It was freezing cold the day Neil Laybourn saw a man in a T-shirt sitting on a high ledge on Waterloo Bridge and made a split-second decision that would change both their lives for ever.
“It’s hard to pin down what it was that made me stop… but it would have played on my mind if I hadn’t,” he said.
“That’s not how you live your life is it? You don’t just walk past when you see someone in need.”
On that January morning in London’s rush hour, hundreds of other people were doing exactly that. But Laybourn didn’t and – it turned out the man, Jonny Benjamin, was contemplating suicide.
Six years later he would launch a campaign to find and thank Laybourn for persuading him down off that ledge.
The two of them now give talks on mental health issues and suicide prevention together.
Looking back now on that day, Laybourn says: “It’s made me much more aware of how important it is to put the amount of kindness you have in you, out into the world.”
But what is it, exactly, that makes us kind? Why are some of us kinder than others – and what stops us from being kinder?
The Kindness Test, a major new study involving more than 60,000 people from 144 different countries, has been looking into these and other questions.
Launched on BBC Radio 4 and devised by the University of Sussex, it is believed to be the largest public study of kindness ever carried out in the world.
The results, which are currently the subject of a three-part Radio 4 documentary The Anatomy of Kindness, suggest that people who receive, give or even just notice more acts of kindness tend to experience higher levels of wellbeing and life satisfaction.
Other encouraging findings are that as many as two-thirds of people think the pandemic has made people kinder and nearly 60% of participants in the study claimed to have received an act of kindness in the previous 24 hours.
“It is a big part of human nature, to be kind – because it’s such a big part of how we connect with people and how we have relationships,” says Claudia Hammond, visiting professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Sussex and presenter of the documentary.
“It’s a win-win situation because we like receiving kindness, but we also like being kind.”
Our desire to be kind is actually quite selfish, on one level, she explains.
Because we have evolved to have empathy, we have all sorts of “ulterior motives” for being kind – the chief one being that it makes us feel good.
“We know from brain research, there is a warm fuzzy feeling that people feel straight away. But also, it gives you the sense that you are a kind person who cares about other people. And we want to be good, we want to feel good about ourselves and what we are like.”
Your religious beliefs and your values system also help to determine how kind you are, the study shows.
“We found those who believed benevolence was important were more likely to give than those who believed power and achievement were more important.”
People who have been told they should be kind are naturally more likely to notice opportunities to be kind:
“They have expectations, which might be the expectations of their religious teachings or it might be the expectations of those around them,” Hammond says. Continue reading