A new study 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. The findings, published in Frontiers in Psychology, point to a nuanced form of cooperation that can function as a subtle tool in interpersonal competition, rather than purely altruistic behaviour.
The research was led by Maryanne Fisher, the Santamarian Research Chair in the Faculty of Science at Saint Mary’s University’s Department of Psychology. It builds on the concept of competitive altruism and grew from a Government of Canada grant that funded a month-long placement for Fisher at the Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile, with additional funding from Chile’s ANID Fondecyt programme. “I relocated there for a month and it was amazing,” Fisher told PsyPost.
In evolutionary psychology, competitive altruism describes acts of giving or helping that raise one’s reputation and social standing. A 2006 experiment suggested that people can gain status and influence by making showy, generous sacrifices, with observers favouring such cooperative individuals as future partners.
Historically, researchers viewed competitive altruism as a male-dominated tactic, with some studies indicating men would endure pain and inconvenience to secure status while women appeared to hold back. Because of such findings, visible generosity was often treated as a public display aimed at a wide 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 centred around men’s conspicuous public displays, such as men becoming more generous in the presence of a potential mate.”
But perspectives on female social dynamics bring a different picture. A 2020 review highlighted that women frequently pursue social status through subtle, low-risk strategies rather than overt public contests. “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 prompted Fisher and colleagues to consider whether kindness could be weaponised as a quiet, low-risk method to outcompete others. “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 test the idea, researchers devised the survey and recruited 103 heterosexual cisgender women aged 18 to 45, primarily from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, via an online platform. 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. They completed the survey twice—assessing how they behaved toward other women and toward men—and also filled out standard measures of Machiavellianism and other personality traits, including agreeableness, plus scales assessing socially desirable responding.
The results showed a strong positive association between competitive altruism and Machiavellianism, with women who reported higher levels of strategic kindness more likely to possess a manipulative, self-interested approach to social life. Conversely, competitive altruism was negatively linked to agreeableness. Notably, it did not correlate with extraversion or conscientiousness, while neuroticism related more to the anxiety and frustration that can accompany strategic kindness than to the trait itself.
“The biggest finding is that kindness and competition are not opposites, because some prosocial behaviour 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 study also reported an average competitive-altruism score of 2.51 on a 1-to-5 scale. Participants tended to report higher levels of strategic kindness toward other women (2.58) than toward men (2.43), consistent with the idea that women’s reputational management and social rivalry frequently play out within female peer groups.
Surprisingly, the researchers found a negative relationship between competitive altruism and impression management: women who endorsed strategic kindness did not appear more concerned with presenting themselves as perfectly virtuous. Fisher said the opposite emerged, suggesting those endorsing strategic kindness were relatively open about their manipulative intent and tended to score lower on the need for social approval.
“What was really unexpected was that women were so open,” Fisher added. “We expected women who use kindness strategically to be the most concerned with presenting themselves favourably but the opposite emerged.” She also noted that those who endorsed strategic kindness described themselves as more manipulative, deceptive and fake, yet not necessarily 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. Common themes included offering gifts or favours to create obligation, performing warmth in public while privately being unkind, and directing exaggerated helpfulness toward superiors or men in romantic contexts.
The findings align with earlier PsyPost reporting from 2024 on concern-framed gossip, which similarly suggested that women can use seemingly benevolent behaviours to gain social advantages while appearing trustworthy to others. “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),” remarked Daniel Farrelly, a principal lecturer in psychology at the University of Worcester who was not involved in the study. “The authors have found that their newly-created measure of competitive altruism correlates with some existing personality measures, and that when asked about it women often describe how and when they see such acts being used.”
The researchers caution that self-report data may underestimate how frequently this behaviour occurs, as those deeply invested in maintaining a kind reputation might be reluctant to admit manipulative motives. Fisher suggested that women who are strategic about kindness but unwilling to admit it could score low on the survey, meaning the results likely reflect only the more candid responses.
They also emphasised that competitive altruism does not cover all forms of altruism, and that the extent to which individuals engage in competitive kindness is unlikely to have a straightforward relationship with overall kindness or altruism.
Fisher concluded with a call for further work to determine whether strategic kindness actually yields social rewards. “We have a qualitative study underway to start to address this question,” she said, outlining plans to use designs that observe both the giver and recipients, such as economic games with varying visibility, and real-group observations with varied audiences. “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.”
The study, titled 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.
