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Category: Project

Description: What is kindness, and how kind are people to the environment? Previous research looking at the costs and benefits of kind acts in general has found that: the kindness of an act depends largely on the benefit it provides, people are more likely to perform high-benefit low-cost acts, and people care about others ~75% as much as they care about themselves. Here we use a similar methodology to investigate perceptions of kind acts to the environment. A sample of the UK public (n = 595) rated either the perceived cost, benefit, kindness or likelihood of performing 111 acts for the environment. The study found that, again, the kindness of an environmental act depends largely on the benefit it provides, people are more likely to perform highbenefit low-cost acts, and people care about the environment ~80% as much as they care about themselves. These results suggest that people think about kind acts to the environment similarly to how they think about kind acts in general. Future research should investigate the degree to which people think they have a cooperative relationship with the environment.