The Selfish Case for Being Nice
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhat If Being Nice Doesn’t Make You a Sucker After All?, It might not make you a sucker after all., Niceness: What social psychology says about the benefits of smiling sincerely or doing small acts of kindness.
Niceness is a loaded term. It whiffs of weakness and blandness. To be nice implies prioritizing other people’s emotions. No one strong or bold worries about such things.
The internet is filled with essays and videos by people who have figured out how to kick niceness like it’s a drug. The narrative often follows a similar arc: An excessively nice person—typically a woman—stops forcing herself to engage in obligatory acts of niceness. Then her life gets better. People trust her more. She’s happier and less exhausted by daily interactions. She also becomes a more respectable writer, businessperson, doctor, or leader.
People who are perpetually nice are addicted to people-pleasing, a cottage industry of TikTok coaches reminds us.
Follow along and they’ll help you abstain from pleasing others and live the life you were meant to have. If you’d like to expand on their teachings, you can help the The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck rise to the top of the bestseller list for the 301st week. And if you want to set your children up for success, start warning them against niceness now, some parenting pundits remind us.
Perhaps the only thing worse than being a people pleaser yourself is being a niceness tyrant, as another subset of social media stars argues, quite convincingly. Indeed, white women who put ‘just be kind’ in their bios deserve to be stuck in a room full of singing Barney plushies. So too does anyone who insists that marginalized people should pave their path to power with niceness.
Still, is it possible that this cloying, potential-impeding attribute has some redeeming qualities? Is niceness underrated?
The work of Polish social psychologist Olga Bialobrzeska, who recently published one of the first ‘niceness scales‘ to ever appear in a scientific journal, suggests that yes, being nice, under certain circumstances, might be even better for our sense of well-being than being productive. Completing errands is helpful. But actually, giving a compliment to a stranger that has nothing to do with your errand could make you feel better, at least in the short term. (Long-term, avoiding errands is probably not great. But let’s not worry about that for now.)
Bialobrzeska, a professor at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, has been studying niceness for about four years. The inspiration emerged after she was treated ‘in a not very nice way’ on the bus and she noticed that it had a strong impact on how she felt. She knew there was a lot of research into the effects of what she calls ‘big pro-sociality,’ like donating organs or intervening in emergencies. And there’s tons of research on activity that’s way more extreme than coldly asking a passenger to get on the bus already. Violence, for example, is a hot topic in the world of social psychology.
But she was interested in the benefits of casual, low-cost acts of niceness, like a friendly chat with a neighbor. She immediately saw that part of the challenge was figuring out how to define it, since people have a tendency to use ‘niceness’ interchangeably with other terms like ‘kindness’ and ‘politeness.’ Ultimately, Bialobrzeska settled on ‘casual, easy gestures that express our warm and friendly attitude toward others, performed to make others feel good.’ In order for it to meet her criteria, it must be genuine. Smile sincerely at the checkout clerk, and it’s niceness. Offer up a fake smile to a difficult customer in order to comply with company standards, and it’s politeness.
Another challenge in studying niceness is that almost everyone considers themselves nice. ‘In fact, we know from the previous studies that when it comes to traits related to warmth and morality, such as being helpful, honest, tolerant, people rate themselves very positively and as better than others,’ she wrote to me. ‘Therefore, when you study niceness, you cannot rely solely on people’s declarations about their niceness and you need to control for this distortion.’
In her most recent paper, which appears in an upcoming issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, Bialobrzeska also comes up with a system to try to quantify self-reported niceness to make it easier for others to also study it.
Reading through these items, I confess, I had a difficult time not cringing. They sound like so many of the tendencies that the internet is warning self-actualized go-getters against:
• ‘When paying in a store, I make sure to use a warm tone of voice or to give sincere thanks to make things pleasant for the person who works there.’
• ‘I try to write my everyday emails or messages in such a way that the recipient feels warmly treated.’
But once again, Bialobrzeska emphasized that this is about doing these things because you want to, not because you have to.
Bialobrzeska first began studying niceness in the early days of the pandemic. Even though people couldn’t safely hang out indoors with one another, they were helping each other more than usual, with time, funds, and all kinds of other efforts. She wondered how an everyday act of kindness—like giving a compliment or smiling at a cashier—impacted someone’s mental state. What she found was that being nice had just as strong a correlation to well-being as more robust efforts, like donating blood, volunteering, or donating money to charity. That said, her study relied on a lot of self-reporting of how people felt and what they did, after the fact, and it’s not totally clear whether niceness made people feel better or whether people who were already in a better place were generally nicer.
I found her next study, which appeared in a different social psychology journal over the summer, to be more intriguing. Bialobrzeska randomly divided participants into two groups and asked one group to perform five acts of niceness during the day and the other group to perform five small tasks from a to-do list. Later, she asked them to indicate well-being on four indicators. The participants who performed acts of niceness reported higher well-being on all four—a sense of meaning in life, self- satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and mood—than those who did errands.
‘Doing tasks from the to-do list is probably also rewarding, but doing nice gestures even more so,’ Bialobrzeska concluded.
In some ways, that simply seems obvious. Though making our bed may be satisfying, it’s also part of a routine. So why would it dramatically boost mood? Still, framed through this self-serving lens, it makes niceness a little less embarrassing. Also, it gives us a nice way to rationalize not doing errands.
Ref: slate
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