Hold a door for a stranger and most people will call it kind. They will also call it nice, and they barely tell the two apart. That is the main finding of an Ohio State University study that tested how everyday people label good deeds, and it overturned the hunch that started it.
The one word that behaved differently was “caring.” People reserved it for acts between people who already knew each other, or for favors that cost the giver more.
A classroom argument turned into an experiment
The idea came out of a positive psychology seminar taught by Jennifer Cheavens, a professor of clinical psychology at Ohio State. Her students insisted the labels mattered. “We were talking about doing ‘acts of kindness,’ and the students were saying, ‘That’s not kind, that’s nice,'” Cheavens said in a university release. In their view, a favor done out of duty or to polish a reputation would be judged more harshly.
Cheavens took the question to colleague Laura Wagner, a developmental psychologist and linguist, and the team built a test. Doctoral student Ally Heiland, the lead author, summed up the belief they set out to check: kindness is about whether someone means it, while nice is closer to being polite.
How the study worked
The researchers wrote 14 short scenarios, two for each of seven features of a helpful act: whether it was anonymous, how much it helped, what it cost the giver, whether it was expected, whether it was planned, how warmly it was done and who the recipient was. Each volunteer read seven of them, imagined being on the receiving end of moments such as a door held open or a meal paid for in line, and scored each act on how kind, nice and caring it was. The authors describe it as the largest study of its kind so far. It was published in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology.
What people actually said
“Participants rated scenarios as similarly kind and nice across six of the seven situational dimensions we tested,” the researchers wrote. Cost was the exception: an expensive favor was rated nicer than a cheap one, but no kinder.
Here is how the three words split, in plain terms:
- Knowing the person: acts between acquaintances scored as more caring, but no kinder or nicer than the same act from a stranger.
- Higher cost to the giver: rated nicer and more caring, but not kinder.
- Warm, planned and unexpected: scored higher on all three words.
Cheavens thinks “caring” stands apart because it sits closest to an emotion. “People don’t say, ‘I feel kind,'” she said. “But you say, ‘I care for you.'”
Why it matters, and where it stops
Psychologists use the umbrella term prosocial behavior for actions meant to benefit others, and the field has long argued over whether any helpful act is purely selfless. This study sidesteps that fight. It suggests that ordinary people do not mark down a good deed just because the helper also gets something out of it. Wagner’s summary of how people see such acts: “at least kind, maybe also nice and possibly even caring.”
There are limits. Volunteers judged imagined scenes on paper, not favors they received in real life, and the release does not report how many people took part or where they were recruited. The work was also funded by a kindness-focused charity, the Center for HumanKindness at the Columbus Foundation, which the university discloses.
The authors argue the practical payoff lies in programs that encourage helping, where a mismatch between the word used and what people expect from it could put them off. For more research on how people and animals behave, browse our latest science stories.
Besides Cheavens, Wagner and Heiland, five more co-authors signed the paper, from Ohio State, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Georgia and the University of Illinois Chicago.
Further reading
Illustrative image. Image: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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