Science Confirms The Obvious: Being Nice Helps You Make Friends

A new study finds that kids really do like other kids who are nice.

By Emily Elert Posted 12.27.2012 at 4:00 pm 2 Comments

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After conducting a month-long study with several hundred Canadian tweens, researchers have arrived at the conclusion that permeates every after-school special you've ever been bored enough to watch: being nice makes people like you.

To investigate how kindness affects kids' happiness and social standing, researchers organized a controlled study with 415 9-11 year-olds in Vancouver, British Columbia:

Every week over the course of 4 weeks, students...were instructed either to perform 3 acts of kindness (for anyone they wish) or visit 3 places (anywhere they wish). Throughout the 4-week intervention, students in both conditions reported what they did each week on in-class surveys. Examples of kind acts included “gave my mom a hug when she was stressed by her job,” “gave someone some of my lunch,” and “vacuumed the floor.” Examples of locations visited included “shopping centre,” “baseball diamond,” and “grandma’s house.”

At the beginning and end of the four-week period, the students rated their happiness and life satisfaction in written surveys, and also recorded the names of peers they “would like to be in school activities [i.e., spend time] with."

The researchers found that kids in both groups received more peer nominations at then end of the study than at the beginning, but, while students in the place-visiting group had an average of .7 more friends (peer nominations) at the end, students in the do-gooder group earned an average of 1.5 friends throughout of the study.

There are, of course, lots of reasons to be kind, and now we have one more: the data support it.

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2 Comments

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BaPef

12/27/12 at 6:39 pm

I am forced to disagree just on the grounds that being nice got me walked over in Middle/Highschool and did not by any means make it easier to make friends if anything being nice just lead to me being depressed because being nice made me a target for the bullies... But oh wait never mind they did the study in Canada where everyone is nicer... I went to school in America we're dicks here...

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Dinky

01/01/13 at 11:26 am

I'm assuming that you're just kidding but if you're not... There is a difference between random acts of kindness (which were done in this experiment) and acts of pseudo kindness. (acts of kindness in which you expect something in return) I'll give you an example, as a child if you give someone you like a cookie hoping to make them a friend or a girlfriend that's not being nice.(an example of pseudo kindness) You're trying to manipulate people around you with your actions. An act of kindness is when you see someone in the lunch room who you don't really know or care about and they have just dropped their lunch on the ground and you offer them half or yours or you offer to pay for half of a new lunch for them.(an act of kindness)Most people who think they were walked over in middle or high school tried to manipulate people around them with "acts of kindness" people saw through this. If you were genuinely kind you would have had a lot of friends, maybe not the so called cool kids or pretty (girls or guys)but a lot of friends. (This also makes an assumption that after helping the above person with their lunch that if they tried to be your friend you responded in kind)

P.S. If your being "nice" involved giving people stuff or deferring to what other people wanted... (a lot of people might look on that as being an act of weakness)Bullies pounce on that.

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