Last year, 60,000 people participated in the world’s largest study on kindness and psychologist Claudia Hammond recently revealed the results. The study included a “Kindness Test” that asked participants about acts of kindness they witness, do themselves, or are recipients of. Acts of kindness can be as small as bringing a cup of coffee to a friend or complimenting a stranger’s cool shoes, or a grand gesture of appreciation. 75% of participants said they receive kindness quite often or nearly all the time. 36% of US participants felt that COVID made people kinder. According to about 66% of participants, the main reason why people don’t express kindness to others is out of fear of the act being misinterpreted. Hammond and other researchers will continue digging deeper into the data to learn more about how kindness manifests in society and how it affects us.
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