Kindness Trivia
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48 free Kindness trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
41 free kindness trivia questions with answers. This kindness trivia quiz is built for World Kindness Day assemblies, Random Acts of Kindness Week, staff meetings and anyone who wants a feel-good round that still makes people think. The questions cover the days and movements (World Kindness Day, Random Acts of Kindness Day, GivingTuesday, the Kindness Rocks Project), the ideas behind them (the Golden Rule in Confucius, Hillel and the Sermon on the Mount, ubuntu, ahimsa, chesed, metta, Aristotle's charis), the science (the warm glow, oxytocin, why volunteers report less depression, and what Yale learned from babies), and the stories, from the Good Samaritan and pay-it-forward to Wonder and the Choose Kind movement. There are questions on kind people too: Mother Teresa's Nobel, Mister Rogers' Senate testimony, Andrew Carnegie's libraries, the Red Cross and the Nobel Peace Prize, and Jacinda Ardern's kindness-first leadership. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's pages on kindness, altruism and the movements and people involved, and each explanation adds one detail worth passing on.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The movement behind World Kindness Day grew out of a 1963 graduation speech in which country?
Japan
Japan's Small Kindness Movement began when a university president urged his graduates to be brave in practising small kindnesses, and in 1997 kindness groups from around the world first gathered in Tokyo.
Q 02In the United States, Random Acts of Kindness Day falls three days after which holiday?
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day is 14 February and the kindness day the 17th: the foundation that promotes it, now in Denver, was started in 1995 by the head of a small California press whose book of kindness stories had become a bestseller.
Q 03Writer Anne Herbert's slogan, first scribbled on a restaurant place mat, urged 'random kindness and senseless acts of' what?
Beauty
Beauty completed the line, a flip of grim news phrases about random violence and senseless cruelty; it spread by graffiti and bumper sticker until a small Berkeley press turned it into a bestselling book of true stories.
Q 04'Pay it forward' means repaying a good deed how?
By doing a kindness for someone else
By doing a kindness for someone else, you keep the chain moving: the phrase was probably coined by a novelist whose narrator says of a great-aunt's devotion, 'You don't pay love back; you pay it forward.'
Q 05Long before 'pay it forward' was coined, which founding father made a loan to be passed on, not repaid?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin helped a man in debt in 1784 and told him to repay it by lending the same sum to another honest man in distress, hoping it would pass through many hands: 'a trick of mine', he called it.
Q 06Which child actor starred in the 2000 film Pay It Forward, based on Catherine Ryan Hyde's novel?
Haley Joel Osment
Haley Joel Osment plays a seventh-grader whose class project is to do three big favours and ask each person to pay it forward to three more, so the good deeds multiply instead of coming back to him.
Q 07The principle of treating others as you would want to be treated is known as what?
The Golden Rule
The Golden Rule has a quieter twin: the 'do not' version, which asks only that you spare other people whatever you would hate yourself, is sometimes called the Silver Rule.
Q 08Which Chinese philosopher taught, 'Do not do to others what you would not want done to you'?
Confucius
Confucius was answering a student who asked whether one word could guide a whole life: he offered 'reciprocity', and this saying was how he spelled it out.
Q 09Challenged to teach the Torah on one foot, which sage said, 'What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow'?
Hillel the Elder
Hillel the Elder took a dare that his rival Shammai had just answered by driving the man off with a builder's measuring stick, and he added: 'the rest is the explanation; go and learn.'
Q 10In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus says 'do to others what you would have them do to you' during which famous teaching?
The Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount offers the line as a summary of all scripture, adding 'for this sums up the Law and the Prophets', while Luke's Gospel places the same saying in a shorter sermon given on level ground.
Q 11In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the traveller is robbed on the road from Jerusalem to which city?
Jericho
Jericho lay at the foot of a steep, winding road notorious for robbers: Martin Luther King Jr. drove it on a visit and told his wife he could see at once why the parable was set there.
Q 12'Good Samaritan laws' protect people who do what?
Give reasonable help to someone in peril
All 50 US states have such a law: those who give reasonable help to someone in peril generally can't be sued over an honest mistake, so bystanders don't hesitate, though gross negligence is not covered.
Q 13The 'kind' in 'kindness' goes back to an Old English word with which meaning?
Q 21Which Robert Trivers concept explains why animals help others who will help them back later?
Reciprocal altruism
Vampire bats regurgitating blood for hungry roost-mates are the textbook example.
Q 22Which R. J. Palacio novel about a boy with facial differences launched the 'Choose Kind' movement?
Wonder
Wonder began with a moment its author regretted: her small son cried at the sight of a girl with a severe facial difference, she rushed him away, and her anger at herself set her writing that same night.
Q 23Which actress played the mother of Auggie Pullman in the 2017 film of R. J. Palacio's bestselling novel?
Julia Roberts
Nature or family
Nature or family is the sense of Old English 'gecynd', a cousin of the word 'kin': to be kind at first meant showing the natural feeling that relatives have for one another.
Q 14In his Rhetoric, Aristotle defined kindness (charis) as what?
Helpfulness towards someone in need
Helpfulness towards someone in need, given 'not in return for anything', was his whole definition, and he added that a kindness counts for most when the need is urgent or the helper is the only one to step in.
Q 15Which philosopher argued an act has moral worth only when done from duty, not fleeting feeling?
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant's example was a shopkeeper who never overcharges a child only because cheating would be bad for business: honest, he said, yet of no moral worth, because duty was not the motive.
Q 16Which French philosopher popularised, and possibly coined, the word 'altruism' in the 19th century?
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte summed up his ethics as 'live for others', and he went on to found a secular Religion of Humanity with its own priests and sacraments.
Q 17Economist James Andreoni's term for the selfish pleasure people feel from 'doing good' is what?
Warm-glow giving
Warm-glow giving makes donors 'impure altruists', moved partly by how good giving feels, and it explains why a government grant to a cause never fully replaces the private donations it might be expected to displace.
Q 18Which hormone is nicknamed the 'cuddle hormone' or 'love hormone' for its role in bonding?
Oxytocin
Oxytocin is released during hugging, childbirth and breastfeeding, and its day job is practical: a synthetic version is the drug hospitals give to start or speed up labour.
Q 19One American study found that over-50s who volunteer regularly are less likely to develop what?
High blood pressure
High blood pressure was 40 per cent less likely four years later, but only among those putting in at least 200 hours a year: lighter volunteering showed no such benefit.
Q 20Yale's 'Baby Lab' tested whether infants prefer kind characters to mean ones by having them watch what?
Puppet shows
Puppet shows were the test: babies too young to talk watched one puppet help a struggling character and another thwart it, and when offered both, most reached for the helper.
Julia Roberts played Isabel Pullman, with Owen Wilson as the boy's father, and the quiet family drama went on to take more than $300 million at cinemas worldwide.
Q 24Megan Murphy started the Kindness Rocks Project in 2015 by leaving rocks bearing messages on a beach in which part of Massachusetts?
Cape Cod
Cape Cod gave a quick verdict: a friend found a rock reading 'You've got this', told Murphy it had brightened her day, and that persuaded her to keep going.
Q 25GivingTuesday, launched in 2012 at New York's 92nd Street Y, falls on the Tuesday after which holiday?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving leads straight into the shopping sprees of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and GivingTuesday was placed right after them on purpose, to turn attention from buying to giving.
Q 26Which part of her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize celebrations did Mother Teresa have cancelled so its cost could go to the poor?
The banquet
The banquet was dropped at her request, and in her acceptance speech she said she was grateful to receive the prize 'in the name of the hungry, of the naked, of the homeless'.
Q 27Which organisation has won the Nobel Peace Prize three times, more than any other recipient?
The Red Cross
Its wins came in 1917, 1944 and 1963; the UN refugee agency has won twice.
Q 28In 1969, Fred Rogers famously testified before a US Senate subcommittee to save funding for what?
Public broadcasting (PBS)
Public broadcasting (PBS) kept its $20 million after his six-minute plea: the gruff subcommittee chairman confessed to goose bumps and told him, 'Looks like you just earned the $20 million.'
Q 29Which steel magnate wrote the 1889 essay 'The Gospel of Wealth' and funded thousands of public libraries?
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie closed the essay with the verdict that 'the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced', then lived by it, paying for 2,509 libraries around the world.
Q 30The Bantu philosophy often translated as 'I am because we are' is called what?
Ubuntu
Ubuntu rests on a proverb Desmond Tutu loved to quote, 'a person is a person through other persons', and he made it the guiding spirit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he chaired.