Most people are kind, right? Depends on how you measure it, but the evidence suggests that’s a true statement…but with caveats. Behavioral economics experiments (like dictator games and public goods games) consistently show most people share resources, cooperate, and punish unfairness even at personal cost, more than pure self-interest would predict. Lost-wallet studies (a famous one across 40 countries) found most people actually try to return wallets with cash in them, and surprisingly, more cash usually meant more likely to return it, not less. Most people report giving to charity, helping strangers, and would help someone in an obvious emergency (bystander effect complicates this in ambiguous situations, but it’s about diffusion of responsibility, not lack of caring). The caveats are that kindness is heavily context-dependent and people are kinder to those they perceive as “in-group,” under less stress, and when they’re not anonymous or rushed. News and social media skew perception toward cruelty and conflict because that’s what gets attention. This creates a real gap between how kind people actually are and how kind we think they are (this is sometimes called “negativity bias” in media consumption). Small daily unkindness (rudeness, impatience) is more visible than the much more common quiet decency, so it looms larger in memory. So, the conclusion from social research suggests that most people, most of the time, default to basic decency, but it’s fragile and conditional, not a fixed trait.
Has human kindness changed much over the millennia? Hard to measure directly, but here’s what the evidence suggests, and it points a somewhat different direction than intuition might expect. As for the case that we’ve gotten “kinder” in some ways, I turn back to my old pal Steven Pinker in his The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues that violence has declined dramatically over centuries with fewer wars per capita, abolition of slavery, decline in torture as routine punishment, reduced acceptance of cruelty to animals and children as entertainment or discipline. There is also the “expanding circle” argument from Peter Singer (the Australian moral philosopher who wrote Animal Liberation), that argues that moral concern has widened over time from family/tribe, to nation, to race, to species, to (for some) animals. Things once considered normal (public executions as entertainment, casual cruelty to outsiders) are now broadly condemned. It’s clear all around us that institutionalized kindness has grown with hospitals, charities, disability accommodations, animal welfare laws, humanitarian aid, all this infrastructure for care that didn’t really exist at scale before.
But there’s also the case that human nature itself hasn’t changed much. Anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer societies (which most closely resemble how humans lived for ~95% of our history) find high rates of in-group cooperation, sharing, and reciprocity, arguably more pro-social within the group than modern strangers-among-strangers cities. The underlying psychology of empathy, fairness instincts, reciprocity, and tribalism all appears remarkably stable and very much in tact today. What’s changed is the scale and rules of the game, which is to say, who counts as “in-group,” what institutions punish or reward, how much strangers interact at all. Cruelty hasn’t disappeared, it’s been pushed to the margins and often industrialized/distanced rather than eliminated (factory farming, drone warfare, algorithmic exploitation). This suggests that visible brutality appears to be down, some argue that it’s just less-visible and perhaps the real harm level is up.
The most defensible summary of all of this is that the capacity for kindness and cruelty in individual humans is probably close to constant across millennia and still have the same brain and the same wiring. That is, we haven’t really evolved to a more enlightened state, as one might hope. What’s shifted is the social technology around us. Laws, norms, economic interdependence, and the size of the group we instinctively extend kindness to seems to have changed somewhat as visibility of our actions is greater thanks to technology and media. We’re not different animals, we’ve just built different cages and different bridges and we want less to be found out and exposed for the unkind beings we can really be. That’s not a very nice way to wake up and think about the human race, but it’s where I find my head this morning.
But that’s simply not good enough for me. How can people be more kind? People generally get kinder when a few things line up. We can simply notice more. A lot of unkindness is just not noticing. Someone’s tired, struggling, or needs help. Slowing down enough to actually see the people around you is most of the battle. We can all assume less negatively. Giving people the benefit of the doubt before assuming rudeness or bad intent is a good place to start. Most people aren’t out to get you, they’re just dealing with their own shit, and the more we recognize that the more we can forgive them that (who among us does not have shit with which to deal?). We can practice small acts of kindness more consistently. Kindness isn’t usually one grand gesture, but rather it’s holding the door, texting back warmly, saying thank you and meaning it. Small and repeated kindness tends to beat the occasional and big gestures. We all need to manage our own stress better. People are kinder when they’re not running on empty. Sleep, downtime, and not overcommitting all make a real difference in how much patience we have for one another. We need to make kindness a habit, not a mood. Deciding in advance (“I’ll let that driver merge,” “I’ll ask how they’re really doing”) takes kindness out of relying on whether you happen to feel generous in the moment. And, of course, we must actually do more listening. A lot of kindness is just giving someone your full attention instead of half-listening while thinking about your reply or your own issues.
I can think of several instances in my routine life where I can be kinder. My guru on kindness is Kim. She is the kindest human being I know and all the things I talk about that we need to do more of she tends to do more of. That doesn’t mean she’s perfect, but she is clearly that more evolved person in terms of kindness that I wish we could all be. The world is full of assholes. I tend to think its 50%, but therein lies the problem. That 50% would more likely be 10% if I gave people the benefit of the doubt or could find the kindness to understand that they are simply hurting for one reason or another.
I have gone through this discourse for a reason. I have a particular situation, which I will not reference, in mind. I simply need to be kinder to someone than I tend to want to be. I have lots or reasons to justify being unkind to them, but that’s never the point. The point has to become that I need to find reasons to be kind. It’s important, less for them than for me…and perhaps for us all. I want the world to be a kinder place and it has to start with me. Let’s see if I can turn this fable into a reality.