The picture is telling some regions glow in green (very likely), others linger in pale yellows, and some turn red (very unlikely).

The Report defines “helping a stranger” as one of three benevolent acts surveyed by Gallup alongside donating money and volunteering, and connects these acts directly to how people rate their own lives.

Over the past years, the world witnessed a “benevolence bump” triggered by COVID-19, during which acts of kindness surged and remarkably stayed elevated. Even in 2024, helping strangers remained, on average, 18% higher than pre-pandemic levels.

On that spectrum, some nations stand out. In Africa, parts of West and Central Africa show higher-than-average willingness (darker green).

In contrast, much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia is shaded red or pale, indicating that helping strangers is seen as unlikely. These visual contrasts mirror the wider inequalities in social trust, institutional stability, and communal norms.

Take Nigeria, for example, despite media narratives often casting it in a negative light, it reportedly ranked 7th globally in terms of kindness to strangers in the 2025 report—even though its overall happiness ranking was much lower (105th).

That gap tells us something essential: a society’s warmth toward strangers can exist independently of broader economic conditions or institutional strength.

It’s telling that the report also highlights a psychological twist: people consistently underestimate how kind others are. Experiments involving “dropped wallet” scenarios revealed that actual return rates of lost wallets are often twice as high as what respondents anticipated.

In some Nordic countries, the long-standing front-runners in happiness, the expected and real rates of wallet returns rank among the highest globally.

In the real world, that misbelief can have consequences if we assume others won’t help; we limit cooperation, trust, and social cohesion before they even begin. The Report finds that expecting kindness from others is a stronger predictor of happiness than major harms people fear.