There is also plenty of popular writing on the benefits of kindness. British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and British (Canadian-born) historian Barbara Taylor have written and interesting book in answer to the question, ‘Why should we be kind?’ Called, ‘On Kindness’, they say, “The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities. . . . particularly the vulnerability we call desire.’’ This is an interesting explanation as to why we enjoy kindness but sometimes find it hard to receive, and often procrastinate when considering offering kindness to others.

Kindness is also a hot topic for researchers. Otake, Shimai, Tanaka-Matsumi, Otsui & Friedrickson report in Happy People Become Happier Through Kindness: A Counting Kindness Intervention, that their most important finding was the close association between kindness and happiness in everyday life. They found that kind people experience more happiness and have happier memories. In a simply experiment where people counted acts of kindness for one week, they found people appeared to have become happier and more grateful. They conclude that happy people are more kind in the first place and that they can become even happier, kinder and more grateful by simply being kind to others.

If happiness is a result of being kind it is interesting to look at researcher, Sonja Lyubomirsky’s,  recent summary of the benefits of happiness. In “The How, What, When, and Why of Happiness,” Lyubomirsky summaries the results of over two hundred scientific studies on happiness and concludes, happy people: