The researchers have said that cooperative behavior is contagious and it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they "pay it forward" by helping others,

It has been provided by the researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard as the first laboratory evidence that good acts spread just the way bad ones do.

The research was conducted by James Fowler, associate professor at UC San Diego in the Department of Political Science and Calit2''s Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, who is professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of medicine and medical sociology at Harvard Medical School.

In the study, Fowler and Christakis show that when one person gives money to help others in a "public-goods game," where people have the opportunity to cooperate with each other, the recipients are more likely to give their own money away to other people in future games.

According to Fowler," You don't go back to being your old selfish self.'' As a result, the money a person gives in the first round of the experiment is ultimately tripled by others who are subsequently (directly or indirectly) influenced to give more.

Fowler further added," Though the multiplier in the real world may be higher or lower than what we've found in the lab. Personally it's very exciting to learn that kindness spreads to people I don't know or have never met. We have direct experience of giving and seeing people's immediate reactions, but we don't typically see how our generosity cascades through the social network to affect the lives of dozens or maybe hundreds of other people." (With Inputs from Agencies)