Shahram Heshmat, Ph.D., who is an associate professor emeritus of health economics of addiction at the University of Illinois at Springfield, says that ultimately, kindness is about putting other people's interests first, and it makes our lives better in a number of ways.
"Acting kindly makes us feel good. It feels wonderful to do something useful for someone. The 'helper's high' is the uplifting feeling that we experience after doing an act of kindness to others," he writes.
According to the professor, the "helper's high" shows up in our brain's reward system. "The experience is like consuming a piece of chocolate cake or having a pleasant surprise," he explains.
"It feels so good that the brain motivates us to do them again and again. As the proverb goes, it’s better to give than to receive. It makes you feel like your life is valuable."
Kindness is also contagious. "Kind acts can have a ripple effect—for example, giving a genuine compliment to a family member, friend, or colleague. When people receive kindness, they get an emotional boost and are more likely to help someone else," Heshmat adds. "Just hearing that someone else has behaved kindly can motivate us to do the same." These memes definitely add to the spread of the message!
Furthermore, Heshmat believes that "kind individuals may even be considered better-looking."
"In other words, being a kind person could make people perceive you as more attractive. We are biologically wired to be drawn to people who are compassionate."
We might even have data to back this up. A recent study published in the British Journal of Social Psychology also suggests that people seen as kind and helpful are perceived as more physically attractive.
In their new research, Natalia Kononov and Danit Ein-Gar focused on prosocial behavior—acts of kindness, cooperation, and helpfulness—and tried to understand whether this quality has a unique effect on perceptions of physical beauty. They hypothesized that people might feel motivated to associate with prosocial individuals, viewing them as more attractive because of an unconscious desire to form connections with people who display kindness.
"Often, we use beauty metaphorically to describe admirable inner qualities, saying someone is ‘beautiful on the inside.’ I was curious to see if this perception has a basis in reality—whether kindness and generosity, qualities associated with inner beauty, actually influence how we perceive someone’s physical attractiveness. Our findings suggest this association isn’t just metaphorical; beautiful acts do, indeed, lead us to see people as more beautiful,” says study author Natalia Kononov, a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
The research consisted of ten studies with over 4,000 participants. The team designed a variety of scenarios to assess whether prosocial behavior influenced how physically attractive people appeared to others. Participants in different studies either observed real-life prosocial acts, read descriptions of kind behaviors, or imagined scenarios involving helpful behavior.
To ensure the findings were comprehensive, the researchers accounted for several factors (they compared perceptions of attractiveness when participants saw people acting kindly versus in a neutral context) and explored how consistent prosocial behavior might affect attractiveness differently than one-time acts. They also examined whether the influence of kindness on perceived beauty was stronger than that of other positive traits like humor or intelligence.