Amit Kumar
speaker
301 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
Amit Kumar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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,
Participants, again, sort of gave a cupcake away to somebody else as an act of kindness.
But in another case, we had sort of what you might think of as a control condition in which no act of kindness was performed, but people still received a cupcake.
So in this other case, recipients are simply getting a cupcake for participating in the experiment rather than from another person.
as a random act of kindness.
So one of these cases includes the warmth associated with a kind exchange.
The other also has somebody receiving a cupcake but without getting it from somebody else.
And so what we do, again, is we compare expected versus actual experiences in these two cases.
And what we found was that people, again, underestimated how positive recipients would feel after this
Showing 121–140 of 301 · page 7 of 16
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