Random Acts of Kindness Day

What the day is

Random Acts of Kindness Day is observed on February 17. The phrase has a traceable origin: the writer Anne Herbert is credited with composing it in the early 1980s, reportedly writing practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty on a restaurant placemat, as a deliberate inversion of random senseless acts of violence.

Origin and background

The most interesting research finding concerns bystanders. Kindness does not only travel between the giver and the receiver; it propagates to people who merely observed it. Experiments on cooperation have found that participants who benefit from generosity go on to treat third parties more generously, spreading the behavior through a network across several rounds to people who never met the original giver. Witnessing kindness also produces a documented emotional response, sometimes called elevation, associated with an increased desire to behave well oneself.

That changes the arithmetic of a small public act. Letting a car in, paying for a stranger's coffee or returning a lost wallet is observed by people who then behave slightly differently themselves.

The research on the giver is also consistent. Spending money on somebody else produces more reported happiness than spending the same amount on yourself, a result replicated across quite different countries and income levels, and the size of the sum matters less than the fact of directing it outward.

One honest caution. Kindness performed for an audience, particularly filmed for one, changes character. Studies of prosocial motivation find that external rewards and recognition can crowd out the internal motivation that makes the behavior sustainable, and the person on the receiving end of a recorded act of charity has been made a prop without being asked.

How to take part

• Do something small for a stranger and tell nobody.
• Do it where other people can see, since the spread is real, but do not film it.
• Spend a little money on somebody else rather than yourself.
• Be kind to someone whose job puts them on the receiving end of complaints.
• Accept kindness gracefully, which is harder and completes the exchange.