This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Is any good deed truly selfless—and does it matter? Professor Jennifer Cheavens often uses a classic 1998 "Friends" episode to explore this question with students in her positive psychology classes.
In it, Phoebe tries to disprove Joey's theory that all good deeds are selfish because they also make the giver feel good. When a donation to a cause she dislikes brings her unanticipated joy, Phoebe admits defeat: "He's right. There are no selfless good deeds." Students in Cheavens' seminar took the debate a step further, arguing that the exact words people use to describe helping others are just as important, and that "nice" and "kind" carry meaningfully different connotations.
"We were talking about doing 'acts of kindness,' and the students were saying, 'That's not kind, that's nice,'" said Cheavens, professor of clinical psychology at The Ohio State University. The students argued that if you do a good deed out of obligation or to enhance your reputation, people will judge you for it, because the intention behind a good deed is as important as the deed itself. She brought the question to her Ohio State colleague Laura Wagner, a developmental psychology professor and linguist who directs the Language Sciences Research Lab at the Center of Science and Industry (COSI), and they designed a study to test the theory.
The research was published recently in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology. What they discovered ran counter to their students' assumptions: Even if good deeds aren't entirely selfless, most people don't discount them simply because the giver gains something in return. In practice, everyday people view "kind" and "nice" as essentially interchangeable, though they have a higher threshold for considering an act to be "caring." In addition, acts that were warm, planned and not already expected of the giver were consistently rated as more prosocial.
Cheavens suspects the word "caring" sets a higher bar because it's the closest of the three terms to an emotion. "People don't say, 'I feel kind,'" she said. "But you say, 'I care for you.'" The most important takeaway from the study, the authors noted, is that prosocial behavior is almost always seen as a positive thing, or, as Wagner put it, "at least kind, maybe also nice and possibly even caring." Back in the seminar room, Cheavens had been skeptical about students' theory that people respond negatively to a person who does something nice or kind in public.
But she did wonder if the fear of being perceived as disingenuous was preventing people from doing good deeds—and whether the language used to describe acts of kindness played a role. "I hear that a lot, especially from people my age and a little bit younger, that being nice is not the same as being kind," said Ally Heiland, a fifth-year doctoral student in clinical psychology and the study's lead author. "Like, being kind is really about people's intentions and whether they mean it or not, whereas nice is more like being socially appropriate or polite." In the study—which the authors call the largest of its kind to date—researchers wrote 14 short vignettes, two for each of seven aspects of prosocial acts (actions performed to benefit others): anonymity, benefit, cost, expectation, planning, warmth and the relationship to the recipient.
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