We imagine social change as the work of governments or visionary leaders. What if it came from the tiniest acts? A 2025 study found that simply talking to people with different viewpoints from ours markedly lowers hostility while increasing social cohesion. Learn from our experts about these world-changing behaviors.

Small Kindnesses Transform Communities

A simple act of kindness every day brings about the most change. Whenever I can I help a stranger, whether it’s giving up my seat on the subway or covering a bill when they’re short. It’s not a big thing for me but breeds a more friendly and empathetic culture and society. 

Small kindnesses really do make a huge difference in how a neighbourhood, town, city and indeed country are perceived. And, I always try to do my bit.

Amy Bos, Co-Founder & COO, Mediumchat Group

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Hear People Fully to Defuse Conflict

Active and empathetic listening (more specifically, providing a space where someone can finish sharing their message – without preparing your rebuttal) is the single most powerful, yet underutilized behavior that can create significant positive social change.

Over the last 15 years, as someone who has been leading customer experience teams, I’ve witnessed, time and again, that the majority of conflicts don’t originate from technical errors or policy disagreements. Instead, they arise from an intrinsic human need to feel heard. 

When customers call expressing a high level of agitation, our instinct is to quickly move to problem-solving mode or defensively react; however, the top de-escalation technique I teach my teams is to simply LISTEN (without any interruptions, without preparing an answer while the other person is still talking, and without any judgments until the individual has completely communicated their issue). 

When we stop trying to win our interaction with another and move toward trying to understand the feeling(s) behind it, the dynamic of the power in the conversation shifts dramatically. If we did this every day in our personal and professional lives, shifting from reactive debating toward patient understanding, we would see many fewer zero-sum conflicts and significantly greater community cohesion. 

Empathy is not a “soft skill”. It is a must-have component to build and maintain healthy, functional relationships.

Pratik Singh Raguwanshi, Manager, Digital Experience, LiveHelpIndia

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Let Curiosity Bridge Divides

In my opinion, one of the underappreciated qualities is a real desire to know more about people whose perspectives of life differ from yours.

Division in societies does not usually occur because of any disagreements, but because people refuse to ask questions and start making assumptions instead. The act of listening and wanting to know what someone else has to say before forming an opinion could create amazing results.

I have experienced first-hand how the change of the attitude from the one of being afraid or defensive towards becoming interested brings a lot of positive transformations. Whether it is related to schoolwork, business, or personal relations, asking questions helps to learn and cooperate.

What makes it so effective is its ability to spread. Once one person decides to listen and not immediately judge, he makes others do so, too. With time, it affects not only the mood of conversations but also relationships between people.

While searching for some big solution to the social problem, we often forget about the small things that make a difference. Curiosity is free, it takes no preparation whatsoever, but it helps people to come together in a way nothing else can.

Vasilii Kiselev, CEO & Co-Founder, Legacy Online School

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Keep Promises, Grow Trust and Respect

If you make a promise, keep it. It’s not the most significant problem compared to the others, but mistrust is mostly the result of broken promises and a hundred other small things. The fact is, if a person is always keeping his word, it’s kind of a pleasant surprise every time. Its value lies in its ability to spread. Treat people as if your word means anything, and they will start valuing their own word, and that feeling is far more powerful than anything else. I actually built my entire company by accident. People talked about me, not because I was smarter than others, but because I was doing what I said while most others weren’t. If you respect people, you earn their respect in return, and it is what makes a difference.

Asawar Ali, CEO, Link Building Agency

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See People, Normalize Everyday Respect

I work in transportation, events, customer service, and technology, industries where the culture is created from smaller interactions rather than grand gestures.

The everyday act that is most underutilized is to make people feel seen in the everydayness of the moment. Greeting the driver, remembering the name of your coworker, saying thank you to the clerk at the front desk, asking someone who seems quiet how they are doing – these are all relatively small actions that challenge the cultural tendency to make people invisible.

In the world of service businesses, I have seen firsthand how one interaction of respect leads to many other interactions being positively altered as a result.

Half of US adults reported feeling lonely, according to the U.S. Surgeon General (source: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf). Culture evolves when respect becomes the norm, not the exception.

Arsen Misakyan, CEO and Founder, LAXcar

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Ask Who Gets Left Out, Then Fix

I started asking a simple question with my team at Nammu: who gets left out by this? We found our new signup process was confusing for certain users. A few quick fixes made it easier. Those changes brought in more people and just made the thing work better for everyone. Those small checks are what actually start making tech and money more accessible.

Tomas Silhanek, Founder, Nammu

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Hold Daily Ten-Minute Chats, Strengthen Teams

You know what?

At the close of every day, I pull someone aside for a chat that lasts maybe ten minutes. It felt really weird for me at first, but gradually, those little chats starting shifting the environment. What people actually wanted to know, ask others; they will tackle a very little piece of a work that before they did not want to.

If you do nothing more than just it you will quickly begin see that all those few minutes combine to a stronger more resilient team.

Emma Sansom, Managing Director, Flamingo Marketing Strategies

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Share Wins Publicly to Speed Growth

Stop keeping your best finds to yourself. When my SEO team moved our wins out of private Slack threads and into a shared doc, new hires started figuring things out faster. We also started borrowing ideas from each other more often. It just works better when everyone can see what the rest of the team is learning.

Justin Herring, Founder and CEO, YEAH! Local

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Praise People by Name, Watch Gratitude Spread

But after I specifically thanked one supplier in the company newsletter at named in person after that… something shifted. And then it felt like our company had a lot happier workplace, and before I knew it all the departments were acknowledging someone else each time in newsletters and I realized it wasn’t just one supplier we could thank.

Andrew Gazdecki, CEO, Acquire.com

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Learn Names, Ask, Unlock Real Feedback

Here’s what I’ve learned managing buildings. Learn the names of the staff and your neighbors. Actually ask how they’re doing and listen to the answer. That small habit is everything. It gets people to tell you the truth about what’s working and what isn’t, which makes solving actual problems so much easier.

Moe Ahmed, CEO, Ahmed Group

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Repair After Conflict to Protect Relationships

Repair after conflict is one of the most effective yet underutilized daily behaviors that can positively impact our relationships with family and friends. “I was wrong,” “That hurt me,” or “I get why that would affect you” are all statements that have a way of changing relational systems. Repair is what keeps small ruptures from turning into chronic resentments or distancing. An example of this is when a parent says, “You were right, I over-reacted.” This is a model for the child to hold them accountable for their emotions, and will translate into the child’s future relationships. On a larger scale, if we normalize repair as opposed to perfection, it may help to decrease shame-based communication in families and communities and create more safe spaces psychologically for growth.

Dr. Alexandra Foglia, DMFT, Director of Family Program, All In Solutions

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Set Kind Boundaries to Prevent Burnout

Boundary setting through kindness is a daily activity with major cultural implications. Most of us tend to be overly accommodating or too rigid, however being consistent and clear regarding our boundaries (e.g., “I am unable to do this for you right now, but I really do care about you”) can establish better expectations in all relationships. In clinical practice, I frequently observe how poorly defined boundaries can lead to burnout, resentment, and unproductive roles within family and other caregiving systems. For example, when someone no longer over-extends themselves at work, they are both protecting their mental health and challenging the normative culture within their workplace where over-working is seen as a measure of one’s commitment. Establishing boundaries that are consistently communicated promotes the idea that it is acceptable to prioritize your own well-being and respect for others.

Jonathan Goelz LCSW, Executive Director, All in Solutions

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Credit Originators Publicly to Unleash Ideas

Credit someone else for their idea when someone else tries to take it. In public. Don’t let it slide. It’s a small thing with big cultural impact that most organizations completely fail to leverage.

Creative teams think together. But credit goes to the person who delivers the work, not the person who had the insight. When you start taking the time to say who actually had an idea, explicitly and publicly, you change the entire group’s willingness to share ideas at all. Those who have seen their ideas credited will speak up more often. Those who have seen their ideas swallowed by someone else’s presentation will withhold them.

Once that behavior starts happening regularly throughout your team, you’ve built a culture where everyone feels safe to contribute regardless of rank. The beauty is that this takes literally no extra time. It doesn’t even cost anything. But most people don’t do it because recognizing someone else isn’t their brain’s perception of “urgent” in the moment.

When you start digging into what makes organizations actually capitalize on the diversity of thought within their teams vs who just speaks the loudest, you’ll find change at this granular of a level.

Brandon George, Director of Demand Generation & Content, Thrive Internet Marketing Agency

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Meet Criticism with Curiosity, Not Defense

Answering someone’s criticism with curiosity instead of defensiveness is more influential in our culture than most people know. In reputation work you see it play out every day.

The majority of bad interactions between businesses & customers or people in general turn negative because the first response is protective. Someone voices an issue and instead of asking a question to understand more the automatic response is defending why it’s not an issue. That in and of itself communicates to the other person that they weren’t heard. If you ask a sincere question first you change the course of the conversation.

Companies that coach employees to ask questions when receiving criticism instead of getting defensive experience vastly different results with their customers. This is true way beyond business interactions as well. Most day to day arguments online and IRL turn into full fledged conflict because no one takes a moment to ask a question to clarify before responding.

The power in that is realized when you understand this behavior can be exercised by anyone in any conversation. It costs no money and changes results far beyond how small of an action it really is. Micro shifts in how we communicate without defensiveness, when practiced by enough people individually can shift entire cultures in how they handle conflict.

Timothy Clarke, Senior Reputation Manager, Thrive Local

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Hear to Understand, Not to Counter

Active listening, while a relatively small action, has significant unexplored opportunities for both social and cultural change. Social psychologists have found that perceived understanding is a much greater predictor of an individual’s willingness to form a relationship and trust someone compared to sharing similar beliefs. This means individuals do not have to hold similar beliefs to build a connection, they just have to believe they were heard.

In many ways this looks very similar to the way we typically interact with others. For example, pausing long enough to reflect on what another person said prior to responding to them, especially when engaging in conversations where there may be some level of polarization present. The simplest reflection possible would be something such as “You seem concerned about stability,” which will often reduce conflict between parties more than if you had countered with facts or opinions. Ultimately, by practicing active listening and healthy communication, we can decrease levels of defensiveness and increase levels of empathy.

Dr. Carolina Estevez, PsyD, Psychologist, SOBA New Jersey

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Lead with Curiosity to Strengthen Community

Curiosity is a powerful and undervalued behavior. Asking someone,”can you tell me more about that?” can radically change how people interact with each other.

Psychological research has shown that being listened to (and therefore heard) decreases defensive behavior and opens up someone’s willingness to accept another point of view. Curiosity fosters understanding rather than escalates conflict.

Social change often begins within the context of relationships. Stronger communities develop from individuals listening before they judge, understanding before they correct, and asking questions before making assumptions.

Curiosity is strong as it is accessible; no wealth, influence, or platform is required. If done consistently, curiosity can enhance your workplace environment, family dynamics, and create bridges across social boundaries. The small moment(s) of understanding that occur from practicing curiosity regularly can create larger cultural shifts than we realize.

Stephanie Lewis MSW, LCSW, LICSW, CCTP, C-DBT, VP of Clinical Operations, Epiphany Wellness

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Offer Real-Time Praise to Elevate Culture

Recognizing someone at the moment it’s happening, even if they’re not physically present, means a lot more than most people understand. Calling out a team member for doing a good job in a meeting or to a customer can take less than 30 seconds. More times than not that recognition will trickle back to them later through word of mouth. Reputation travels fast around crews of 10 or even 100 because genuine recognition travels faster than enforced recognition. Employees begin to recognize each other when they are doing a good job because they know an effort will not go unseen even if nobody else is present.

Culture will begin to shift when reputations are created by peer-to-peer interaction instead of job titles. Team members will lift each other up more because they feel that when they do a good job someone will recognize it regardless of who is standing around. Companies spend millions of dollars trying to create employee engagement programs to lift employee morale, but saying a few genuine sentences a day will have a more long lasting effect. Whispered recognition said between employees can transform an entire company with no one having to announce a new initiative.

Alfred Pintor, Founder and Owner, Copper Collar Services

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Read Primary Sources Before You Repeat

Our daily habit with the greatest potential to change our culture is reading the original primary source before we share or repeat an opinion about something that impacts other humans.

The cultural impact builds exponentially over time. Societies with larger populations that consistently read primary sources before repeating assertions make fewer costly group mistakes. Fewer regulatory failures. Fewer policies based on misunderstood data. Fewer safety assumptions that were never actually confirmed. In my own experience with property management, teams that read the inspection reports and code language themselves (instead of hearing about them second-hand) identify significant mistakes once every four compliance cycles.

Lo Choe, Founder and Fire/Electrical Safety Contractor, Aura Fire Safety

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Talk to Strangers to Forge Connection

I think that simply talking to people, especially people you don’t know, can make such a difference. Strike up a conversation with your barista. Ask your mailman how his day is going. Talk to the people standing next to you in line. Whenever I travel, I make a conscious effort to talk to locals so that I can better appreciate the culture and make positive connections. I think those same efforts could be just as impactful at home.

Steve Schwab, CEO, Casago

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Choose Empathy and Curiosity Over Judgment

There’s no doubt in my mind that empathy and curiosity about another person’s lived experience would fundamentally change society for the better. All too often we struggle to mentalize and understand what someone else might be going through, or how they see the world from their perspective. That kind of judgment without context is what leads to people treating each other poorly, disregarding those who are less fortunate and even creating tension between groups who have much more in common than differences. Taking the time to truly listen and understand with positive intention is something simple that everyone can benefit from.

Ken Marshall, Co-Founder, Meet Sona

Share Your Insights

We’d love to hear from you! Share your thoughts in the comments below:

• What other ideas or perspectives would you add to the discussion?
• What are your thoughts or experiences on this topic?
• Have you encountered something similar or different?

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