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A while back I wrote about how, in some parts of the country, people were " paying it forward " -- paying for the coffee of the person behind them at Starbucks or at the drive-up window. But a new study has found that it may hurt to be too generous.   According to The New York Times, " if you receive or observe an act of help, you become more likely to help others, even if your own action won’t be directly reciprocated or rewarded,"  demonstrating that the effect of a single act of kindness can in fact ripple through a social network, setting off chains of generosity that reach far beyond the original act.   But observing people doing too much for others can backfire, the study discovered.   " We found that receiving and observing generosity can both significantly increase your likelihood of being generous toward a stranger, but that if you observe a high enough level of generosity, your willingness to help suffers — you become a 'bystander' w...

I’ve been doing something weird lately.  Letting people get in front of me at the supermarket.  I’ve also been shocking myself about something else.  I’m even letting cars get ahead of me in merges and go first, turning left in front of at green lights, this from a person who always had to be the fastest car on the road (I once drove all the way to Syracuse passing very car.) But I’m finding that it’s fairly easy to do, and in the way of karma, a lot of people do it for me.  One day a friend was in a huge rush when we both were in the “10 items or less” line, so I let him go first – no big deal. But he acted like I gave him my winning lottery ticket. I came across the fact that many people are doing this now from an essay in the Sunday New York Times a couple of weeks ago, which reported that some people are paying for the people behind them at drive-throughs.  The person behind them orders while the car in front’s paying so they know what the other per...

See if this makes you feel as good as it did me.  There's been an epidemic -- call it viral -- of people paying it forward. You know.  Doing something nice for someone you don't know just because . . .   Just because. According to Kate Murphy, last December at a Tim Hortons in Winnipeg, Manitoba, "228 consecutive cars paid it forward. A string of 67 cars paid it forward in April at a Chick-fil-A in Houston. And then a Heav’nly Donuts location in Amesbury, Mass., had a good-will train of 55 cars last July." Just what exactly did they do?  Paid for the meal of the car behind them. And where paying it forward in drive-throughs occurred maybe once or twice a year a decade ago, "now fast-food operators said it might happen several times a day," Hughes reports. Why is this happening?  Hughes postulates it's because there's so much hatred and bad feeling in the world -- from the inability of Congress to come together to avoid the nation...