Random Acts of Kindness Before

Random Acts of Kindness

Before writing about my impressions of this project, I feel as if I have to state that I believe it was not the best way to investigate the impact of altruistic behavior. I enjoyed my experiences committing acts of kindness, both acts of kindness for strangers and acts of kindness for my family. However, because these acts of kindness were motivated by the idea that I was keeping a journal and would need to write a paper about those experiences, I feel as if the experiences were not as genuine as they could have been. Therefore, I wonder whether my reactions to the things I did are the same as the reactions that I would have had if I had done these behaviors without any external impetus. In fact, because the behavior was linked to a grade, I do not think I could characterize anything that I did as altruistic behavior. I am not certain whether this is due to the fact that, in many ways, behavior that benefits society also benefits the individual, or is simply due to the fact that I committed the acts knowing that they were part of a grade. Regardless of the reason, I felt as if I had to mention my concerns prior to giving my impressions of the project.

Helping strangers was, in some ways, more rewarding than helping that I know, because it felt more altruistic to me. The first opportunity I had to help another person occurred when I saw a woman driving around my neighborhood, looking for her dogs that had gotten out of her yard. Normally, in that situation, I would have helped if I had seen the woman's dogs, but I would not have taken on personal responsibility to look for the dogs. However, I took the woman's cell phone number, asked her to let me know if she found them, and told her that I would help her look for them. I spent almost two hours helping the woman search for her dogs. I was ready to stop helping after about thirty minutes of searching, but when I called to see if she had found them, she sounded so despondent that I felt compelled to help her keep looking. Her dogs actually returned to her yard without either of us finding them, and a neighbor texted her to let her know they were in her front yard, so my random act of kindness made no real difference to her. The whole experience made me believe that the empathy-altruism hypothesis has merit, since, as a pet lover, I could empathize with her feelings, which is what made me continue helping her (Kassin et al., 2010).

Moreover, I found that if I could not empathize with the person I was helping, that helping them did not give me the same feeling of being rewarded. I encountered a pair of homeless people who were around my age outside of a large discount store. They had a sign stating that they were homeless and asking for money. I had bottled water and protein bars with me, so I shared those with them. We struck up a conversation, and I discovered that they were not homeless because of unfortunate circumstances, but because they had made decisions that I could not understand. Even though they were very appreciative of what I had shared with them, it made me angry that they had made these choices that resulted in them being homeless and hungry. I wanted to take the water and the protein bars back from them. It made me realize that identifying with someone certainly helps impact how helping feels.

Equally interesting to me was the fact that helping my friends and family did not seem as rewarding as helping strangers. The first person that I helped was one of my good friends. She was scheduled to take a test in one of her classes when she got a call from her daughter's school that her daughter was sick and needed to go home. I was with her and offered to go pick up her daughter and watch her until she could finish her testing. I did not really feel rewarded by the behavior. I had plans for the afternoon, which I had to rearrange in order to babysit. While I did not resent babysitting, I felt as if I was obligated to watch her child. The reality is that I would be a horrible best friend if I had an afternoon free and did not watch my friend's child under those circumstances. Therefore, I do not even know that I would qualify this helping as a random act of kindness. Instead, it is one of those reciprocal acts of kindness that really seems to form the underlying basis for human relationships.

The idea that helping loved ones cannot really be classified as a random act of kindness was intensified when I did something nice for my mother. I surprised her by going to the nursery and getting some plants to put in the flowerpots around her house, which is something she does every spring, but had not done this year. She was very pleasantly surprised when she came home and found what I had done. In fact, she was so happy that she insisted on making my favorite dinner for me that night. Being rewarded with my favorite dinner after spending a few dollars on flowers and maybe 30 minutes potting them gave me a tangible personal reward for the behavior.

This experiment made me realize that helping people can make me feel better, but does not always make me feel better. Moreover, it made me realize that I might feel better about helping strangers than about helping family members, which I found to be surprising. However, I also found out that if I helped a stranger that I later deemed to be undeserving of my help, I would feel an anger that was disproportionate to what I had actually done. For example, I was angry at the two homeless people who were begging because I felt as if they had contributed to their situation, while I would never have felt any type of anger about my family or friends eating some protein bars and drinking a bottle of water.