Erin Alexander was having a hard day. A waitress working at Starbucks was too. Erin ordered an iced green tea and told the waitress to cheer up. After picking up the order, she noticed a message on the cup: “Erin, your soul is golden.” Erin Alexander recalled the incident, “Of course, I was still really sad, but that little thing made the rest of my day.”
New findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in August, prove just how powerful experiences like Erin’s can be. Researchers found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.
A recent experiment recruited 84 participants at an ice skating rink in Chicago, where they were given a hot chocolate and asked to keep it or give it to a stranger as an act of kindness. The 75participants who gave away their hot chocolate were asked to predict how the recipient would feel on a scale from 0(very small) to 10(very large), and the recipients were then asked to report their actual feelings on the same scales.
In that experiment, the people doing the kind thing consistently underestimated the appreciation they receive, according to Amit Kumar, a psychology professor at the University of Texas. “People tend to think that what they are giving is kind of little, maybe it’s relatively inconsequential,” Dr. Kumar said. “But recipients are less likely to think along those lines. They consider the gesture to be significantly more meaningful because they are also thinking about the fact that someone did something nice for them.” Dr. Kumar continued, “With an experiment like this, I hope it will inspire more people to actually commit random acts of kindness.”
【小题1】What’s the function of paragraph 1?| A．To present a fact. | B．To introduce the topic. |
| C．To describe a scene. | D．To explain an opinion. |
| A．All participants give away their hot chocolate. |
| B．Recipients received kind gestures from their friends. |
| C．Recipients showed more appreciation than givers think. |
| D．Participants reported their feelings on a scale from 0 to 10. |
| A．Insignificant. | B．Substantial. |
| C．Beneficial. | D．Unbelievable. |
| A．The Power of Small Acts of Kindness. | B．The Magic of Receivers’ Appreciation |
| C．The Importance of Appreciating Kindness. | D．The Impact of a Simple Message on a Cup. |
