The Science Of Kindness
Kindlab
What is kindness? Why are people kind and unkind? How can we promote kindness at home, school, and work? Kindlab uses the latest scientific insights to answer these questions, and help make the world a kinder place.
What Kindlab Does
Kindlab, our research hub, investigates the causes and consequences of kindness through a mix of pure and applied research, drawing on the best of the natural, social and behavioral sciences. Everything we learn goes into building high-impact, real-world products and programs, and sharing our knowledge with the world.
{ KQ. Like an IQ, But Kinder. }
What’s Your KQ?
How kind are you? And how kind are people, in general? We have developed a new way of measuring kindness – The Kindness Questionnaire – which can give you your Kindness Quotient (KQ). The Kindness Questionnaire uses real-world acts to assess how kind people are to family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and strangers.
Here are some of our current projects
KindBase
What are the kindest things you can do? We have collated over 1,000 acts of kindness, and have rated them for perceived costs, benefits, and kindness, and categorized by potential donor and recipient (who can do what for whom). The goal is to identify the easiest and most impactful kind acts you can do for others, and move from random to ‘recommended acts of kindness’.
Learn Kind
Can you teach schoolchildren to be kind(er)? Kindlab helped to design and evaluate Learn Kind – our K-8 kindness-based social and emotional learning (SEL) curriculum. The results from an experiment / randomized control trial involving 60 teachers and 1414 students are encouraging. The Learn Kind program makes kids kinder and happier.
What is kindness anyway?
One way to conceptualize kindness is an action intended to benefit others at some cost to the actor – the ‘ABC’ model of kindness. This captures a lot of what people intuitively think about kindness – that kindness comes in many different shapes and sizes, but that the underlying principles are universally understood and appreciated.
*If you want to get technical, kindness is a meta-value that encompasses acts of altruism, bravery, charity, decency, empathy, forgiveness, gratitude, heroism, integrity, justice, kama muta, love, mercy and so much more…
From the Lab
The Research
Published papers
The costs and benefits of kindness for kids.
Curry, O. S., San Miguel, C., & Tunç, M. N. (2024). The costs and benefits of kindness for kids. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 246, 105987.
Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor.
Curry, O. S., Rowland, L. A., Van Lissa, C. J., Zlotowitz, S., McAlaney, J., & Whitehouse, H. (2018). Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 76, 320–329.
Cyber-kindness: Spreading kindness in cyberspace.
Rowland, L., & Klisanin, D. (2018). Cyber-kindness: Spreading kindness in cyberspace. Media Psychology Review, 12(1).
A range of kindness activities boost happiness.
Rowland, L., & Curry, O. S. (2019). A range of kindness activities boost happiness. The Journal of Social Psychology, 159(3), 340–343.
Kindness – society’s golden chain?
Rowland, L., & Curry, O. S. (2019). A range of kindness activities boost happiness. The Journal of Social Psychology, 159(3), 340–343.
BLogs & Media
What is a Kind Act to a Kid?
Curry, O. S. (2024). What Is a Kind Act to a Kid? Psychology Today.
Kindness and Happiness at Work.
Curry, O. S. (2023). Kindness and Happiness at Work. Psychology Today.
Effective Altruism is Unkind.
Curry, O. S. (2022). Effective Altruism is Unkind. Effective Altruism Forum.
How to Be Kind in a Crisis. kindness.org (2020)
How to Be Kind in a Crisis. Medium.
Civic Acts of Kindness. kindness.org (2020)
Civic Acts of Kindness. Medium.
Papers under review
Consistent Kindness: Money allocation and kind act decisions are regulated by a ‘welfare trade-off ratio’.
Curry, O. S., San Miguel, C., Wilkinson, J., & Tunc, M. (2024). Consistent Kindness: Money allocation and kind act decisions are regulated by a ‘welfare trade-off ratio’. https://osf.io/zuh59/
The costs and benefits of kindness.
Curry, O. S., San Miguel, C., Wilkinson, J., & Tunç, M. N. (2023). The costs and benefits of kindness. https://osf.io/gvfdw/
Learn Kind: A cluster randomized controlled trial.
Tunç, M. N., San Miguel, C., Reed, R., Lindsey, J., Peterson, M., & Curry, O. S. (2024). Learn Kind: A cluster randomized controlled trial. https://osf.io/e25p7/
More papers
to come!
Who We Are
Dr. Oliver Scott Curry
Chief Science Officer
Oliver received his PhD from the London School of Economics, and is a research affiliate of the School of Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He has spent over 20 years researching kindness, cooperation and morality.
Dr. Chloe San Miguel
Research Manager
Chloe received her PhD in Experimental Psychology, with a focus on personality and social psychology, from Idaho State University. Her academic research focused on personality perception and judgment accuracy on social media. She designs, manages, and runs Kindlab surveys and experiments, helps wrangle and analyze data, interprets insights, and gets materials ready for presentation and publication.
Dr. Ryan McManus
Statistician and data visualization consultant
Ryan received his PhD in Experimental Social Psychology and Neuroscience, with a minor in quantitative and computational methods, from Boston College where he studied morality as well as methods and statistics in psychological science. He advises on statistical methodology, organizes & analyzes the data from Kindlab experiments, and creates summaries and visualizations of data and results.
Citizen scientists
We lean on a team of more than 500 volunteer citizen scientists in more than 45 countries, who test out our surveys and experiments.
Join Us
Do you want to help build a kinder world? We want to hear your ideas. We do our best to reply to every inquiry.