Valuing the modest might of ‘microkindness’

Applying research methods more typically used in the physical and health sciences, academic scholars are exploring how even brief, individual gestures of kindness can inspire a culture of compassion that brings wider benefits to society.In a counterweight to the better-known notion of microaggressions, two Harvard University researchers highlighted the concept of “microkindnesses” in a recent peer-reviewed journal article, noting how such acts can ripple outward and shape communities for the better. If the term sounds “modest,” Tim Lomas and Tyler J. VanderWeele wrote recently, “It is meant to be. Microkindness is not heroic sacrifice ... or major generosity. It is the tiny act of human regard that passes from one person to another in ordinary life.”The two researchers – affiliated with Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program – are also inverting the use of traditional public health assessment approaches by applying a positive lens to identifying how uplifting acts and practices permeate through society, rather than how negative behaviors or illnesses are transmitted.“Small gestures deserve more scientific attention,” the authors wrote in Greater Good magazine on July 16, writing that “societies concerned about polarization, loneliness, and distrust should pay closer attention to the brief moments in which people communicate goodwill.” Such moments affect not just individuals but “also the wider social environment,” they noted elsewhere.“A lot of people think about kindness as a transfer where one person sacrifices and someone else benefits,” empathy researcher Jamil Zaki observed in an interview with Stanford Magazine. “But happiness and well-being are not zero-sum. ... Kindness and empathy help us thrive.”Multiple studies have shown that well-being and kindness or altruism are reciprocal and reinforcing. “Happier people tend to engage in more altruism, and more altruistic people feel happier,” The Washington Post reported in 2024.To help others understand the ripple effects of microkindness, the Harvard researchers offer up a simple measure: a smile. It’s brief and costs little, but communicates much and “offers a simple case for thinking about how microkindness might move through a room, a classroom, a gathering, or a community.”A smile often elicits one in return, causing such cues to become commonplace in varied settings and scale up from one-off acts into consistent social habits. That in turn, Drs. Lomas and VanderWeele wrote, can positively impact the media environment, shifting it from “outrage, threat, and conflict” to stories of “kindness, not as sentimental distraction, but as part of ... public life.”