TUESDAY was Kindness Day. Did you notice? Last year commuters were treated to free chocolate handed out at London mainline stations. (Not sure if that would work now given weeks of disruption on South Western Railways. For six years I commuted daily to London on South West Trains with only six days of disruption that meant I failed to get to/from work. Now, the service is so unreliable that when I go to London, I drive. Tragic! Sadly, it’ll take more than a free chocolate bar to get me back on the rails….). But I digress!

World Kindness Day to ‘make the world a better place by celebrating and promoting good deeds and pledging acts of kindness’. This year, it encouraged everyone to do at least one act of kindness for someone else. Of course, the world would be so much better if we were kind to one another; we all know how lovely it is when someone is kind to us – particularly if it’s unexpected. “What goes around, comes around,” a friend is fond of quoting at me when I comment on how kind she is. As Princess Diana is reputed to have said: “Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you.”

That’s pretty straight forward – more kind actions by more people is bound to make the world a happier place.

But a bunch of clever researchers down at Sussex University have discovered there’s more to it. They looked at brain scans of 1,000 people when they made a kind decision and noticed an increase in brain activity in some parts of the brain – they’d located the ‘feel good’ factor, the ‘warm glow’. Being kind packs a double whammy – not only does it make the world a nice place in which to live, but it also makes the ‘giver’ as well as the receiver feel better.

Their research went further. They noticed that activity in parts of the brain of those who made the decision out of genuine altruism (expecting nothing in return but a warm glow) was distinguishable from those who acted in the expectation of getting something back. There was evidence that different parts of the brain were at work with the different motivations.

They reasoned that if one was to confuse the different motivations – offering someone modest payment when they’d done something kind, say – and mistake genuine altruism for self-interest it could backfire. “Here I am just wanting to be good – and you think I’m doing it because I want some reward!”

How refreshing to find that even though transactional relations are becoming ever more dominant in our world, there lies deep within us a place that transcends that…

Wouldn’t it be good to find that it’s kindness, not money, that makes the world go round.