An Ohio Woman Brought Toilet Paper Instead of Flowers, and Her Neighbor’s Kindness Came Back to Her Porch the Next Morning

An Ohio Woman Brought Toilet Paper Instead of Flowers, and Her Neighbor’s Kindness Came Back to Her Porch the Next Morning

Most of us assume help is always a gift. Psychologists Marci Gleason, Masumi Iida, Niall Bolger, and Patrick Shrout found it’s more complicated. In their 2003 study “Daily Supportive Equity in Close Relationships,” published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, they tracked 85 couples for four weeks and found that receiving support without giving any back was tied to a worse mood, while support that flowed both ways lifted it. Kindness…