Kindness is Contagious

All the shootings in the US in the past month have left me feeling disheartened about how humans can treat one another.  As an antidote, I decided to watch the movie Kindness is Contagious for a second time.  This film by David Gaz is narrated by Catharine Ryan Hyde, author of the book Pay it Forward.

Gaz feels that emotions are “collective phenomena.  We don’t just feel emotions, we show them.”  He was interested to see if kindness can spread in social networks.  This interested him because networks have exponential power.  Researchers have found that we are each connected to all other humans by just six steps or what has been called “six degrees of separation”.  Therefore, although we may have a relatively small number of people in our social network, those people have people that they are connected to and so on.  So through these networks, we have more influence than we think.

Studies have demonstrated that when you are interacting with someone who is kinder, you tend to be kinder as well.  Likewise, if you get the flu and you are in contact with someone else, they may get the flu. Gaz, says that an emotional contagion is as “process where one person feels an emotion and it ends up spreading to the people that person is connected to and the people that they are connected to and so on.”

Scientists are finding that kindness and cooperation are vital to the survival of a species.  Even Charles Darwin came to this conclusion in his last book.  The idea of survival of the fittest based on a model of competition was one of his earlier ideas that was made popular because it fit the worldview of industrialized nations of the time.  But by the end of his life he felt species that cooperated were more likely to survive.  This idea didn't gain attention because it was counter to the thinking of the time.  Watching the events in the US lately makes it obvious to me that fear and hatred can also spread like a contagion and that they don’t create healthy communities.

Gaz argues that altruism allows us to do more together than we could do on our own.  He gives the example of the simple network of a bucket brigade.  Altruism allows us to form social networks because we tend to break connections that aren’t reciprocal.  These networks allow us to see ourselves as a sort of superorganism.  Groups that have altruistic people in them do better than groups with only selfish people in them.  On average, these groups are a force of good where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Here are some interesting facts based on research about the benefits of kindness:

• ·        The primary quality that one looks for in a prospective mate is kindness more than money and good looks
• ·        People who volunteer later in life are more likely to live longer
• ·        Kind people are trusted in a competitive game and are given more resources
• ·        Sports teams have a higher level of wins if the members like each other
• ·        People who give in their teenage years have better mental and physical health in later years
• ·        Kind people are more likely to get pay raises and promotions

In the movie, Gaz asks a wide variety of people one simple question, “What is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?”  The answers included, paying someone’s rent, buying someone a car, donating a kidney, being a Big Brother and the list goes on.

Try asking yourself this question: What is the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?

I wonder if you can even figure out what the nicest thing you have done for someone else is.  I suspect we will never know all the good will we have sent out like ripples.  Most of us focus on our gaffs and mistakes instead.

When I hear about the turmoil south of us and within our own society as well, I often feel powerless.  But if you think about kindness being contagious, then we all have more power than we know.  Our kind acts will magnify exponentially.  If we can imagine what it is like to be another person, we may have an idea of what kindness would be to that person.  If we have the courage to create an act of kindness, we are being part of the solution and building a stronger community where we all benefit.

If you want a shortcut to feeling this, you can watch the trailer or if cuteness will do the trick, check out this grade school class reciting the poem Kindness is Contagious.