Kindness in short supply: Evidence for inadequate prosocial input.

In everyday life, people often have opportunities to improve others' lives, whether offering well-intentioned advice or complimenting someone on a job well done. These are opportunities to provide "prosocial input" (information intended to benefit others), including feedback, advice, compliments, and expressions of gratitude. Despite widespread evidence that giving prosocial input can improve the well-being of both givers and recipients, people sometimes hesitate to offer their input. The current paper documents when and why people fail to give prosocial input, noting that potential givers overestimate the costs of doing so (e.g., making recipients uncomfortable) and underestimate the benefits (e.g., being helpful) for at least four psychological reasons. Unfortunately, the reluctance to give prosocial input results in a short supply of kindness.

"Just letting you know " Underestimating others' desire for constructive feedback.

People sometimes avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix others' problems. For example, only 2.6% of individuals in a pilot field study provided feedback to a survey administrator who had food or lipstick on their face. Five experiments (N = 1,984) identify a possible reason for the lack of feedback: People underestimate how much others want to receive constructive feedback. Initial experiments demonstrated this underestimation of others' desire for feedback in hypothetical scenarios (Experiment 1), recalled feedback experiences (Experiment 2), and real-time feedback among friends (Experiment 3). We further examine how people ascertain others' desire for feedback, testing how much they consider the potential consequences of feedback for themselves (e.g., discomfort giving feedback or harm to their relationship with the receiver) or the receiver (e.g., discomfort receiving feedback or value from feedback). While we found evidence that people consider both types of consequences, people particularly underestimated how much receivers value their feedback, a mechanism not extensively tested in prior research. Specifically, in Experiment 4, two interventions-making feedback-givers consider receivers' perspectives (enhancing consideration of receivers' consequences) or imagine someone else providing feedback (reducing consideration of givers' consequences)-both improved givers' recognition of others' desire for feedback compared to no intervention, but the perspective-taking intervention was most effective. Finally, Experiment 5 demonstrates the underestimation during a financially incentivized public-speaking contest and shows that giving less constructive feedback resulted in less improvement in feedback-receivers' performances. Overall, people consistently underestimate others' desire for feedback, with potentially negative consequences for feedback-receivers' outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).