The whole point of this podcast is that we get together and discover something new every day, and then we can bring that nice feeling out into the rest of the world.
And we may be onto something.
A scientific paper out of the University of Oregon proves that when you’re nice, that can lead to more niceness around you!
It may seem like a no-brainer that if you’re nice to people, they’ll be nice to you.
But there’s actually something more going on here.
The psychologists in this research worked off something known as the “assumed similarity effect.”
When we meet people we don’t know well, we fill in some of the blanks about the personality with some of our personality.
We assume that we’re similar.
This latest study found a similar phenomenon in how people interact called the “perceiver-elicited similarity effect.”
If person A interacts with person B and is assertive, person B is more likely to be assertive too, because that’s sort of the ground rule of the interaction, even if person B isn’t usually that assertive.
If person A is a cranky-pants, person B may end up reciprocating, even if they’re otherwise in a good mood.
But if person A decides to be super friendly, person B is more likely to respond to that ray of social sunshine with one of their own.
As Professor Sanjay Srivastava, one of the researchers, put it, “You go through life making people a little more like you.”
So kindness really can make the world a nicer place.
Today in 1910 was what’s believed to be the first movie stunt.
It’s not clear today who did it or even what movie it was for, but while the cameras rolled somebody jumped into the Hudson River from a hot air balloon that was on fire.
Hopefully they didn’t need many takes.
It’s true: Be nice and others are more likely to be nice to you (University of Oregon)
How Hollywood killed the movie stunt (Salon)
