Kindness isn’t always what it seems: The psychology of women’s competitive altruism

New research suggests that some women report using kindness and generosity strategically to gain an edge over rivals, a tendency linked to manipulative personality traits and lower agreeableness. These findings, published in Frontiers in Psychology, provide evidence that cooperation can sometimes serve as a subtle tool for interpersonal competition.

The research, led by Maryanne Fisher, a Santamarian Research Chair in the Faculty of Science at Saint Mary’s University’s Department of Psychology, builds on the concept of competitive altruism. The study grew out of a Faculty Mobility for Partnership Building Program grant from the Government of Canada, which allowed Fisher to spend a month at the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile, with additional funding from Chile’s ANID Fondecyt program. “I relocated there for a month and it was amazing,” Fisher told PsyPost.

In evolutionary psychology, competitive altruism refers to the idea that people give away resources or help others in ways that boost their own reputation and social standing. A 2006 experiment showed that people can gain higher status and social influence by making showy, generous sacrifices, as observers tend to prefer these cooperative individuals as future partners.

Initially, scientists viewed competitive altruism as a predominantly male tactic for winning status and attracting mates. For example, a 2012 experiment indicated that men eagerly competed to endure pain and inconvenience to secure status within a group, while women held back from this overt display. Because of findings like this, visible generosity was often treated as a public broadcast of quality aimed at a large audience.

“There was absolutely a research gap we tried to address,” Fisher said. “Most research on competitive altruism (the idea that people compete to be seen as the most generous or kind) has focused on men. It also often centered around men’s conspicuous public displays, such as men becoming more generous in the presence of a potential mate.”

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However, research into female social dynamics provides a different perspective. A 2020 review highlighted that women tend to seek social status through subtle, low-risk strategies rather than the overt, public contests that men often favor.

“Past studies that included women produced highly mixed results, and we thought it might be because researchers were looking in the wrong place,” Fisher explained. “A long line of work shows that women’s rivalry tends to involve minimal risk and rely on indirect means, for example, carried out through gossip, exclusion, and the management of reputation rather than open confrontation.”

This pattern of indirect competition raised the question of whether women might weaponize kindness and giving as a subtle way to outcompete others. Fisher and her colleagues suspected that some women use generosity not as a flashy public contest, but as a quiet, low-risk way to win allies and reputation while remaining deniable as competition.

“Given this is how women often compete, kindness seemed like an ideal competitive tool because it wins allies and social standing while being very difficult to call out as competition,” Fisher noted. “The everyday expression ‘kill them with kindness’ captures that thought. We went one step further, though, and tried to actually measure its occurrence, which meant we had to create the Competitive Altruism Survey.”

To investigate this, the scientists developed the survey and recruited 103 heterosexual cisgender women, aged 18 to 45, primarily from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, through an online research platform. The participants rated 15 statements describing the strategic use of kindness, such as offering help to gain an advantage or behaving generously to look better than a rival.

Participants rated these statements twice: once based on how they behave toward other women, and once based on how they behave toward men. They also completed several established psychological questionnaires. These included a measure of Machiavellianism, which is a personality trait characterized by treating social life as something to be manipulated for personal gain. Other questionnaires measured general personality traits, such as agreeableness, as well as the participants’ tendencies to give socially desirable answers or claim implausibly virtuous behaviors.

The results indicated a strong positive association between competitive altruism and Machiavellianism. Women who reported higher levels of strategic kindness were also more likely to possess a manipulative, self-interested approach to social interactions. In contrast, competitive altruism was negatively associated with agreeableness, which is the personality trait linked to genuine warmth, trust, and cooperative sincerity.

Some predictions were not borne out: competitive altruism was unrelated to extraversion and conscientiousness. As expected, neuroticism was linked not to strategic kindness itself but to the anxiety and frustration that can accompany it, such as worrying that one’s kindness will seem insincere or feeling upset when it goes unnoticed.

“The biggest finding is that kindness and competition are not opposites, because some prosocial behavior can serve a competitive purpose,” Fisher told PsyPost. “This is not to say we are totally aware that our kindness or generosity might have this motive attached to it, or that all ‘nice’ acts are for competition, but to say they are opposite is incorrect.”

“The real point to consider though is that the average score on the survey was below the neutral midpoint of the scale, meaning that, on average, women leaned towards disagreeing with the strategic statements,” she added. “The study tells us which women report the behavior and how it relates to personality. It does not tell us how common strategic kindness is in women’s daily life, or whether it works. Those need follow up studies.”

The overall average competitive altruism score was 2.51 on a scale of 1 to 5. The audience of the behavior mattered. The participants reported slightly but reliably higher levels of competitive altruism directed toward other women (an average score of 2.58) than toward men (2.43). This aligns with the idea that women’s reputational management and social rivalry frequently occur within female peer groups.

Unexpectedly, the study found a negative relationship between competitive altruism and impression management. The researchers had anticipated that women who use kindness strategically might also try to present themselves as perfectly virtuous on the survey. Instead, women who endorsed strategic kindness appeared relatively open about their manipulative intent and tended to score lower on a measure of the need for social approval.

“What was really unexpected was that women were so open,” Fisher said. “We expected women who use kindness strategically to be the most concerned with presenting themselves favorably but the opposite emerged.”

“It might be that women who endorse strategic kindness are simply more candid about it and less invested in being liked by everyone; this is a very real possibility,” she explained.

When asked to rate their own traits compared to peers, these women described themselves as more manipulative, deceptive, and fake, less honest, and more popular than other women their age, but not as kinder or more generous.

At the end of the survey, 101 participants provided open-ended descriptions of times they had witnessed other women using kindness strategically. The most common themes included offering gifts or favors to create a sense of obligation, performing warmth in public that contradicted private unkindness, and directing exaggerated helpfulness toward superiors or men in romantic contexts.

These findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which investigated concern-framed gossip rather than self-reported generosity. That study similarly found that women use seemingly benevolent behaviors to gain social advantages in competition, successfully knocking down rivals while appearing trustworthy to observers.

“This research offers a new way to think about how people, in this case women, can use kindness in a strategic way and how this relates to other similar measures,” said Daniel Farrelly, a principal lecturer in psychology at the University of Worcester who was not involved in the research. “The authors have found that their newly-created measure of competitive altruism (which is altruistic acts that aim to improve the actor’s reputation compared to others) correlates with some existing personality measures, and that when asked about it women often describe how and when they see such acts being used.”

“There is good evidence that women do compete with one another, but unlike men this competition often involves indirect acts (such as gossip, reputation challenges etc),” Farrelly told PsyPost. “This study further supports the indirect nature of women’s competition, showing that competing to be seen to be cooperative is just another example of this.”

There are a few details to keep in mind when interpreting the current study. Because the data relies entirely on self-reporting, it might underestimate how often this behavior occurs. Women who are deeply invested in maintaining a kind reputation might be unwilling to admit their manipulative motives on a survey, meaning the results only capture the behavior of women willing to be honest about their deception.

Fisher noted another possibility: “women who are strategically kind but unwilling to admit it would score low, which means a self-report survey probably underestimates the behavior among the women most invested in appearing kind.”

“It’s important to note, as the authors rightly do as well, that competitive altruism doesn’t cover all types of altruism,” Farrelly noted. “In this case it is only a very strategic display that is used in particular circumstances, and how much an individual uses competitive altruism is unlikely to have a clear relationship with how kind/altruistic they are overall.”

“We do not want readers to walk away thinking that all kindness is fake,” Fisher emphasized. “We also have not compared how it occurs relative to men, and our findings are really preliminary.”

“There are some clear findings here, but not all hypotheses are supported so as the authors state there is more to find out about this potential effect,” Farrelly said. “One thing I did feel was missing was a comparison with men’s competitive altruism. As this study only used female participants we don’t yet know if the same effects might occur in men’s behavior.”

It is also unknown whether this strategy actually works in practice. The survey measures the intent and the self-reported behavior, but it does not test whether the targets of this strategic kindness actually extend greater cooperation, status, or alliances in return. Future research using observational methods could help determine if competitive altruism successfully tricks observers into granting social rewards.

“The most important question is whether strategic kindness works,” Fisher told PsyPost. “We have a qualitative study underway to start to address this question. We would like to use designs that observe both the person being kind and the people receiving that kindness, such as economic games in which generosity is made more or less visible, partner-choice tasks, and observation of real groups, with the sex of the audience varied.”

“It would be good to see examples of competitive altruism being used in women’s intrasexual competition, this is something that could be explored in future experiments,” Farrelly added. “I would also like to see this study replicated in male participants so we can see if/how the behaviors the authors describe in this study are unique to women.”

Finally, the sample was modest in size and consisted of heterosexual cisgender women from predominantly Western, English-speaking countries. Because cultural norms dictate how competition and self-presentation are expressed, the findings might not apply to populations with different social expectations.

The study, “Kill them with kindness: preliminary evidence for women’s competitive altruism,” was authored by Maryanne L. Fisher, Oriana Figueroa, Nohelia Valenzuela, Ferity Thorne, Pablo Polo, José Antonio Muñoz-Reyes, Nerea Aldunate, and Simón Ramirez.