The unexpected power of random acts of kindness

In late August, Erin Alexander, 57, sat in the parking lot of a Target store in Fairfield, California, and wept. Her sister-in-law had recently died, and Alexander was having a hard day.

A barista working at the Starbucks inside the Target was too. The espresso machine had broken down and she was clearly stressed. Alexander — who had stopped crying and gone inside for some caffeine — smiled, ordered an iced green tea, and told her to hang in there. After picking up her order, she noticed a message on the cup: "Erin," the barista had scrawled next to a heart, "your soul is golden."

"I'm not sure I even necessarily know what 'your soul is golden' means," said Alexander, who laughed and cried while recalling the incident.

But the warmth of that small and unexpected gesture, from a stranger who had no inkling of what she was going through, moved her deeply.

"Of course, I was still really sad," Alexander said. "But that little thing made the rest of my day."

New findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in August, corroborate just how powerful experiences such as Alexander's can be. Researchers found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.

"We have this negativity bias when it comes to social connection. We just don't think the positive impact of our behaviors is as positive as it is," said Marisa Franco, a psychologist and author of "Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends," who did not work on the recent research.

Underestimating the power of small gestures

The recent study comprised eight small experiments that varied in design and participants. In one, for example, graduate students were asked to perform thoughtful acts of their own choosing, such as giving a classmate a ride home from campus, baking cookies or buying someone a cup of coffee.

In another, researchers recruited 84 participants on two cold weekends at the ice skating rink at Maggie Daley Park in Chicago. They were given a hot chocolate from the snack kiosk and were told they could keep it or give it to a stranger as a deliberate act of kindness. The 75 participants who gave away their hot chocolate were asked to guess how "big" the act of kindness would feel to the recipient on a scale from 0 (very small) to 10 (very large), and to predict how the recipient would rate their mood (ranging from much more negative than normal to much more positive than normal) upon receiving the drink. The recipients were then asked to report how they actually felt using the same scales.

In that experiment — and across all others — the people doing the kind thing consistently underestimated how much it was actually appreciated, said one of the study's authors, Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

"We believe these miscalibrated expectations matter for behavior," he said. "Not knowing one's positive impact can stand in the way of people engaging in these sorts of acts of kindness in daily life."

A third group of 50 people were told they could give a cupcake away to strangers, and were asked to rate their own mood as well as how they believed the recipients would feel. Once again, the researchers found that those who got a cupcake as a result of a random act of kindness felt better than the person on the giving end thought they would.

Also, people who got a cupcake because of an act of kindness rated themselves higher on a happiness scale than those who got one simply for participating in the study, suggesting they got an emotional boost from the gesture, in addition to the cupcake itself.

"People tend to think that what they are giving is kind of little, maybe it's relatively inconsequential," Kumar said. "But recipients are less likely to think along those lines. They consider the gesture to be significantly more meaningful because they are also thinking about the fact that someone did something nice for them."

How to show others you care

The notion that kindness can boost well-being is hardly new. Studies have shown that pro-social behavior — basically, voluntarily helping others — can help lower people's daily stress levels, and that simple acts of connection, such as texting a friend, mean more than many of us realize. But researchers who study kindness and friendship say they hope the new findings strengthen the scientific case for making these types of gestures more often.

Stress can also keep people from being kind to others, she said, as can the "little judgy voice" in people's heads that causes them to question whether their gesture or gift will be misinterpreted, or whether it will make the recipient feel pressured to pay it back.

"When the kindness impulse arises," Cousineau said, "we totally overthink it."

An act of kindness is unlikely to backfire, she said, and in some instances, it can beget even more kindness. Jennifer Oldham, 36, who lost her 9-year-old daughter, Hallie, in July after a tree fell on the car she was in during a storm, recently created a Facebook group — Keeping Kindness for Hallie — that encourages participants to engage in random acts of kindness. People have bought groceries and baby formula for others in Hallie's honor. They've donated school supplies and given hydrangeas to strangers.

"No small act goes unnoticed," Oldham said. "It will help your own heart, maybe even more than the recipients."

Sometimes, it is something much sillier. When Kimberly Britt, president of Phoenix College in Arizona, left for a week of vacation in July, her vice president of student affairs hid 60 rubber chickens in her office.

It did — and has since inspired Britt to begin a random-acts-of-kindness challenge on campus. They have recorded 200 acts of kindness so far, including a teacher who went above and beyond to spend time with a student who was struggling emotionally; a staff member who brought food to the office; and another who made coffee for all of their colleagues.

If you are not already in the habit of performing random kind acts — or if it does not come naturally to you — Franco said to start by thinking about what you like to do.