colleagues, and strangers) rated for perceived cost, benefit, and kindness, by a large sample of the US & UK public (Ntotal=16,064). As predicted, we found that benefit, cost, and benefit:cost interaction all positively predicted the kindness of the act (pseudo R2≈0.73), and did so for all types of recipients. We also found that less efficient acts are considered kinder than more efficient acts. We discuss the implications of these findings for discussions about the effectiveness of altruism, and the prospects for further research on the nature of kindness.