Humans Give Unconditional Small Acts of Kindness – Continuously

I thought that one driving premise of economic theory is that human beings are primarily selfish?!

Well, that’s going back a few years – or decades. We know that human beings are very cooperative but some of this cooperation differs between cultures. What’s more a lot of research into cooperation and collaboration looks at big ticket items like sharing food or other resources.

So what did this research look at?

This is more fascinating because this international research team looked at more often overlooked acts of help and kindness. Things like opening a door, passing an object, helping pick something up, and so on.

But of course we help with things like that!

That’s precisely the point – if you say “of course” then this suggests that this is natural, it’s inbuilt, it’s default human nature. Big ticket items are big, less common, and carry much more wight also in terms of invested resources. They also develop their own cultural norms around them so then it become hard to find correlations between cultures.

Indeed, the good news is that we seem to be very kind and collaborative. They analysed videos from everyday interactions in different locations and settings ranging from towns in Europe to rural settings in South America and Africa to, aboriginal Australian.

They found that we ask for help in a small way (in group situations) more often than we would assume. On average every 2 minutes. What’s more people helped the other almost 80% of the time with about 10% ignoring and 10% rejecting the offer. But when they rejected the offer about 75% of the time they gave a reason.

So, we are naturally helpful?

Yes. Precisely. This is very strong evidence that there is a natural helping reflex – the strong norm is to help and to justify why you can’t if you can’t. But the strong alignment across cultures is good proof that we are in fact naturally kind, collaborative creatures.

Good news – but some people claim we are selfish and see this all the time – not to mention on plenty of social media posts!

Yes, it is very good news. Obviously the reasons selfishness draws out attention is two fold. One because we are so kind and collaborative by nature, being selfish draws our ire and attention – social media will magnify this. We are shocked because we are so kind on average.

The other reason is more interesting: other recent research has shown that selfish people expect other people to be selfish also and, similarly, generous people expect other people to be generous. So this feeling of seeing selfishness may be a reflection of a person’s own selfishness!

Oh wow – obviously, erm, I see a lot of goodness in the world

Great – and the big news that we should be communicating to the world, and dancing in the streets about, is that human beings show each other kindness on average every two minutes – and this is happening all over the world as I write this. That makes a few billion acts of kindness every few minutes.

There – that should cheer you up.