cool to be kind

It goes without saying that the world could afford a little more kindness. Spend enough time reading the news and browsing the internet and it becomes easy to believe that we’re a species marked by our selfishness and mistrust. Yet a growing body of evidence is showing not only that our capacity for altruism is one of humanity’s most defining traits, but also that being kind and compassionate is actually good for our physical and mental wellbeing.

“It all comes down to our mammalian origins,” explains James Kirby, a research psychologist who founded the University of Queensland’s Compassionate Mind Research Group. “Our parental investment strategy is to have a small number of children that we spend an incredibly long time raising.” The helplessness of our children—an evolutionary price we pay for our oversized brains—means that we have a “caregiving motive”. “When we hear our baby cry because they perceive a threat, we move towards that threat in order