Why Listening to Your Heart Can Make You a Nicer Person
Why being able to feel what others feel makes agreeable people so likeable.
Posted December 30, 2025 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
People who are nice tend to make the others around them feel comfortable. Translated into the personality trait of agreeableness , “niceness” implies a certain degree of care and concern for others, the ability to relate to what others are feeling, and an unselfish desire to help people in need. When you meet a nice person, you just know it.
As one trait in the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality, agreeableness takes on the role of accounting for why people are high in prosocial or altruistic motivation , are able to empathize, and care about other people. The other traits in the FFM ( conscientiousness , extraversion , neuroticism , and openness to experience ) each have their own roles to play, but it’s agreeableness that uniquely helps explain why you might like someone without being able to say exactly why.
Agreeableness and Feeling What Others Feel
You might say that people who are agreeable are not only kind but also able to zero in on the emotional needs of others. Step one in being kind does seem to need this ability to empathize. According to North Dakota State University’s (NDSU's) Michael Robinson and colleagues (2025), unlike the other FFM traits, agreeableness has an emotional component. In their words, “trust, warmth, compassion, and friendliness… seem to require a feeling component to be enacted successfully.”
One of the more innovative ways to test this idea was developed by Robinson in earlier work, where he found that agreeable people are more likely to favor the “heart” over the “head” when it comes to defining themselves. Just for fun, ask yourself where you come out on this question. Do you tend to play according to the rules of emotions or thoughts?
Putting the Agreeableness Factor to the Test
Using undergraduate samples across four studies, the NDSU team tested the hypothesis that agreeable people would be more reactive to other people’s feelings by measuring how they reacted in a task presenting them with standard emotional stimuli. Known as the DART (dynamic affective reactivity task), this method involved having participants rate their current feelings across a series of emotion -related images. The more they reacted to each image, the higher their emotional responsiveness.
The first study’s results supported the prediction that participants high in agreeableness were indeed more affected by the emotional valence of the images. The second study introduced several refinements to the method to ensure that the research team was correctly tracking the emotions of the participants.
Digging deeper into the study’s results, the stronger emotional reactivity of highly agreeable people occurred for both positive and negative images. The positive images included such themes as family and friendship , and the negative images portrayed the suffering of others. The authors maintain that agreeable people relate to both sets of images because they see them as “personally relevant, even when the self is not directly influenced by the events in question.
Agreeableness Is More Than Niceness
The Robinson et al. study shows that agreeable people don’t just exhibit such qualities as kindness and willingness to help. They feel what others feel, and this allows them to react to situations with kindness rather than a lack of interest or, worse, pleasure in the suffering of others. They might read about the tragic death of a local young person and put themselves in the place of that person’s family.
Using this study as a guide, you can understand why you might be drawn to a highly agreeable person. You might share a funny but slightly embarrassing story about yourself with a person you meet for the first time. Let’s say while hurrying down the sidewalk to get to an appointment, you tripped over your own feet, landing on the ground. The point of your story was to demonstrate a bit of self-deprecating humor . But instead of laughing at you or commenting on your clumsiness, this person immediately asks if you were OK and honestly seems worried about whether you hurt yourself. This is a nice person, you think.
From a theoretical point of view, the NDSU study has value in translating what we might regard as a static quality of personality into one that would play out in real life. People are exposed all the time to emotion-provoking images involving the fate of other people. It’s only the highly agreeable ones who will take these seriously.
Flipping things around, the Robinson et al. study can also help guide you toward being a nicer person. When others tell you stories that could trigger your emotions, don’t push those feelings aside. Let yourself imagine their experience, if only for the moment, with your “heart.”
To sum up , knowing what to look for in the emotional reactions of people you meet can provide important guidance in choosing nice over “naughty.” It’s hard to fake empathy, but the agreeable people won’t even try.
Robinson, M. D., Irvin, R. L., Fereidouni, H., & Klein, R. J. (2025). Feelings as a currency of care: A role for agreeableness in emotional reactivity. Journal of Personality , 93 (3), 553–566. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12951
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Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.