The kindredness of kindness
The persistence and breadth of generosity, a new study shows, matter far more than identity in shaping human interaction.
Ukrainian volunteers with the American charity World Central Kitchen hand out meals in Sviatohirsk, a town once occupied by Russian troops, April 23.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
Since the social justice protests that fanned around the world three years ago, businesses, institutions, and public services have made strides to become more inclusive. More than a hundred colleges in the United States, for example, now offer programs or degrees in diversity studies.
The trend reflects earnest attempts to grapple with difference – to close gaps in opportunity and wages and to see and value the breadth of human experience. Against that background, the insights of a new study on communal sharing and “reciprocal altruism” are almost radical in their simplicity. The study found that kindness is so omnipresent in daily human affairs that it virtually erases the dividing lines of identity.
“When we zoom in on the micro level of social interaction, cultural difference mostly goes away, and our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible,” says the study’s lead author, Giovanni Rossi, a sociology professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, in a press release.
The study, published last month in Scientific Reports, examined the way people help each other in eight distinct cultures on five continents. At the level of daily human activity, it found little variance from one community to the next in the consistency or constancy of acts of kindness. Strikingly, that generosity and selflessness is unaffected by bias. People are as apt to offer directions to a stranger as help a family member prepare a meal.
The value that people put on kindness is measurable. A recent Pew study found that 81% of American parents said it was extremely important or very important that their children grow up to be “someone who helps others in need” without regard to the other person’s identity.
Some helping gestures are more visible than others. International volunteers have flown into war zones like Ukraine to help distribute food in disrupted communities. In Texas, some people have responded to the influx of migrants at the border by opening their homes to stranded families. Under a pilot project funded by a nonprofit organization, police officers in eight towns in the state of Washington now carry prepaid debit cards they can use at their discretion to help people they encounter on their beats. That might be a meal, an item of clothing, or even auto repairs.
The cards, Wenatchee Police Chief Rick Johnson wrote in a recent blog, enable officers to build trust through empathy and have tapped into “an amazing outpouring of support from the community in the form of donations to our program.”
The study by Professor Rossi and his international colleagues concluded that while most acts of kindness play out in small or incidental exchanges, in their sheer volume they add up. “Large-scale social realities are built out of small-scale moments,” they wrote. In its diversity, humanity is and, the research implies, always has been bound together by the universality of innate generosity.