The Virtue of Humanity: Love, Kindness, and Social Intelligence

The Virtue of Humanity: Caring for Others’ Well-Being

Caring for the people close to you, not just the community at large, is the thread that runs through humanity: in their 2004 classification of positive psychology, Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman grouped under this virtue the strengths centered on close relationships and looking after other people.

People who lead with this virtue tend to actively look after the well-being of those around them, not only reactively, when asked for help.

The Three Strengths That Make It Up

• Love: the capacity to value and sustain close relationships with others, in their various forms: affection for the people who care for us, care for those who depend on us, and the desire for emotional, physical, and sexual closeness in romantic love.
• Kindness: an orientation toward others based on recognizing them as deserving of attention, help, and respect in their own right, not out of obligation or self-interest. It shows up as concrete helpful behavior.
• Social intelligence: the ability to reason about your own and other people’s emotional information (motivations, feelings) and use it to navigate different social situations well.

Everyday Signs of This Virtue

• They help without being asked, noticing when someone close to them needs support before it’s put into words.
• They read what motivates other people well, which makes for smoother relationships and fewer misunderstandings.
• They care about others’ well-being genuinely, not as a social strategy but as real concern.
• They distinguish between their inner circle and everyone else: they care intensely for the people they love, but they also treat strangers with respect, without needing a utilitarian reason to do so.

An everyday example: a coworker notices that someone on the team has been quieter than usual for two days. She doesn’t ask in front of everyone; she suggests a coffee, just the two of them, and instead of assuming what’s wrong, she asks what would help. All three strengths are in that scene: the bond (love), the initiative to help (kindness), and the reading of the situation (social intelligence).

What the Data Say About This Virtue

Peterson and Seligman built their classification by reviewing moral texts from several traditions (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Athenian philosophy, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and humanity was one of the six virtues that appeared in all of them (Dahlsgaard, Peterson and Seligman, 2005). Since then, the questionnaire that measures it, the VIA-IS, has been taken by hundreds of thousands of people, which makes it possible to say more than the definition alone.

• Love is among the strengths most closely tied to life satisfaction. In a study of 5,299 adults, Park, Peterson and Seligman (2004) found that hope, zest, gratitude, love, and curiosity were the strengths most consistently associated with being satisfied with one’s life. It’s a correlation, not proof that one causes the other.
• Kindness is one of the most common strengths almost everywhere. Comparing more than 100,000 people from 54 countries, the same team found that kindness, fairness, honesty, gratitude, and judgment (open-mindedness) were the strengths people most often attributed to themselves, in a very similar order across countries (Park, Peterson and Seligman, 2006).
• Helping feels good to the helper, though the effect is modest. A meta-analysis of 27 experimental studies (4,045 participants) estimated that performing acts of kindness improves the well-being of the person doing them, with a small to moderate effect size (δ = 0.28) (Curry et al., 2018). Along the same lines, Dunn, Aknin and Norton (2008) observed that people randomly assigned to spend money on others felt happier at the end of the day than those who spent it on themselves.

One nuance from later research: when responses to the VIA-IS are analyzed statistically, the six virtues don’t emerge as such. In an analysis of more than a million cases, Robert McGrath (2015) found a simpler structure of three broad factors, and the one he called Caring brings together mainly gratitude, kindness, love, and teamwork. Humanity, then, overlaps with strengths that the original classification spread across other virtues.

A Talent That Travels: The Case of Empathy

In Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), a popular business book, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton (creators of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder method) tell the story of Danielle, a journalist who made a career leap into palliative care therapy. What made that change possible was recognizing that her core talents (empathy and the ability to steer a difficult conversation) would remain valuable in a very different context.

The point the authors underline is that a talent like empathy or social intelligence is portable: it goes with the person whether they’re caring for a family member, coordinating a team, or being there for someone going through a hard time. It’s a popular-press reading, not an empirical finding, but it fits the coffee scene: the same strength works anywhere there’s another person.

How It Is Built

A common idea in the literature on this virtue is concrete help over generic help: asking what the other person actually needs, instead of assuming it, is what separates a real gesture of care from a symbolic one.

To this is often added emotional reading (paying attention to someone’s tone, gestures, or silences, not just their words) as the basis of social intelligence, along with a necessary limit: this virtue holds up best when it doesn’t mean ignoring your own needs in exchange for other people’s.

To see whether humanity is your strongest virtue or another of the six leads, there’s the Character Strengths Test. If you’re specifically interested in the part about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, the empathy test explores it separately.

Sources

• Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press.
• Dahlsgaard, K., Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Shared virtue: The convergence of valued human strengths across culture and history. Review of General Psychology, 9(3), 203-213. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.3.203
• Park, N., Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Strengths of character and well-being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(5), 603-619. https://doi.org/10.1521/jscp.23.5.603.50748
• Park, N., Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Character strengths in fifty-four nations and the fifty US states. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(3), 118-129. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760600619567
• McGrath, R. E. (2015). Integrating psychological and cultural perspectives on virtue: The hierarchical structure of character strengths. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(5), 407-424. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2014.994222
• Curry, O., Rowland, L., Van Lissa, C., Zlotowitz, S., McAlaney, J. and Whitehouse, H. (2018). Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 76, 320-329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.02.014
• Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B. and Norton, M. I. (2008). Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science, 319(5870), 1687-1688. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1150952
• Buckingham, M. and Clifton, D. O. (2001). Now, Discover Your Strengths. Free Press.