Is any good deed truly selfless - and does it matter?
Professor Jennifer Cheavens often uses a classic 1998 "Friends" episode to explore this question with students in her positive psychology classes. In it, Phoebe tries to disprove Joey's theory that all good deeds are selfish because they also make the giver feel good. When a donation to a cause she dislikes brings her unanticipated joy, Phoebe admits defeat: "He's right. There are no selfless good deeds."
Students in Cheavens' seminar took the debate a step further, arguing that the exact words people use to describe helping others are just as important, and that "nice" and "kind" carry meaningfully different connotations.
"We were talking about doing 'acts of kindness,' and the students were saying, 'That's not kind, that's nice,'" said Cheavens, professor of clinical psychology at The Ohio State University. The students argued that if you do a good deed out of obligation or to enhance your reputation, people will judge you for it, because the intention behind a good deed is as important as the deed itself.
She brought the question to her Ohio State colleague Laura Wagner, a developmental psychology professor and linguist who directs the Language Sciences Research Lab at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), and they designed a study to test the theory. The research was published recently in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology.
What they discovered ran counter to their students' assumptions: Even if good deeds aren't entirely selfless, most people don't discount them simply because the giver gains something in return. In practice, everyday people view "kind" and "nice" as essentially interchangeable, though they have a higher threshold for considering an act to be "caring." In addition, acts that were warm, planned and not already expected of the giver were consistently rated as more prosocial.
Cheavens suspects the word "caring" sets a higher bar because it's the closest of the three terms to an emotion. "People don't say, 'I feel kind,'" she said. "But you say, 'I care for you.'"
The most important takeaway from the study, the authors noted, is that prosocial behavior is almost always seen as a positive thing, or, as Wagner put it, "at least kind, maybe also nice and possibly even caring."
Back in the seminar room, Cheavens had been skeptical about students' theory that people respond negatively to a person who does something nice or kind in public. But she did wonder if the fear of being perceived as disingenuous was preventing people from doing good deeds - and whether the language used to describe acts of kindness played a role.
"I hear that a lot, especially from people my age and a little bit younger, that being nice is not the same as being kind," said Ally Heiland, a fifth year doctoral student in clinical psychology and the study's lead author. "Like, being kind is really about people's intentions and whether they mean it or not, whereas nice is more like being socially appropriate or polite."
In the study - which the authors call the largest of its kind to date - researchers wrote 14 short vignettes, two for each of seven aspects of prosocial acts (actions performed to benefit others): anonymity, benefit, cost, expectation, planning, warmth and the relationship to the recipient. Each participant read seven vignettes and was asked to imagine being on the receiving end of scenarios like someone holding open a door for them or paying for their food in line. Participants then rated each act on how kind, nice and caring it was. Across these scenarios, the researchers found that subtle context influences how people perceive these actions.
"Participants rated scenarios as similarly kind and nice across six of the seven situational dimensions we tested. The one exception related to cost; although participants interpreted high- and low-cost prosocial behaviors as equally kind, they endorsed high-cost behaviors as nicer than low-cost behaviors," the researchers wrote in the study.
Of the three words tested, "caring" stood out: Acts between people who knew each other were rated as more caring, but no kinder or nicer than the same acts performed by strangers. Higher-cost acts, meanwhile, were rated as both nicer and more caring, though no kinder.
"It's a word that when we're using it often indicates some sort of closeness or intention that might not be naturally baked into something like kind or nice," Heiland said of "caring."
Across all three terms, acts were judged most favorably when they were delivered warmly, planned in advance and not already expected of the giver.
For Cheavens, the results confirmed what she'd suspected from the outset: "The biggest effect was like, yep, people think that's good when you do good things."
That doing good also feels good might actually be the point. Wagner points to concepts from cognitive science suggesting that we are built to feel good about doing nice things for other people, because otherwise it would be very hard to motivate people to behave in prosocial ways.
"So, the idea that you do get a warm, fuzzy feeling might actually be part of how Mother Nature motivates us to be nice to other people," Wagner said.
"Applying these results to clinical, community and educational settings could help to promote prosocial behavior more effectively by eliminating 'mismatch' barriers between the prosocial term and their implied expectations," the researchers wrote in the study.
The study was funded by the Center for HumanKindness at the Columbus Foundation.
Other Ohio State co-authors of the study are Emily Walker of the Department of Psychology and Eve Saltzman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Additional co-authors are Abigail L. Arntz of the University of Notre Dame, Josephine E. Luck of the University of Georgia and Hana Nip of the University of Illinois Chicago.
