Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor
By Oliver Curry, L. Rowland, Caspar J. van Lissa, S. Zlotowitz, John McAlaney, Harvey Whitehouse. 2018
451 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Do acts of kindness improve the well-being of the actor? Recent advances in the behavioural sciences have provided a number of explanations of human social, cooperative and altruistic behaviour. These theories predict that people will be ‘happy to help’ family, friends, community members, spouses, and even strangers under some conditions. Here we conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the experimental evidence that kindness interventions (for example, performing ‘random acts of kindness’) boost subjective well-being. Our initial search of the literature identified 489 articles; of which 24 (27 studies) met the inclusion criteria (total N = 4045). These 27 studies, some of which included multiple control conditions and dependent measures, yielded 52 effect sizes. Multi-level modeling revealed that the overall effect of kindness on the well-being of the actor is small-to-medium (δ = 0.28). The effect was not moderated by sex, age, type of participant, intervention, control condition or outcome measure. There was no indication of publication bias. We discuss the limitations of the current literature, and recommend that future research test more specific theories of kindness: taking kindness-specific individual differences into account; distinguishing between the effects of kindness to specific categories of people; and considering a wider range of proximal and distal outcomes. Such research will advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of kindness, and help practitioners to maximise the effectiveness of kindness interventions to improve well-being.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01a2251e37ca39dc1d70a21ba005b67f6979197c
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In Applied Psychology
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Effectiveness of positive psychology interventions: a systematic review and meta-analysis (2020, background): “These include interventions targeting signature strengths (Schutte & Malouff, 2019), kindness (Curry et al., 2018), forgiveness (Akhtar & Barlow, 2018; Baskin & Enright, 2004; N. G. Wade et al., 2014; Lundahl et al., 2008; Rainey et al., 2012; N Wade et al., 2005), gratitude (Davis et al., 2016;…”
- Small Sample Size Solutions (2020, methodology): “For example, Curry et al. (2018) used MetaForest to examine moderators of the effect of acts of kindness on well-being (full syntax and data available at github. com/cjvanlissa/kindness_meta-analysis).”