The suggestion to become a kinder person assumes that kindness is an unequivocal positive, a dial that should be maximally turned up. However, the findings are more nuanced. Kindness has meaningful advantages as well as substantial drawbacks, and the true skill lies in distinguishing the beneficial form from the type that subtly undermines you.
It’s beneficial to begin with the positive aspects, as there is an abundance of them.
Kindness truly enhances the aspects of life that are important to people
Agreeableness, the character trait that embodies warmth, cooperation, and a propensity to trust and accommodate others, serves as the closest approximation psychology offers for measuring kindness. And regarding the outcomes that most individuals claim are most significant, it portrays a favorable picture. In Timothy Judge’s studies and those of his colleagues, agreeableness was correlated with greater life satisfaction, more robust social networks, increased community involvement, and reduced stress levels.
This is not an insignificant list. It broadly outlines the elements people cite when they characterize a good life. Regardless of what else kindness achieves, it seems to afford a more comforting and less stressful existence, providing a strong rationale for this fundamental disposition before addressing its complexities.
The cost associated with it
However, the complexities are substantial. In the same research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2012, Judge and his co-authors examined income, revealing that kindness could be a disadvantage. Through analyzing surveys of about 10,000 employees over approximately two decades, they discovered that more agreeable individuals earned less, with the least agreeable men out-earning their most agreeable counterparts by around 18 percent.
The underlying cause is not particularly obscure. Agreeable individuals tend to shy away from aggressively advocating for themselves, negotiating tenaciously, or confronting situations regarding what they deserve, leading others to realize they can be relied upon without much resistance. It’s important to note the standard caveats: this is correlational, the effect was intertwined with gender in ways reflecting bias as much as behavior, and it stems from a singular research initiative. Nonetheless, the direction serves as a valuable caution. In circumstances that reward self-advocacy, unmitigated kindness incurs a cost.
When kindness backfires on the kind person
There is an additional cost, and it is the one that inflicts the most subtle harm. It relates to the distinction between caring for others and erasing your own identity in the process.
Psychologists Heidi Fritz and Vicki Helgeson carefully delineated this boundary. They made a distinction between ordinary communion, a healthy, caring orientation toward others, and what they termed unmitigated communion, which focuses on others so entirely that one’s self disappears from consideration. The latter involves neglecting one’s own needs, deriving self-worth from the approval of others, and finding it exceedingly difficult to refuse requests. Across their studies, this pattern correlated with psychological distress, including symptoms of depression.
The crucial discovery is what was not attributable to the outcome. Healthy caring was not linked with distress; it was self-neglect that was. Caring for individuals while simultaneously being a person with needs diverges markedly from caring as if having needs diminishes your worth. The former is warmth; the latter is a gradual deterioration that fails to benefit those on the receiving end.
The art lies in calibration
When synthesizing these findings, the conclusion is not to be less kind. Instead, it suggests maintaining warmth while separating it from its two failure points.
The first failure point is the inability to advocate for oneself, which transforms kindness into an open invitation to be disregarded. The second is the conflation of one’s own needs with those of others, which research indicates is less a purer form of kindness and more a path to distress. Authentic kindness resides between these extremes: naturally warm yet assertive when something genuinely matters, be it regarding salary, establishing boundaries, or expressing a necessary no.
A few limitations are important to acknowledge. These findings represent averages derived from correlational studies, not definitive rules governing any individual, and the gendered trends particularly reflect how kindness is perceived and penalized rather than the trait itself. Furthermore, kindness does not equate to morality or virtue; a person can be amicable yet unkind, or brusque yet profoundly good.
Nevertheless, the overall shape of the evidence is sufficiently clear to be beneficial. The kindest individuals, in a sense worth aspiring to, demonstrate an intriguing balance.