Why letter writing leads to kindness : Regulating emotions or activating pro-social thinking ?

Previous experiments suggest a chain of unkindness: unkindly treated people pass on unkind behavior to an innocent third person. As a remedy, it has been proposed that the unkindly treated person writes a letter to the unkind person in order to regulate emotions by ‘closing the case’. Indeed, unkindly treated subjects who were writing letters have been found to be more kind to an innocent third person than unkindly treated subjects that were not writing letters. However, we propose a second possible explanation for this behavior: letter writing might activate more pro-social modes of thinking irrespective of how the letter writer was treated before. Here, we examine how letter writing affects kindly treated subjects and compare this effect to that on unkindly treated subjects using an experiment. We find that letter writing increases giving to an innocent third person in both groups, suggesting that letter writing activates more pro-social modes of thinking. Incidentally, our subjects do not pass on unkind behavior.