UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute sees ’contagious kindness’ in action

IStock.com/solitude72 "We laid out a framework for understanding why witnessing kindness motivates being kind," said UCLA's Daniel Fessler. Today is World Kindness Day, and despite the current state of political tension, kindness is pretty easy to perpetuate, a UCLA study reveals. "Each of us is kind to someone, and therefore have the potential to be kind to everyone, even those with whom we differ politically,' said Daniel Fessler, director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, housed in the UCLA College division of social sciences. The first study from the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, which has been shared on the peer-reviewed open access scientific journal PLOS ONE, is about kindness and how it spreads — and the bottom line is that kindness really is contagious. Witnessing an act of kindness, even between strangers, can make us feel better about our world, and make us more inclined to perform an act of kindness ourselves. Social scientists call this state "elevation,' an uplifting emotion often accompanied by a warm feeling in the chest, goosebumps, and sometimes even tears. These aren't assumptions or nice generalizations — researchers at the institute have proven the effects of acts of kindness in their initial study, first shared with peers in December 2019. In the study, Kindness Institute researchers set out to test the theory and uncover evidence of how and why the feeling state of elevation causes contagious kindness — or what researchers call "prosocial contagion?