Little thoughtful gestures can make someone’s day. alashi/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images
By Margaret Echelbarger, The Converstion, July 12, 2023
The big idea
From expressing gratitude to surprising someone with a mug of hot chocolate on a cold day, adults tend to underestimate how positively others will respond to their random acts of kindness. I’m a behavioral scientist who teamed up with my research partner Nicholas Epley on research that showed how children and teens share this misunderstanding.
We gave 101 kids who were 4-17 years old and 99 adults who were visiting a museum in Chicago an opportunity to perform a random act of kindness. They received two museum-branded pencils and were told that they could keep both pencils but were encouraged to give one to another visitor.
The people taking part in this stage of our two experiments then completed a survey asking them to predict how big the pencil’s recipient would consider this act of kindness to be, how positive or negative that person would say they felt afterward, and how good or bad the act of giving the pencil away made them feel.
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