Amit Kumar

What we find in our research is that it actually goes even further than people expect that it will.

We underestimate how much value these acts will have on the people that we're kind to.

We had recipients of that act of kindness kind of play one of these economic games that are used to explore what are sometimes called pay it forward effects.

So participants are assigned the role.

They're told that they're sort of the decider.

They're asked to allocate some money between themselves and another person.

This is someone that they'd never meet.

And so everybody that received an item, in this case, again, it was either from the experimenter for their participation or as a result of their act of kindness, they're assigned to be this decider.

There's real money on the line.

These are consequential choices.

And what we found was that those who had just been on the receiving end of an act of kindness

gave substantially more to sort of this anonymous person in this subsequent game.

So this other person was now being kind to someone else, basically because someone had been kind to them before.

Yeah, you can think of this as a potential virtuous cycle of sort of giving to other people, but we don't always realize that we have the capacity to create cycles like that.

I wish the story was I reflected on how I had behaved and I changed my behavior right away and called her up on the phone.

But we ended up, you know, there was some shared memory, essentially, that that led to us having a little bit of a text exchange.

We ended up talking to each other as a result of that.

And from that conversation, I knew that it would have been great if we had talked to each other.

It's, you know.

When you're close to someone, those feelings of closeness come back pretty quickly in reality, but sometimes it's hard to realize that when you're thinking about sort of the prospect of reconnecting with somebody else.