Dacher Keltner

The lives of five regular people go from ordinary to extraordinary when they choose action over apathy.

Kindness Is Contagious is a feel-good documentary, narrated by Catherine Ryan Hyde, best selling author of Pay It Forward. It’s a film about being nice and the benefits of being nice. The film profiles cutting-edge scientists and best-selling authors from Berkeley to Harvard, along with people from all walks of life whose lives illustrate their incredible discovery: NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST! It all began with an article about James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis and their research concerning the viral nature of kindness. Fowler and Christakis demonstrated that if you are kind to one person, that person, will be kind to four other people and each of those four people, will be kind to four more people and so on and so on… eventually circling back to you. Showing in fact, that Karma may actually exist in the scientific sense. CEOs, baseball players, roller girls, musicians, artists, street performers, police officers and many more tell you their heartfelt stories of kindness and generosity. With that in mind, we asked people: “What is the nicest thing that anyone has done for you?” Their answers range from the mundane to the profound. We hope that by watching these kind acts, audience members will be inspired to do kind acts for 4 other people, proving lots of tiny acts of kindness (which are easy to do) will have more of an impact than a few big ones. Ultimately, Kindness Is Contagious is about how a little generosity can help us live happier, healthier, wealthier, longer and more fulfilling lives.