Paying it Forward: How One Cup of Coffee Could Change the World

How one cup of coffee could change the world

Sandi Mann

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First published by HarperTrueFate 2015

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Epigraph

'This book is full of heart-warming, real-life examples of paying it forward that will inspire and motivate you to do the same.'

Charley Johnson, President of the Pay It Forward Foundation

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Paying it Forward: How it All Started for Me

Foreword

Chapter 1: Paying it Forward – What’s it All About?

Chapter 2: Why Giving Feels Good

Chapter 3: The Power (and Discomfort) of Gratitude

Chapter 4: Selfish or Selfless?

Chapter 5: Goodwill Un-Chained

Chapter 6: Trying it Out – My Story

Chapter 7: For the Good of God? How Religious Communities Have Been Paying it Forward for Years

Chapter 8: How We Can All Make a Difference

Further reading

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About the Publisher

Paying it Forward: How it All Started for Me

Prior to 2 February 2013 I, like many people, had never heard of the concept of paying it forward. All this changed when a friend in America posted on Facebook her experience of being bought a coffee as part of a pay-it-forward campaign. I was intrigued, and wrote a blog on this for the Huffington Post. The blog received over 2,000 ‘Likes’ and nearly 300 shares and is still being shared and read today. Clearly this is a topic that resonates with a lot of people – including me. I was hooked.

This book has been borne from this one cup of coffee that my friend Debbie was treated to. It is the story of the psychology of altruism and kindness, and it’s also my story, for I couldn’t research PIF without trying it out for myself. It has changed my world; I hope it changes yours, too.

Foreword

Paying it forward is the one thing on this planet that all 7.1 billion people can participate in. The one thing that allows anyone, no matter what their age, race, religious beliefs or where they live, the ability to make someone’s day better. It can be a family member, a friend, a stranger, a customer, maybe someone you see all the time at the gym – whoever you choose. It can happen whenever you want it to; there will never be a shortage of people who need help or even a little cheering up. It doesn’t need to involve money – all the pay-it-forwards that Sandi Mann carries out in the last chapter cost less than the price of this book. It doesn’t need to make you feel uncomfortable and it can be done for any reason. This world needs more goodness in it, and any reason – no matter what that is – is a good reason.

Goodness needs to make its way to the forefront of our society and it needs to be taken seriously. It needs to be on the front page of newspapers, at the beginning of the news on TV with big feature stories and not the last 30 seconds of the broadcast. It needs to infiltrate our homes, our schools, our companies, our shops, our families, our lives – every aspect of our world. It needs to become the thing we get addicted to, just like we did with Angry Birds. This book, which discusses the psychology of paying it forward, should help with getting the message out there.

Imagine 10 million kind acts happening today that did not happen the day before. Can you imagine what that would do to our world? This book is full of heart-warming, real-life examples of paying it forward that will inspire and motivate you to do the same. Paying it forward, random acts of kindness and doing good, is something we all speak of but not enough of us back up that talk with actions. We want our kids to grow up to be kind and respectful, yet our day-to-day examples may be showing them the complete opposite. When people see good, they do good, as the extensive research that this book draws upon so clearly shows. The world needs more goodness and with every kind act you perform, someone will be sure to notice it and do the same.

Together, we can all pay it forward and make the world a better place – one coffee cup at a time.

Charley Johnson, President of the Pay It Forward Foundation

www.payitforwa‌rdfoundation.org/

Chapter 1

Paying it Forward – What’s it All About?

When Michelle Hickinbottom’s 16-year-old daughter left her iPhone on a train in Birmingham in March 2015, both mum and daughter believed that was the last they would ever see of the £250 device. But they struck lucky – the phone was found by 12-year-old schoolboy Josh Brown, who handed it in to the station master. So grateful were the Hickinbottoms that they asked Josh to leave his address with the station master, too, so they could send him a £20 reward. But when Mrs Hickinbottom went to collect the phone, instead of his address she found this message: ‘Don’t worry about the money, just do something nice for someone else.’

Josh Brown, at the tender age of 12, with his heart-warming entreaty not to pay him back for his good deed but to pay it forward instead, really captured the essence of what paying it forward is all about.

The idea of paying it forward builds on the acts of kindness or ‘good deeds’ that we, as a civilised society, are encouraged to perform for others. Traditionally, however, we are more accustomed to ‘paying back’ than ‘paying forward’; paying back is when we do something nice for someone in return for them having already done something for us. So because my friend picks up my kids from school on Monday when I’m working late, I pay her back by collecting her kids for her on Thursday when she can’t get there in time. We are all very familiar with ‘paying it back’, and indeed society runs very well on this established system of reciprocity. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours; we’ve all done it, and many of us rely on this reciprocal favour-giving to cope with the various demands on our time and resources.

‘Paying it forward’ (PIF) is different. Instead of paying back, the idea here is that we pay forward so that we don’t return the favour to the person who donated it, but ‘pay it forward’ to an entirely different person. So, in theory, instead of picking up my friend’s kids as a thank-you for helping me out with mine (paying it back), I would instead pay it forward by doing the return favour for someone else. That person, too, is encouraged to pay it forward by doing something nice for another person, and thus acts of kindness are spread around. Kindness begets kindness, and so a kindness domino effect is begun.

The essence of the pay-it-forward concept (referred to by some as ‘upstream reciprocity’) then is that we perform acts of kindness for complete strangers rather than for people we know. This way, the recipients of our good deeds can’t pay us back. They can only satisfy the psychological demand for reciprocity (more on this later …) that our good deed creates by paying it forward to someone else. Of course, they are under no obligation to pay it forward to a complete stranger in the true spirit of the PIF ideology (they could choose to pay it forward to a friend instead, or, of course, not pay it forward at all), but it is hoped that the many and growing organisations that now exist around the world to promote the concept of paying it forward (see Chapter 8) will be able to spread the message so that recipients of random acts of kindness know exactly what they are meant to do! This is also the aim of this book: to spread the word and the ideology of PIF so that random acts of kindness and good deeds spread like a virulent (but benign) virus across the globe.

The origins of paying it forward

The origins of the term are not entirely clear, but it may have been coined by Lily Hardy Hammond in her 1916 book In the Garden of Delight:

I never repaid Great-Aunt Letitia’s love to her, any more than she repaid her mother’s. You don’t pay love back; you pay it forward .

However, the concept of passing on acts of kindness far precedes the actual term ‘pay it forward’. One of the earliest recorded references to the idea was made by Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to one Benjamin Webb, dated 25 April 1784:

I do not pretend to give such a deed; I only lend it to you. When you […] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him.

Franklin suggests that recipients of a good deed receive a debt, which they then feel obliged to ‘discharge’. This is similar to the idea of psychological reciprocity, which will be discussed in more detail later.

The next reference to the concept takes almost 60 years to make an appearance when, in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American lecturer and poet, wrote in an essay entitled ‘Compensation’:

In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody.

Here, Emerson believes that it is the law of ‘nature’ that even though we can’t always return favours (or pay back) we must still be obliged to pay the favour on to ‘somebody’.

Caffè sospeso is a tradition in the working-class cafés of Naples where a person who has experienced good luck financially pays for two coffees, but receives and consumes only one, the second being left until a person enquires later whether a sospeso is available.

It wasn’t until the 1940s that the concept (if not the terminology) of paying it forward really started to take off, with the ‘Heifer Project’, a global non-profit organisation set up by a farmer, Dan West, which aimed to end poverty and hunger in a sustainable way. The idea was that by giving gifts of livestock (heifer cows), seeds and trees to those in need, the gift could be passed on to others. Each family benefiting from the original donations was obliged to then give some of their own produce (new calves, trees, etc.) from the gift to another family in need. This family, too, would in time donate some of the produce borne of their gift to another family. In this way, the single gift could multiply into a far-reaching wave of giving. Heifer International, as it is now known, thus works to ensure that the gift of each animal will eventually help an entire community to become self-sustaining, and in this way it aims to eradicate hunger and poverty (www.heifer.org/).

The term ‘pay it forward’ gained further popularity in 1951 when Robert A. Heinlein, an American science-fiction writer who died in 1988, wrote in his book Between Planets of a gift of money given to a hungry recipient, Don. When Don assures the donor that he will pay it back, he is urged instead to pay it forward ‘to some other brother who needs it’.

Heinlein’s widow took the concept of paying it forward further after his death by founding The Heinlein Society in order to ‘pay forward’ the legacy of the writer to future generations. The foundation has programmes to promote blood drives, supply educational materials, offer scholarships and provide his books to military heroes, among other things (www.heinleinsociety.org/).

In 1957, the concept of paying it forward appeared in another book – this time a novel entitled Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, in which the main protagonist wonders how to thank a Mr Jonas for saving his life: ‘You just can’t pay. What then? What? Pass it on somehow, he thought, pass it on to someone else. Keep the chain moving.’

It is not, however, until the turn of the twenty-first century that the concept and term ‘pay it forward’ really entered the modern lexicon with the publication of a book in 1999 by Catherine Ryan Hyde bearing the title Pay It Forward. Apparently, the idea for the novel came when Catherine’s car caught fire in what she described as the ‘bad neighbourhood’ in which she lived, and two total strangers came to her assistance, but then left before she could even thank them. The novel revolves around the obligation to do three good deeds for others in response to a good deed that one receives. In this way, the practice of helping one another would be spread throughout the world, with the overall impact of making it a better place.

The novel has been translated into 20 languages for publication in more than 30 countries, and was chosen among the Best Books for Young Adults in 2001 by the American Library. In 2000 a movie based on the book, starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment, was released by Warner Brothers.

Paying it forward as an evolutionary process

Researchers Novak and Roch, who coined the term ‘upstream reciprocity’, also suggested that paying it forward had evolutionary advantages, in that it encourages the exchange of resources within a group. Groups with altruists in them would be more altruistic as a whole, because kindness is so contagious (see below), making them more likely to survive than selfish groups. Interestingly, in his book on evolution, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin mentions ‘the survival of the fittest’ (the concept he is perhaps best known for) only twice, whereas benevolence gets a whopping 99 mentions.

The concept of paying it forward also goes by other names, particularly ‘random acts of kindness’ (RAK). The origins of this term are unclear. One source claims it was coined by a Dr Chuck Wall in 1994 in response to a news article that reported on what it called yet another ‘random act of senseless violence’. Another source, however, credits the term to an Anne Herbert who in a California restaurant in 1982 scrawled the words ‘Practise random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty’ on a place mat – something that was photographed and copied until it became part of legend.

How PIF works

Paying it forward works because kindness is contagious. Research conducted by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, who are co-authors of the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, shows that when one person gives money to help others in a ‘public-goods game’ (which psychologists often use to investigate what happens when people are given the opportunity to cooperate with each other), the recipients are more likely to give their own money away to other people in future games. This creates a domino effect in which one person’s generosity spreads forward so that they can indirectly bring about acts of kindness to tens (or more) of people. And, of course, each of those people creates their own domino effect when they pay it forward in turn. We return to this idea in later chapters of this book.

Chapter 2

Why Giving Feels Good

Are you nice? Kind? Caring? Of course you are – most of us like to think of ourselves as nice, caring, kind individuals. Doing something nice for other people strengthens our perception of ourselves as someone nice and caring and makes us feel good. This is why they say it is better to give than to receive; giving enhances our self-identity, whereas receiving can lower it by making us feel indebted and perhaps even weak and incompetent.

We think we are kinder than everyone else

In a 2014 survey, 46 per cent of respondents said they considered themselves to be very kind, rating themselves 5/5 for kindness. A further 40 per cent rated themselves at 4/5, and only 14 per cent admitted to not being very kind at all, with self-ratings of 3 or less out of 5.

However, the same people rated other people as being far less kind. Just 16 per cent of people said they considered the people around them to be very kind (5/5), while 34 per cent gave the people around them a 4/5 rating and the rest (51 per cent) 3 or less.

This idea was tested in 2014 using Karma Kitchen, a pay-it-forward Indian restaurant. At the end of their meal, customers were told (as is usual at Karma Kitchen) that their meal had been paid for by someone else. They were then invited to pay it forward by paying for another customer’s meal. However, what differed from usual was that in the experiment half the customers were given a PIF message that stressed the giving part of the transaction, while the other half were given a message that stressed the receiving part. People chose to pay more for the next customer when the giving part was emphasised (the average donation being $20.42) than when the receiving part was stressed ($11.09). This shows that, for most of us, giving really is more motivating than getting.

Perhaps this is because we reap so many benefits from being kind, as the next sections suggest.

Kind people are happier

A Japanese study in 2006 showed that kind people experience more happiness and have happier memories than less kind people. The research showed that simply noting and counting acts of kindness for a week can make us happier. This could be because being kind makes us value ourselves as good people and therefore makes us feel more positive – by counting our acts of kindness in a week, we are reminding ourselves of how nice we are and consequently enhancing our own self-esteem. Even the thought of helping others makes us happier, and there are physiological reasons for this. Brain scans have shown that just thinking about helping others activates the mesolimbic pathway in the brain, which produces the feel-good chemical dopamine.

Performing acts of kindness has consistently been shown to relate to being more satisfied with life. If you were to perform five kind acts every week, after six weeks you would most likely feel happier than if you had not performed these acts (try it!). This could be because, as suggested above, being nice makes us feel better about ourselves, but there could be another explanation for why being kind makes us happier. A paper in 2010 published in the esteemed Journal of Social Psychology argues that being kind makes us happier because of the novelty factor. Humans crave new stimuli, and people who perform acts of kindness every so often thus experience the ‘thrill’ of the novelty of it. So, for example, imagine that you and a friend decide to take me up on my ‘five acts of kindness per week’ challenge. Your friend decides to get all their kind acts over with in one day each week, while you prefer to spread them across the week. Who will be happier? Research suggests that your friend will. This is because they will get a buzz from the novelty of being kind one day a week, whereas for you the novelty of being nice will quickly wear off with your more regular acts of kindness.

Kind people are more accepting of others

A study at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, was designed to see what would happen when 9–11-year-old children performed acts of kindness for four weeks. As expected, those who performed the kind deeds ended up feeling happier than those who didn’t. But what was really interesting was that these kids were also more accepting and tolerant of their peers. Being kind, then, seems to make us nicer people. Perhaps this works via a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby we notice that we have done something nice and thus conclude that we must be a good person – and good people are accepting and tolerant of others.

Being kind can even help our health

Cami Walker, a multiple sclerosis sufferer from Los Angeles, decided to perform an act of kindness every day for a month – and was startled by the results (documented in her book 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life). She found that being kind helped her cope with her MS better and use less pain medication. She also become more mobile. She had fewer flare-ups, and scans even showed that the disease had slowed its progression. She later set up a RAK organisation, 29gifts.org.

Ms Walker’s experience is not a scientific study, of course – but science does seem to back up her findings. In a 2002 study published in Pain Management Nursing, researchers found that patients with chronic pain experienced less pain, depression and disability when they counselled and helped other patients. Helping others could be so beneficial to our health that it might even save our lives. In another study, this time at the Buck Institute for Age Research in California, elderly volunteers who helped out for more than four hours per week were 44 per cent less likely to die during the course of the study than those who didn’t. And a study that followed 427 married women over a period of 30 years found that 52 per cent of those who did not volunteer experienced a major illness – compared with only 36 per cent who did volunteer.

How does being kind make us healthier? One theory is that being kind lowers the amount of stress hormones we produce. Evidence for this theory comes from a study in Miami of patients with HIV, which showed that the more altruistic patients had lower levels of stress hormones. In another study, older adults who volunteered to give a massage to babies also had lowered stress hormones. An alternative theory to explain the health benefits of being kind is that such acts of altruism stimulate the production of protective antibodies. In fact, even witnessing someone else being kind might be enough to produce this effect. When researchers at Harvard University showed people a film about Mother Teresa’s work, they discovered an increase in the production of protective antibodies when compared with another group who watched a neutral film. This suggests that we might be able to reap some of the health benefits associated with kindness just by watching others do the good deeds! So the next time you do something nice for someone, you can feel the warm glow of satisfaction knowing that so many people have benefited – not only the recipient of your good deed, but you yourself, too, and those who witnessed it.