I would just say that people are much nicer when their needs (positive and negative) are both being met generally. Until then, one can’t help being selfish and innwardly focused
I would say that kindness is an expression (not the only one) of empathy. Some degree of empathy is present in the overwhelming majority of people - barring extreme sociopathic conditions and an absence of mirror neurones. So for most people I would say that it is innate to some extent.
Even in cases where empathy is not present, kindness can be simulated or faked and some people with strong sociopathic conditions have proven to be very good at this when it suits their purposes - so I certainly say something with the appearance of kindness can be learned in one form or another.
It can definitely be cultivated - and I would say that this is one of the major qualities in the whole “two wolves” metaphor or, in classical Greek terms, a virtue to be developed.
I believe that there is at least some learning/cultivation; I’ve seen plenty people becoming nicer over time, and some nice people becoming arseholes. However that is not enough to rule out a potential innate component.
IMHO what is innate is a person’s capacity for empathy (the ability to understand that others have different feelings and to temporarily take their perspective for the purpose of understanding).
Whether a person actually expresses the empathy they have capacity for depends on things like whether or not they’ve been the victim of abuse. For example, the character Scrooge is what I’d call a person with large capacity for empathy but had no sympathy (the sharing of feelings with others) and thus acted without compassion. He lacked empathy for some reason, in some versions due to childhood abuse (never read the actual Dickens version so idk). The ghosts that visited him showed him why he should have empathy and because he had the capacity to, he changed.
I don’t believe that every human has the same biological capacity for empathy. As a silly example, I don’t think that the former pres. of the U.S. could possibly become a compassionate person due to being visited by the ghosts of Christmas past/present/future.
Note that I’m using kind of reversed definitions of sympathy and empathy vs some definitions I’ve seen online. My way makes more sense to me, since the word “sympathy” is used outside of psychology the way I use it.
