Kindness and Incrementalism

 NB Anything here about incrementalism and entitism has come from discussions with a trainee who knows more about this than I do, but if I get it wrong it’s all on me.

 

I was listening to a Radio 4 programme about kindness and the presenter did a vox pop in which people were asked why they might be kind to someone. Almost everyone responded that they would be kind to a person because they didn’t know what kind of day they had gone through, or how hard their lives were right now.

That’s interesting. So, the motivation for kindness is the possibility that someone has had a bad day. Not being kind because you want to be kind, but to do someone a favour, help them out. Does that mean if you knew that hadn’t had a bad day you wouldn’t be kind?

I think that’s fairly awful. Isn’t the point of kindness that it is done without any sense of return or because it is needed, just because it is a kindness? Maybe I have been a hippy for too long. I hope so.

But this is not entirely true. Japanese students who are happy are kind. And maybe happier.

In an experimental study being kind has been shown to result in more positive emotions and greater academic engagement so it is to our advantage to be kind simply for kindness sake, not just in case someone has had a rough time.

So?

If we are kind to people who have had a bad day (i.e., they have been grumpy with us, but we are kind because they might be grumpy because they have had a bad day) that means that we are incrementalists (Is) (maybe not in all we do, but in that situation) and that means that we hold a view that a grumpy person is not grumpy due to trait, but due to state, so they can degrump. If you didn’t treat the person any differently, whether grumpy or not, you are likely to be an entitist (E), someone who believes that this aspect of that person cannot change (so it doesn’t matter what you do). I expect we need a third category, people who don’t care if the person can change or not.

This is an interesting area that has some research, trying to get a sense of what aspects of people either might be associated with incrementalism or entitism, or how these different approaches to the world might impact upon our beliefs. Harper and Bartels (2018) did a study looking at attitudes towards sex offenders, examining how incrementalism or entitism might play a part.

We might expect that to work in forensic psychology one must be an incrementalist, either wholly or in the main, or else one would not believe in the possibility of change. We might wonder if different professions have different views (and those views might have partially drawn them to their professions). If we lived through clichés entirely we could hypothesise that psychologists are Is and psychiatrists Es (based on the stereotype that people can’t change, which is why they are given drugs). I don’t think anyone has done that. You can have that for free.

Suppose that is true and suppose that whether you are an E or an I was total. How would those differences work out when the two professions need to collaborate on, for example, a treatment plan or a formulation? What about discussions in an MDT? It might be a useful reflective exercise to examine when and if you are an E or an I. Are you a racist or sexist, or homophobe because you are an E? There might be research on those, I don’t know.

 

Belief about self

Typically, these styles of thinking are used to understand how we think about the other. What about how we think about ourselves? If you don’t think you can change how does that make you feel about you? If you think you are great and are an E-thinker are you a narcissist? If you think you are terrible and an E-thinker are you depressed, have low self-esteem, less likely to engage in interventions? Are you more likely to engage if you think you are terrible but are an I-thinker? You recognise your failings but believe that you can change. Those seem to me to be interesting questions and maybe are related to ideas such as readiness to change (presuming you can only be ready to change if you think you can change in the first place).

The really interesting bit, is it possible to change from I to E and from E to I, both finding ways that I can change you and that I can change myself? Of course, we wouldn’t bother if it wasn’t important, so maybe it’s worth checking if it is important or not first.

Getting back to kindness. Why are we kind at all? Part of me wonders if we are kind as it makes us feel good, and we like feeling good. The problem with that is that I would feel better being kind to you if you didn’t “deserve” it, you hadn’t had a bad day; I was being a total self-sacrificing saint. Another part of me thinks that perhaps kindness is the wrong label, or we think about it in the wrong way. It’s an attribution we use because we find it hard to understand why someone would be nice to someone else when there is no need to and no benefit for the nice person. That leaves us with uncomfortable cognitive dissonance and the best way to deal with that is to remove the dissonance by re-labelling the behaviour as kindness.