Personal Narrative: The Reciprocal Altruism Theory

Kindness, positive acts, and behaviors should not just be for family and friends, but everyone in society as well. How I see it is the reciprocal altruism theory – “a view that suggests that we may be willing to help people unrelated to us because helping is usually reciprocated.” I believe that helping someone, even a stranger, would not hurt me in any ways. Everyone has their bad days and we should not just help our relatives, but also “help people who are unrelated to us” (Social Psychology, 302). This happened unexpectedly when I was in a supermarket with my mom. We were in line to pay for our grocery and the person, an elderly woman, in front of us did not have enough money. The woman was short a dollar and coincidentally, I had an extra dollar. So, I offered the …show more content…
I chose to offer the dollar because I wanted her to have her grocery and it was as simple as that. She had to make her way to the super market, make her rounds in there, picked her grocery, and waited in line to pay and if she was not even able to get her grocery back to her home, it would just not be fair to her. I did not want her to feel like she wasted her time and effort and in the end, got nothing. I wanted her to feel happy and I know someone out there would have done the exact same thing to me if I was short that one dollar. She was a total stranger to me, but she accepted my kindness which solved the situation. I think because of our stranger relationship, it affected the way we handled the situation. I was not being all snobbish like I had all the money in the world, but she felt that I understood her needs at that time. Even though she did not know me, she saw my kind gesture and she and I both acknowledged that it was done out of sincerity. This was not a kindness I expected to do, but when I was doing it, I just felt really happy that I was also able to provide grocery for someone with just a dollar. I felt very happy because I believe people would also think the