The Costs and Benefits of Kindness

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 (N=16,064). As predicted, benefit and cost (and their interaction) are positively related to the kindness of the act (pseudo R2≈0.73), for all types of recipients. Less efficient acts are considered kinder than more efficient acts. We discuss the implications of these findings for the effectiveness of altruism, and the prospects for further research on the nature of kindness.