The word “nice” has an unusual history in the English language.

Originally a term for “foolish”, its meaning over the centuries has morphed from “wanton” to “reserved” to “fastidious”. These days, it has become a somewhat bland and opaque description of personality: “she’s really nice.”


Personality psychology can help unsnarl some of these fuzzy concepts. Recent research suggests that our tendency to be “nice” can be separated into two related but distinct personality traits: politeness and compassion.


A tale of two traits


Some of our most valued qualities — kindness, integrity, empathy, modesty, patience, and trustworthiness — are nestled within this dimension. They are instilled in us at an early age and reflect important standards through which we judge others and ourselves.

But are there exceptions to this cluster of “nice” personality traits? What about your big-hearted but foul-mouthed friend, or a well-mannered but distant acquaintance?

It turns out that agreeableness can be meaningfully divided into two narrower traits. Politeness refers to our tendency to be respectful of others versus being aggressive. It’s about good manners and adhering to societal rules and norms — what we’d see in upstanding, decent folks, or “good citizens”, if you will. In contrast, compassion refers to our tendency to be emotionally concerned about others versus being cold-hearted — what we’d see in the proverbial “good Samaritan”.

Clearly, these two characteristics often go hand in hand, but they also diverge from one other in interesting ways. For example, studies on political ideology show that politeness is associated with a conservative outlook and more traditional moral values, while compassion is associated with liberalism and progressive values.

One view is that politeness and compassion are linked to different brain systems — politeness with those governing aggression, and compassion with those regulating social bonding and affiliation. We see some evidence for this in neuroimaging research, where compassion — not politeness — is related to structural differences in brain regions involved in empathic responses.

Politeness and compassion in economic games



But can altruism in these games be explained by people’s politeness, compassion, or both?

We began with the dictator game, a task in which a person is asked to divide a fixed sum of money with an anonymous stranger. Our results showed that traditional economic predictions were wrong on two counts. Not only did people not behave selfishly, they behaved in different ways depending on their personality.

Notably, polite people were more likely to split the money fairly than their rude counterparts. Surprisingly, we did not see this for compassion, which may indicate that sharing money with a stranger doesn’t necessarily arouse emotional concern.


Here, compassionate people gave away more money than their cold-hearted counterparts. Polite bystanders were not selfish per se — we know this because they were willing to part with their money in the dictator game just moments earlier. But they were no more likely than anyone else to intervene when bearing witness to the mistreatment of others.

These studies highlight some crucial differences between good citizens and good Samaritans. Polite people don’t necessarily help those in need, but they are fair-minded and peaceable. Meanwhile, compassionate people aren’t necessarily even-handed and rule-abiding, but they are responsive to the misfortunes of others.

What kind of ‘nice’ should we be?




