Amit Kumar

That's a risk of any potential interaction with another person.

But of course, there's potential benefits to interacting with other people as well in terms of the support that you're providing and in terms of both how you and they feel.

One way that psychologists will sometimes talk about these costs is sort of an inordinate concern with how competent we seem.

Are we doing just the right thing at just the right time?

If it seems like we're not, then we might not act in the direction of kindness, as George Saunders put it, these other oriented interactions.

We essentially had participants perform a random act of kindness for just a stranger who happened to be nearby.

So we had these participants at a skating rink in a public park in Chicago.

They were giving away hot chocolate on a cold winter's day to someone else in the area.

You're giving to another person this delicious hot chocolate.

You're expecting nothing in return.

And after performing this act, what we did is we had these participants kind of report their own feelings and predict their recipients' experience.

And we then got ratings.

We asked the recipients of this act of kindness to tell us how they actually felt.

And when we followed up with these recipients, what became clear is that performers tend to underestimate the value of their kindness.

So as it turns out, both performers and recipients were in significantly better moods than normal after this exchange, after giving a hot chocolate to a stranger.

And in fact, recipients of that act of kindness felt significantly better than performers of that act anticipated.

We returned to the same public park, contrary to popular belief, it eventually gets warm in Chicago.

And so the skating rink had melted because the seasons had changed.

So we had participants giving cupcakes away to a stranger, but we had these cupcakes given to participants in our study in a couple of different ways.

So in one case,