Recently I buried someone I didn’t know and had never met. That’s not all that unusual. What was unusual in this case was that the deceased had outlasted all their family members, burial matters were handled by a former in-law, and the obituary was absent any of the educational, vocational, or pastime notes of interest that give clues into a person’s life. The obituary simply said [Name] “was a kind and gentle soul who dutifully served the ones around [them] and never forgot the importance of even the smallest of gestures.” This simple statement was apt, because all the people from the deceased’s neighborhood showed up at the service. Each neighbor had been the recipient of the person’s small gestures of kindness.
 
It is not newsworthy that when we are kind to someone, the recipient of our kindness benefits from it. What is less well publicized, however, is the effect the kind act has on people beyond the giver and the receiver. What is also less well publicized is the effect the act has on the brain of the giver. Each time I offer a blessing at the conclusion of worship, I extol us all to “make haste to be kind.” This week I want to explore why that matters.

We’re all acquainted with the idea of the ripple effect of an action. A stone thrown into a pond illustrates that beautifully. Recently, behaviorists have begun examining those ripples in more detail. A recent study by psychologists at the University of California Riverside examined the effect of acts of kindness in the workplace. To do this, researchers worked with some employees at a large Coca Cola plant in Madrid, Spain. The employees were told they’d be participating in a happiness study. They were directed to daily record their moods as well as any acts of generosity they performed. Unbeknownst to the study group, a small number of “confederates” were asked by the researchers to perform extra and intentional acts of kindness for half of the study population. The other half of the study population served as the control group.
 
At the end of the month-long study, the half of the study population who’d been on the receiving end of these extra and intentional acts of kindness reported 278 percent more prosocial behaviors than the control group. That’s a tenfold increase, said researchers. [1] What’s a “prosocial behavior”? Prosocial behaviors refer to "a broad range of actions intended to benefit one or more people other than oneself—behaviors such as helping, comforting, sharing and cooperation." [2]
 
These increased prosocial behaviors weren’t directed by the receiver back toward the giver, because the receiver didn’t know who the giver was! So the receiver paid the kindness forward to people outside the initial encounter. Here was clear proof that an act of kindness has an effect on people in expanding circles well beyond the original giver-receiver pair. That effect appears to last in time as well: One month after the Coca Cola study ended, the receiver group reported “significantly higher levels of happiness” than the control group. And the giver group reported even higher levels of sustained happiness than the receiver group! [3]
 
Acts of kindness, then, set off virtuous cycles in the world. The recipients of our kindness in turn perform their own tenfold kind acts, setting off new virtuous cycles that expand, overlap, and themselves spawn more kind acts. And us givers? We benefit in big ways! The Random Acts of Kindness foundation drew together a summary of scientific research into the benefits giving has on the giver. The footnoted link takes you to their site, where you can access the scientific studies which support the following facts. [4]
 
When you perform (or even witness) an act of kindness, your body increases production of oxytocin. Oxytocin lowers blood pressure (thus improving heart health), and boosts self-esteem and optimism. Some people who perform kind acts report increased feelings of strength, energy, calmness, and self-worth. Financial kindness—i.e. generosity, altruism—increases reported feelings of happiness. Volunteering as an act of kindness decreases reported feelings of aches and pains. Seniors who volunteer regularly decrease their likelihood of dying early. People who kindly help others get what’s called “a helper’s high”—a lighting up of the pleasure/reward centers in the brain. Acts of kindness also stimulate the production of the feel-good brain chemical serotonin, and pain-dulling endorphins. “Perpetually kind people have 23% less cortisol (the stress hormone) and age slower than the average population!” Regular volunteering has been shown to decrease reported feelings of anxiety. In short, we are hard-wired to benefit by acting in ways that promote the survival of our species. We are also hard-wired to benefit by acting in ways that are Christ-like.
 
According to researchers at The University of Wisconsin, it is possible for us to build up our compassion muscle, and to better “make haste to be kind.” [5] One technique they use is a Buddhist meditation that you can find in the footnotes on a website called “Spirituality and Practice.” [6]
 
Hoping, like you, to strengthen my own kindness and compassion muscle, I gave it a go last Friday. I was running errands in the pre-holiday madness, which offers a rich testing ground for intentional acts of kindness. I was navigating one of those small carts around a Sprouts grocery store crowded with holiday displays and shoppers. I zipped around a corner to come face-to-face with a lost-looking elderly woman. She looked at me. I smiled. She said, “I’ve lost my friend. She just disappeared.” “Do you know what I think?” I asked, leaning toward her conspiratorially. “No,” she replied, looking mildly alarmed. “I think you should get the check-out person to call for her on the loud-speaker: Mrs. Jones, please come to the front desk to pick up a lost friend.” The woman began to giggle. “Oh, she’d kill me for that!” she said, laughing. “That’s all the more fun!” I replied, and she wandered away laughing in delight. She may’ve been lost, but the small gesture of kindness let her know she wasn’t alone.
 
When I finished shopping and headed for the check-out myself, the lines were predictably long. When it was finally my turn to place my items on the conveyer belt, I did. I heard an audible sigh behind me, and turned around. The sigher, a young woman, looked tired. “Busy day, huh?” I offered. “Oh,” she sighed again, “I am so worn out. It’s been a long week.” “I hear ya,” I replied.
 
 I took my reusable grocery bags from the cart and plopped them on top of my items on the belt. The young woman stared at them, and then at me. “Are you from New England?” she asked. I wondered if my faint residue of a Down East accent had given me away. “Yes,” I replied. “Your grocery bags,” she said, by way of explanation. My woven grocery bags bear the name “Hannaford”—a popular grocery chain in the Northeast. “Where from?” she continued. “Maine,” I said. “No way,” she said in wonderment. “So am I.” It turns out her folks are divorced and her father lives on the coast about 15 miles from my cottage in Union. Her mother lives about 15 miles from my cottage in the opposite direction.
 
I finished checking out and waited for her to pay for her groceries, and we walked to our vehicles together. I gave her my card. She took it without looking at it. She was looking at me. “Thank you,” she said. “You really changed my day.” I hugged her. “You’re welcome,” I said. “You changed mine too.”
 
On a kindness roll, I stopped for gas. The vehicle on the other side of the pump from mine was a FedEx truck. The driver, a young man, got out. “Good morning, most popular man in America,” I said, grinning. I figured that at this time of year delivery drivers probably feel like nothing more than a means to an end. He laughed and grinned back. He was still smiling minutes later when he got back in his truck and drove away.
 
Do you, like me, wonder what ten-fold acts of kindness they will go on to do? What a lovely thing to contemplate.
 
Notes:
[1]https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-24716-001andhttps://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/07/04/small-acts-of-kindness-at-work-benefit-the-giver-the-receiver-and-the-whole-organisation/
[2] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-prosocial-behavior-2795479
[3]https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/generosity-is-highly-contagious-heart-warming-new-.html
[4] https://www.randomactsofkindness.org/the-science-of-kindness
[5] https://news.wisc.edu/brain-can-be-trained-in-compassion-study-shows/
[6]https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/practices/practices/view/27782/just-like-me-compassion-meditation