World Kindness Day: the small act that matters more than you thinkAnd one thing to try tonight

November 13 is World Kindness Day. Most people think it’s a social media holiday. It’s older than that, and the idea behind it is simple enough to keep at home.

In March 1963, Seiji Kaya, then president of the University of Tokyo, told his graduating students to be brave about practicing small kindness, and hoped it would spread across Japanese society. That speech started Japan’s Small Kindness Movement. In its early years the movement encouraged people to give visitors a warm welcome during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Decades later, Japan’s movement brought kindness groups from other countries to Tokyo. On September 20, 1997, they signed a declaration that formed the World Kindness Movement. November 13 became the day because it was the opening day of the movement’s first conference, held in Tokyo in 1998. The movement registered as an NGO under Swiss law in 2019.

The idea has stayed small on purpose. The point isn’t one grand gesture. It’s the ordinary act you almost talked yourself out of.

Psychologists Amit Kumar of the University of Texas at Austin and Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago tested this in a 2022 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

In one experiment in a Chicago park, people chose to give their cup of hot chocolate to a stranger. Both sides then rated the stranger’s mood on a scale from −5 to +5. Givers guessed the stranger would land around 2.7. The strangers reported 3.5. In another experiment, MBA students did two kind acts of their own choosing. The gap was wider: givers guessed 2.32, and recipients reported 3.55.

The researchers found that givers focus on the thing, like the drink or the favor. Receivers focus on the warmth behind it. In a lab version, people who had just received a gift from another participant were then given $100 to split with a stranger. They gave away $48.02 on average, against $41.20 for people whose gift came from the lab.

In short, a kind act lands better than you expect, and it tends to get passed on.

World Kindness Day has no fixed ritual, and that’s part of its appeal. There’s no altar and no special food. A few simple ways a household can mark it:

• Pick one person outside the house whom everyone knows: a neighbor, a bus driver, a grandparent who lives alone. Do one small thing for them together.

• Keep it ordinary. Carrying groceries, a handwritten note, a meal dropped off. The research above suggests the size of the act matters less than you think.

• Talk about it at dinner. Ask who was kind to you today. Kindness gets easier to notice once it’s named out loud.

• Repeat it next year. One act on the same date each year makes it a family tradition.

Write one short thank-you note.

In an earlier study, published in Psychological Science in 2018, Kumar and Epley asked people to write a letter of thanks to someone who mattered to them. Writers expected it to feel a bit awkward. Recipients reported more surprise and more good feeling than the writers predicted.

1. Choose one person who helped you this year and never heard a proper thank-you.

2. Write three sentences: what they did, when it was, and what changed because of it.

3. Send it before November 13 ends, by hand, text or email.

It takes about five minutes. Based on the research, it will probably mean more to them than you expect.

Inside Kithmark

Say the kind thing out loud

Kithmark’s shared spaces are for you and one other person, working things out through games instead of arguments. Tell me something good is one of the games you play there together.

Real screens from the Kithmark iPhone beta. Free in the iPhone beta. Android coming soon.

Inside Ritual OS

Small acts, start to finish

Ritual OS matches you with short practices from the world’s traditions, each named with its tradition and where it’s from, and adapts them week by week. You can do them alone or with other people.

Real screens from the Ritual OS iPhone beta.

How our apps help

Kithmark is a private record of the people who matter to you, in plain words, never scores, and encrypted on your phone. When you’re both on the app, games like Tell me something good make the kind thing easier to say. Ritual OS matches you with short practices from the world’s traditions, each with a beginning and an end, for you alone or with the people close to you.