Amit Kumar

So when we're a potential performer of an act of kindness, our perspective just tends to focus less on warmth than targets do when we're considering our own behavior.

It seems like a plant watering a plant to a performer, but it's actually somebody doing something nice for me when you're a recipient.

So it turns out that these acts are pretty easy.

They don't necessarily involve lots of effort.

They're the types of things that you can do in just a matter of minutes.

Folks have been making the case for about two decades now that expressing gratitude improves well-being.

And yet again, we don't necessarily walk around in our daily lives

giving thanks to people all that often.

And that makes a scientist curious as to, well, why don't we?

And so one of the ways that we investigated this was by having participants write a gratitude letter to somebody else who had impacted them in some way.

And we again had those participants make predictions about how their recipient would feel as a result of their letter.

And what we found when recipients told us how they really felt, and we kind of compare those responses to expectations, was that

Senders significantly underestimated how surprised recipients would be about why they were grateful.

They overestimated how awkward or uncomfortable recipients would feel.

And they didn't realize just how positive it would feel to be on the receiving end of one of these letters.

Yeah, so it's essentially participating in this experiment.

So they write a letter to somebody else.

They make a prediction about how that person will feel.

We contact their recipients.

We find out how they really feel.