Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My son is in the 5th grade and just starting to explore his interests and ideas for a science fair project. His latest idea is to conduct an experiment about kindness. The purpose of his project would be to find out if kindness is contagious.....if people who are treated kindly are more likely to pay it forward. However, we are having a challenge coming up with a procedure. His thoughts were to actually perform acts of kindness and takes notes on others reactions, I'm not sure this is precise enough. Ankh guidance is appreciated.

Hey!

This sounds like an interesting experiment! Perhaps for the procedure you could say something such as 1) Perform an act of kindness (list a specific one) to subject A 2) Record subject A's actions after receiving the act of kindness 3) Repeat steps 1-2 with X amount of subjects. This is just a very broad procedure though. You should keep in mind the final procedure should have a more detailed list of steps. I hope this helps!

Hi ahorner3298,

It might help if your son took a look at the human behavior and sociology project ideas on our site:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... n-behavior

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... /sociology

Those could give you some ideas about how to do a project like this with groups of volunteers. I have read about studies similar to this before (for example you give a bunch of people candy or money, and then set up experiments where they have various incentives to share with other people or keep it for themselves, and you examine what factors influence their actions - an act of kindness could be one of those).

Hope that helps!

Ben