What the science says

Researchers call kindness prosocial behavior: actions that benefit someone else. Three findings worth knowing:

• People are kinder than we think. In the World Happiness Report 2025, lost wallets were returned about twice as often as people expected, and believing others are kind was a strong predictor of happiness.World Happiness Report 2025, Chapter 2
• Kindness is good for the giver. A review of 27 experiments found that doing acts of kindness gave a small to medium boost to the giver’s well-being.Curry and colleagues, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018
• Kindness builds friendships. When 9- to 11-year-olds did three acts of kindness a week for four weeks, they gained more acceptance from classmates than students who visited three places a week instead.Layous and colleagues, PLOS ONE, 2012