Quickie: Generosity in Relationships Can Be Contagious
Study finds kindness begets kindness
Sometimes it feels like selfishness is running rampant in our interpersonal relationships, but a team of researchers has found that kindness and generosity are also contagious. To prove this, James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis — authors of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives* — created a “public-goods game” experiment where participants gave away money to each other. In order to ensure that people were being truly generous — instead of just reciprocating when someone gave them money — none of the players in the game were matched with the same person more than once.
“It’s very exciting to learn that kindness spreads to people I don’t know or have never met.”
Fowler and Christakis found that as people received money in the game, they tended to give away more than they received — and the generosity was passed on from person to person to person. Fowler says this is because giving can become a social contagion that people will happily pass on to others.
“It’s very exciting to learn that kindness spreads to people I don’t know or have never met,” said Fowler. “We have direct experience of giving and seeing people’s immediate reactions, but we don’t typically see how our generosity cascades through the social network to affect the lives of dozens, or maybe hundreds, of other people.”
The study, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is part of the researchers’ work on how different behaviors can become contagious. Fowler and Christakis have also studied how obesity, loneliness, and happiness can spread from one person to another in the same environment.
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Source:
Kiderra, I. (2010, March 5). ‘Pay It Forward’ Pays Off. UC San Diego News Center. http://www.ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/03-08ExperimentalFindings.asp
