Kindness is going to be studied by a university institute in California

Kindness, new field of study at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). The American college has launched this Wednesday its Institute of Kindness, to study the small and generous acts of everyday life.

The institute, called the Bedari Institute, will have an "interdisciplinary approach to understanding kindness". The work will mix evolution, biology, psychology, economics, culture and sociology, according to a UCLA press release.

Contagious kindness

This institute seeks to be "an antidote to the current global political context, violence and tension," says the dean of the department of social sciences. "We all live in a world where humanity discovers and implements the kindness that is in each of us," adds Matthew Harris, co-founder of the institute.

"It will take a lot of research to understand why kindness can be so rare in the modern world," he continues. Scientific studies have already shown that acts of kindness have a very positive impact on the physical and mental health of their authors and that they can be "contagious" for those who witness it.