Kindness while driving pays off
People & Empowerment: Friendliness helps in road traffic, says Dennis Dal Mas from TÜV NORD.
People & Empowerment: Friendliness helps in road traffic, says Dennis Dal Mas from TÜV NORD.
A car comes out of a driveway and wants to turn onto the road. In heavy traffic, this is not always easy: first, another road user has to brake and leave a gap. ‘That's good manners,’ says Dennis Dal Mas from the Medical-Psychological Institute of TÜV NORD in Bielefeld. ‘But unfortunately, good manners in road traffic cannot be taken for granted.’
Research proves this. In recent years, drivers in around 40 countries in Asia and Europe have provided information on how they behave in similar situations: How often do they give way? Do they regularly signal before changing lanes? Do they tailgate cars in front of them? According to the results, the UK and the Netherlands are the countries in Europe where you can most likely hope for decent behaviour. In Germany, on the other hand, as in France, Italy and Turkey, people tend to be ‘moderately polite’, as the researchers put it.
A famous field study from the 1990s also observed regional differences in friendliness towards strangers. Test director Robert Levine and his team put people in more than 30 US cities to the test by simulating critical everyday situations on the street. In one of them, an apparently blind pedestrian tried to cross a busy junction. The key finding: the more densely populated a city was, the less helpful people behaved. New York came last in the friendliness ranking.
Friendliness was a survival advantage for ancestors
A person's friendliness can also be measured by their vehicle, as the US psychologist Paul Piff from the University of California discovered. For his field experiment, he always had a pedestrian walk towards a zebra crossing when a car was approaching at the same time. The cheapest cars allowed the pedestrians to pass, reported Piff. But the more expensive the car, the more often they drove across the zebra crossing without stopping.
One possible interpretation: the wealthy possibly believed they could afford such behaviour. ‘Being friendly pays off for everyone,’ explains Dennis Dal Mas, a psychologist with a doctorate from TÜV NORD. But it could be even more important for the less well-off.
For our ancestors, friendliness was even a survival advantage, if anthropologist Brian Hare from Duke University in the USA is to be believed. He speaks of the ‘survival of the friendliest’, alluding to Charles Darwin's evolutionary principle of ‘survival of the fittest’. According to Hare, humans are more dependent on each other and therefore behave more friendly towards each other than chimpanzees do, even without a reason. The US cognitive researcher David Rand confirmed on the basis of numerous experiments: ‘We intuitively tend to co-operate.’
Friendliness is good for your health
This is also reflected in the way people spontaneously judge each other. The judgements can be traced back to two central dimensions: One comprises friendliness and co-operation (‘communion’ in English), the other self-confidence and assertiveness (‘agency’). However, German psychologists discovered in 2023 that friendly and cooperative behaviour wins more sympathy. Michael Dufner from the University of Leipzig and Sascha Krause from the University of Witten-Herdecke observed test subjects in conversations with strangers. Friendliness proved to be twice as important as self-confidence in making a good impression on the other person.
No wonder, because being treated kindly is good for your health. Researchers refer to this as the ‘rabbit effect’ because the positive effect was discovered in the 1970s during experiments with rabbits. They were genetically identical and had all been fed the same high-fat diet, and yet some of them remained healthier. In retrospect, it turned out that one carer had treated her charges more lovingly, and it was precisely these animals that fared better on average than the others.
But being kind also makes the kind people themselves happy. In a study by the University of Oxford, people were happier if they had done something kind for their fellow human beings at least once a day for a week. What's more, kindness is contagious. In a Spanish company, randomly selected employees were asked to do something good for other employees for four weeks. As a result, not only were both sides happier and more satisfied with their lives, but those who had been kind also behaved more kindly.
Kindness also encourages others to make good gestures
Nevertheless, the effect of kindness is systematically underestimated. In a series of experiments, the US psychologists Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley induced around 1000 test subjects to do something unexpectedly kind to others, for example to send nice messages to friends or relatives or to give strangers a hot chocolate in the park on a cold winter's day. The recipients were happier than the test subjects thought they would be: They thought their gesture was relatively insignificant.
‘Good deeds leave a mark,’ says Dennis Dal Mas from TÜV NORD. That's why the psychologist advises using every opportunity to do so, whether privately, at work or in traffic. ‘Every kind gesture makes life a little better for everyone.’
Founded over 150 years ago, we stand for security and trust worldwide. As a knowledge company, we have the digital future firmly in our sights. Whether engineers, IT security experts or specialists for the mobility of the future: in more than 100 countries, we ensure that our customers become even more successful in the networked world.
