The Ripple Effect of Kindness

by Lilian Drake

When something falls into a body of water, it causes a ripple. This ripple starts out small, but rapidly expands to encompass a large area. One Kind Act a Day is asking people to do just one deliberate act of kindness. It may seem inconsequential, but that act of kindness has a reach much further than you could know. Kindness has the power to create a ripple effect.

Students at Bountiful Elementary recently completed their path to become a Certified School of Kindness. With the encouragement of the administration, they started a Kindness Initiative to focus more on kindness every day and do as many acts of kindness as possible. As part of this process, they collected food and hygiene supplies to donate, wrote essays about kindness, created artwork, and focused on doing at least one deliberate act of kindness every day for a whole month. I had the opportunity to speak in the kickoff assembly. As I thought about my remarks, I wanted students to understand the far-reaching power of their acts of kindness. That each act has the potential to spread, just like a drop of water in a pond.

Little did I know how much this message would impact these amazing kids.

Reciprocity of Kindness

Boston, a first grader at Bountiful Elementary and winner of the Kindness Essay competition, summed up the ripple effect perfectly in his essay.

Just like Boston said, kindness is a superpower and is “really great”. Kindness, just like a drop of water, can start a chain reaction. When people recognize a kind act done to them, it makes them want to turn around and do something kind to someone else. This is due to the reciprocity effect, a sociological social norm that says people will often respond to the actions of another with a similar equivalent action, typically with kind acts. Humans mirror behavior; this means that a person, sometimes unknowingly, will reciprocate or mirror an act of kindness done to them. Using the example from Boston’s essay, if one person chose to be kind to three people, and those three people were kind to another three people, and so on, by the fourth ripple, it would have affected 40 people.

Throwing Stones

This idea of ripples has spread deeply through the school of Bountiful. One father of a student at reached out to share an experience with his son.

“My son goes to an elementary school where One Kind Act a Day was just implemented. I was able to see the kickoff assembly where the speaker gave a really great presentation on the ripple effect of kind acts. She spoke about how nothing we do out of kindness ends, but whenever we do something kind, that act spreads and multiplies. Just like the ripples on the water. A few weeks later I was hiking with my son, and we found a pond. As is the natural instinct of young kids, he started to throw pebbles into the pond. I was just zoning out, enjoying being in nature when I noticed my son saying something peculiar. He would throw a rock and say, “That is telling someone you like their cool shirt!” then another rock and say, “That is asking someone to play”. I asked him what he was talking about, and he said, “Dad, kindness is like ripples. Each rock is something kind and look how the ripples spread!”

I was touched and gratified to see how much this message had sunk in for him. I grabbed a fairly large rock and lobbed it into the pond with a loud splash.

“Whoa Dad!” my son shouted, “That is like…like…like DONATING $100 to a charity! That was huge!”

We then enjoyed throwing stones and small boulders into the pond and naming off different acts of kindness they represented. Soon the once calm surface of the pond was wavey and rippling and my son said, “Look at all that KINDNESS dad!” It was a rewarding moment to me as a parent that my son understood the effects of his actions and wanted to think about doing kind things. When we are kind, our actions never stop there, they ripple out within and without. In our hearts and into the world.”

We Can Spread Ripples

A single rock thrown into a pond can make a major difference, but just imagine hundreds of rocks being thrown into that pond. Big or small, those rocks create ripples.

One Kind Act a Day was started because small acts of kindness, when done by many, can lead to big change. Due to the ripple effect, one hundred people doing one deliberate act of kindness can result in much more than one hundred acts of kindness.  One kind act can become a catalyst for more kindness that has the superpower to transform a community. We may not always see the result of our kindness… but maybe we will be able to. Then we can proudly look at all our ripples and say, “Look at all that KINDNESS!”

Sources:

Kilner, J. M., & Lemon, R. N. (2013). What We Know Currently about Mirror Neurons. Current Biology, 23 (23), R1057–R1062. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.10.051

Molm, L. D., Schaefer, D. R., & Collett, J. L. (2007). The Value of Reciprocity. Social Psychology Quarterly, 70 (2), 199–217. https://doi.org/10.1177/019027250707000208

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