Post No.: 0546
Furrywisepuppy says:
For most people, kindness feels intrinsically rewarding because kindness is evolutionarily necessary in order to help raise children. It’s a key part of reciprocal altruism, as well as sexual selection i.e. kindness is attractive – a kind person, as opposed to a selfish person, is less likely to cheat on you, is more likely to devote more resources to raising offspring, and so on.
According to experiments, people give more if they have less time to think about how much to give i.e. when they act more on instinct – suggesting that kindness evolved to be innate because it was overall important and advantageous to be kind for the survival of the species.
For being a social species, humans evolved for each other (read Post No.: 0354) and must overall take care of each other or perish – especially the offspring. Humans are a species that normally gives birth to only one baby at a time, any ‘runts’ aren’t left to die, and it can take a couple of decades before a child becomes independent. Heterosexual women tend to seek a balance between the costs and benefits of choosing a more ‘masculine’ partner and a kind partner, but a kind partner more often wins when they finally seek someone to settle down with.
Spending on others promotes joy to all – including the giver. Giving to others, whether it’s our resources or emotional support, fires up the same reward circuitry in our brains as gaining things that we think will make us happy. Activating the brain regions associated with pleasure, social connection and trust (that warm glowing feeling) raises our endorphin levels and induces a ‘helper’s high’!
The amount of giving is mostly irrelevant and it doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are – voluntary acts of kindness will make you feel happier. Being generous improves our self-perception and sense of status within our circles. After carrying out an act of kindness, you see yourself as more interconnected with others in a good way, and less stressed or fearful about others – for we give to those we like, and tend to like those we give to. If we need a boost then taking a moment to remember our past acts of kindness boosts our happiness levels too.
You make friends by being generous and this builds up a network in case you need support in the future i.e. kind behaviours lead to a virtuous cycle in the community, and unkind behaviours lead to the opposite. So if there’s a feeling of a vicious cycle of ill will between people in your group or between groups – be the morally bigger person or group and start the cycle of kindness. Woof!
We’re happier giving gifts to those we have strong social ties with than weak ones, but gifts make any bond closer and stronger. We feel extremely happy if people enjoy the things we do or give to them, such as our gifts or the food we cook. We like them more if they like our gifts or gestures.
The best acts of giving don’t feel like an obligation, they allow us to connect with others and we can see the positive impact of our help – so, if possible, choose activities where you get to spend time with the recipient(s) and donate to charities that clearly explain where your money is going to. Connecting whilst giving, by having both giver and recipient being physically present together and fully attentive when a gift or favour is being bestowed, is therefore better.
A sense of community can be made with strangers too. If you run a charity that helps people in need either close to home or abroad – try to make each donor’s donations go to a particular child or family if possible, and create a direct dialogue between the donor and recipient, such as the recipients returning with personal ‘thank you’ notes and updates on their lives. Emphasise the specific, real-world impact of people’s donations. This all makes people more willing to give again.
So giving under our own accord is best. Encouraged or common taxes, duties or responsibilities are the next best. But aggressively imposed, coerced or forced surrendering isn’t good – this will actually make people feel worse. Taxation at source (pay-as-you-earn or PAYE) is better than having the money then having to relinquish a portion of it. Something else that could be helpful is stating on payslips where the money is specifically going towards, what benefits it’ll bring, and include a ‘thank you’ on it too – this will improve community feeling, happiness and help people to understand that they make real, tangible and positive impacts around them every day for paying their fair share of taxes.
Happiness could be defined as the difference between what we expect and what we get – so don’t expect reciprocation whenever you give and you’ll feel happier. (Of course, if you don’t get, at least attempted, reciprocation over time then firstly consider the other person’s circumstances, and if you think they’re deliberately being selfish then don’t be exploited. But do quickly forgive as soon as they show signs of thoughtfulness.)
Seeing kind acts from others increases our faith in humanity and everyone’s sense of common humanity. People tend to feel that warm glowing feeling even when watching someone else do a good deed – even stranger to stranger, with no physical benefit to the observer – and after watching this, they’ll more likely become kind to others in the future themselves. A similar but reversed effect happens when people watch and copy bad deeds. This is simply down to our surrounding culture, and everybody is both consciously and subconsciously influenced by it.
So it’s definitely in our nature to receive a warm, lovely feeling whenever we see good deeds, courage and kindness happen, even if we don’t benefit from the interaction at all. I suppose we do benefit from it indirectly because seeing kindness amongst others and around us signals that there’s peace in the community. Some people think that we don’t live in a moral world, and feel disgust whenever they see people behave in cruel, selfish or petty ways – but when we see people behaving kindly to one another, we get a thrilling sense that maybe we do live in a moral world!
Giving makes us feel good, promotes cooperation and social connection, trust and reciprocation. It elicits gratitude, volunteering and a ripple effect of kindness amongst society. Kindness decreases loneliness, improves health, lessens any depression or pains, increases happiness and gives us purpose or meaning. (Grandparents who help look after grandchildren are less likely to die within the following 7 years.) It creates a virtuous cycle of being kind then feeling happier, and feeling happy then being kinder, etc.. The opposite feelings arise when we hold grumpy thoughts towards others – this makes us feel isolated and unhappy, which in turn creates a vicious cycle of being unkind then feeling grumpier, and feeling grumpy then being even less kind, etc.. Due to the brain’s cognitive associative machinery, happy people give, and people who give feel happy; whilst grumpy people are miserly, and miserly people feel grumpy.
But reminding someone of a previous act of kindness they’d performed before can drive them to be generous again. Don’t make extrinsic rewards be the reason for making generous acts because then it’ll be about those things rather than about the innate rewards. You could perhaps link their/your kind acts to anticipated good or desirable outcomes in the future along the lines of how they will fit into the bigger positive picture or greater good though. Being more aware of our positive social interactions makes us feel happy in the moment, as well as builds up evidence of our own positive impact or contribution to something greater than ourselves, which increases our long-term self-esteem. It makes us feel useful to others.
So kindness feels pleasurable because that’s our nature. It’s a desirable trait that our instincts want us to repeat again and again because it helps our survival. We feel touched, moved, inspired and more optimistic about humanity (‘elevation’). At the same time, we feel sad and it’s repulsive whenever we see unkind behaviours because that’s not a desirable trait of our nature, and our instincts don’t want us to repeat these again. Natural selection encourages an organism to do more of the things it finds pleasurable, and less of the things it finds painful or induces a guilty conscience.
Most people want to hang around and associate with kind rather than selfish people. Selfishness and conflict are therefore implied to be the less natural or desirable traits of human nature compared to kindness and cooperation, as indicated by most people’s instinctive reactions to observing these acts. The disgust reaction indicates that we find these people morally defective and to be avoided, like rotten food, and this is true across all cultures – in every successfully thriving culture, good and kindness is depicted at the top and evil and selfishness at the bottom. We naturally desire kind people in our groups and want to avoid selfish people. We desire ‘we’ over ‘me’ in people. Culturally, altruism is contagious, but so unfortunately is selfishness. But we’re happier in the first scenario and sadder in the latter, which speaks about our greater desire and nature for altruism over selfishness.
To improve one’s own happiness, and to promote more kindness in society, an exercise we can try is to perform random acts of kindness – perform 5 random acts of kindness within a day. These kind acts must be beyond acts of regular duty otherwise it won’t boost our happiness, so do some varied, unpremeditated or spontaneous acts of kindness (big or small doesn’t matter), and best keep them novel and fresh.
The biggest improvement in happiness is achieved if one does a lot of these within a single day rather than spreads them out over several days, because it’ll then feel special, more memorable and beyond a normal routine activity. You can obviously repeat this exercise on other days. Buying gifts, volunteering time or giving to charity can cause a ripple effect through a community and make for a tighter and more peaceful community. Feeling that you are making positive differences to other people’s lives is a major way to increase your self-perception, happiness and life satisfaction. If you like, write in a journal about both the ways you give to others and receive from others, and the positive impacts these acts have had on them and on you.
Many key things to health and happiness can seem logically counterintuitive, such as giving makes us feel happier, exercising makes us feel more energetic, not expecting to be happy all of the time makes us feel more content, trying to regularly drink or eat one’s problems away doesn’t work yet many still try to do it, and more. Most people who don’t give in a voluntary way out of the goodness of their own hearts, and only give in an obligatory or calculating way, don’t think that voluntary giving will make them feel happier – just like many people who don’t exercise don’t think they’ll feel more energetic afterwards and that it’s all just pointlessly draining, self-inflicted pain. But those who practise these things with intention know how good it makes them feel :D!
Woof! If you can recall when an act of kindness, big or small, made you feel that warm furry feeling inside then please share that story via the Twitter comment button below. I like fixing things so I fix things, like toys or electronics, for others for free whenever I see something that needs fixing that I can fix. I also normally buy birthday and Christmas presents many months ahead of time and I love the anticipation of when I finally give those gifts to their recipients. I cannot wait until Fluffystealthkitten gets the musical present I got her.
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