This is the forward to Be Kind: A Year of Kindness, One Week at a Time, by Melissa Burmester and Jaclyn Lindsey
What is kindness? Why are people kind? What are the different types of kindness? How does kindness contribute to a happy and fulfilling life? And how can we make the world a kinder place?
In recent years, science has made immense progress in answering these questions—and our goal at Kindlab, the research hub for kindness.org, is to take the science further still.
Humans are kind because we are an intensely social species. We have lived in social groups for the past fifty million years, and throughout this time we have relied on cooperative relationships with others in order to survive and thrive. Kindness is a way of kick-starting and maintaining these relationships. Thus, we can explain why people are kind to their families, friends, spouses, community members, and even strangers. We can explain why kindness comes in many forms—including love, loyalty, camaraderie, compassion, reciprocity, respect, generosity, gratitude, fairness, forgiveness, heroism, and humility. We can explain why we find investing in these relationships rewarding, and why helping others makes us happy. And we can explain why most people are kind most of the time.
Most people, most of the time, but not everyone, always. What stops people from being kinder? There are many reasons. For example, some people lack the incentive—they don’t care or don’t see the point. Some people lack information—they would like to help, but they don’t know what to do, or worry about what might happen if they get it wrong. And some people feel isolated—they would like to help, but they don’t want to act alone for fear their efforts will be wasted.
Kindlab uses the latest insights from the science of kindness—the biological underpinnings, the psychological circuitry, and the social conditions that foster it—to design more effective interventions and programs for cultivating kindness at scale. We help people overcome these obstacles and make it easier for them to choose kindness.
To provide additional incentives, we use techniques from experimental psychology to measure the costs and benefits of kindness, and to show how even apparently insignificant acts of kindness can have a big impact.
To provide the missing information, we curate ideas for how to be kind and subject them to rigorous real-world testing by our citizen scientists.
And to overcome the feeling of isolation, our online community creates the common knowledge needed to reassure people that they are not acting alone, that their efforts are not futile, that they are appreciated, and that by acting together, they can achieve more than acting alone.
So, enjoy the science and stories presented in Be Kind, and join us in making the world a kinder place!