Competitive altruism is kindness used as a tool against a rival instead of for its own sake — help that buys allies, reputation, or an edge, while still looking exactly like generosity. A 2026 study of 103 women found this strategic kindness tracked Machiavellianism closely and showed up more toward other women than toward men, which is more or less what François de La Rochefoucauld argued back in 1665: that most virtue is vice wearing a disguise.

Hand 103 women a fifteen-item survey about using kindness on purpose — not once, but twice. Once asking how they act toward other women. Once asking how they act toward men. Then hand them a full battery of personality measures on top: Machiavellianism, the Big Five, social desirability, impression management. See what lines up with what. That’s the design behind Kill Them With Kindness: Preliminary Evidence for Women’s Competitive Altruism, published Sep 9, 2026 in Frontiers in Psychology by Maryanne L. Fisher (Saint Mary’s University) and seven co-authors, covered Oct 1, 2026 by PsyPost and picked up the same week by Yahoo News.

The finding, in short: competitive altruism scored higher toward other women (2.58 average) than toward men (2.43), and the trait correlated strongly with Machiavellianism and negatively with agreeableness and social desirability. Women who rated themselves high on using kindness strategically also rated themselves more manipulative, more deceptive, more fake — and no warmer than anyone else. François de La Rochefoucauld never saw a Likert scale. He died in 1680, two hundred and ninety years before anyone built a questionnaire to measure Machiavellianism by name. But his Maximes, first published in 1665, open with a line this study reads less like a prediction and more like a footnote: “Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.”

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether women use kindness strategically toward rivals (“competitive altruism”), and which personality traits predict it
Who ran it?	Maryanne L. Fisher (Saint Mary’s University) with researchers at Universidad de las Américas and Universidad del Desarrollo
Where and when?	Frontiers in Psychology, published Sep 9, 2026; covered Oct 1, 2026 by PsyPost and Yahoo News
Sample	103 heterosexual cisgender women, ages 18–45, mostly from the UK, US, and Canada
Tool used	A new 15-item Competitive Altruism Survey (CAS), rated separately for behavior toward women and toward men
Core finding	Competitive altruism scored higher toward other women (2.58) than toward men (2.43) on a 1–5 scale
Personality link	Strongly positive correlation with Machiavellianism (r = 0.54); negative with Agreeableness and social desirability
What La Rochefoucauld already argued	Maximes (1665): “Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise” — generosity is often self-love, amour-propre, wearing a nicer coat

The Quick Version

Competitive altruism is kindness used as a tool against a rival instead of for its own sake — help that buys allies, reputation, or an edge, while still looking exactly like generosity. A 2026 study of 103 women found this strategic kindness tracked Machiavellianism closely and showed up more toward other women than toward men. La Rochefoucauld said in 1665 that most of what gets called virtue is self-interest wearing a disguise. This study put a number on that claim: 0.54, the correlation between “I use kindness to get ahead” and a personality trait literally named for the most famous description of calculated self-interest ever written.

What the Study Actually Found

The interesting choice here isn’t the subject — people have suspected strategic niceness for centuries. It’s the instrument. Most research on competitive altruism had focused on men, usually on conspicuous public generosity (tipping big in front of a date, say), and the handful of studies that included women produced results all over the map. So Fisher’s team built something new: the Competitive Altruism Survey, fifteen statements about using kindness tactically, each one asked twice. Once with “women” as the target. Once with “men.” That doubling is the whole design. It lets the same woman’s strategic-kindness score toward women be compared directly against her own score toward men, rather than against some other woman’s answers.

The audience gap held up statistically, not just as a rounding difference: 2.58 toward women versus 2.43 toward men, a difference the researchers report as significant (t(102) = 2.25, p = 0.026). Small in raw terms. Real all the same. And it points the opposite direction a naive guess might land on — if competitive altruism is a courtship tactic aimed at impressing men, you’d expect the score toward men to run higher, not lower. Instead, the sharper edge pointed at other women. Rivals, not targets of romantic interest, got the more calculated kindness.

The personality data is where the study gets its teeth. Competitive altruism correlated at 0.54 with Machiavellianism — a strong relationship by psychology’s usual standards — and at −0.36 with Agreeableness, the trait most people would assume sits right next to “generous.” It also correlated negatively with social desirability (−0.36) and impression management (−0.46), which matters more than it sounds like it should: these women weren’t just answering in a way designed to look good. If anything, admitting to strategic kindness ran against their instinct to look good on paper. And when the researchers asked participants to rate their own character traits, high scorers on competitive altruism called themselves more manipulative (r = 0.37), more deceptive (r = 0.33), more fake (r = 0.24), and less honest (r = −0.29) — while rating themselves no warmer, no kinder, no more generous than anyone else. The kindness was real enough to report. The warmth behind it wasn’t.

What Did La Rochefoucauld Mean by Virtue in Disguise?

La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1665) is a collection of several hundred short, aphoristic observations arguing that amour-propre — self-love, vanity, the drive to think well of oneself — sits underneath nearly every act that looks selfless from the outside. Generosity, loyalty, gratitude, friendship: he treats each as a transaction dressed up as a gift, not because people are uniquely wicked, but because self-interest is simply what the mind runs on, whether or not it tells itself the truth about that.

He wasn’t subtle about where this leads. “Self-love is the greatest of flatterers,” he wrote — the mind’s first and most devoted audience is itself. On friendship: “What men term friendship is merely a partnership with a collection of reciprocal interests, and an exchange of favours — in fact it is but a trade in which self love always expects to gain something.” And the maxim that reads like it was written for this exact study, three and a half centuries early: “What seems generosity is often disguised ambition, that despises small to run after greater interest.” Swap “ambition” for “strategic positioning against a rival” and you’ve described the CAS’s entire manipulation subscale.

La Rochefoucauld wasn’t arguing that kindness is fake in the sense of never happening. He was arguing that the motive underneath it rarely matches the story we tell about it — generosity performed, consciously or not, in service of something the giver wants. Reputation. Allies. Standing. A debt the other person doesn’t realize they now owe.

Why Is She Being So Nice to Me?

1. Check who the kindness is aimed at. The study found competitive altruism ran higher toward other women than toward men — if the warmth escalates specifically around a same-status rival, that’s the pattern this research flags, not paranoia.
2. Notice if the kindness is public. Fisher’s team built a “public-display” subscale into the CAS for a reason — strategic generosity tends to prefer witnesses. Kindness that only exists when no one’s watching is a different animal.
3. Ask what it would cost to not need the audience. Competitive altruism correlated with wanting to look good to others (admiration-seeking) more than with any measure of actual warmth. If the kindness evaporates the moment it stops being noticed, that’s data.
4. Weigh it against the Machiavellianism link, not against your gut. A 0.54 correlation doesn’t mean every nice colleague is scheming. It means the trait cluster — manipulative, strategic, low-agreeableness — predicts this behavior better than warmth does, across this sample.
5. Remember La Rochefoucauld got here first, with worse data and a sharper pen. “What seems generosity is often disguised ambition” wasn’t a hunch about one person. It was a general claim about how self-love operates — one this study just happened to be able to measure three hundred and sixty-one years later.

The Gap La Rochefoucauld Didn’t See Coming

Here’s where the study complicates the maxim rather than just confirming it, and that’s the more interesting half.

La Rochefoucauld’s self-love was universal and ungendered — a feature of the mind, not of one sex. He had no occasion to ask whether strategic generosity gets aimed differently depending on who the target is, because the framework he was working in didn’t carve the world up that way. This study did, and found something his generalized cynicism doesn’t predict on its own: the sharper edge of competitive altruism pointed at other women specifically, not at men, and not evenly in all directions. The researchers also found that Machiavellian women were more likely to attribute strategic kindness to other women than to men — meaning the same trait that predicts using the tactic also predicts expecting it, but asymmetrically, with other women as the presumed audience and the presumed rival at once.

That’s not a small footnote. It suggests amour-propre doesn’t just sit in the individual mind calculating advantage in the abstract — it gets routed through something more specific: same-sex social competition, the kind evolutionary psychologists would call intrasexual. La Rochefoucauld diagnosed the engine. He didn’t have the tools, or the framework, to ask where the engine pointed its exhaust.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

The connection isn’t “a seventeenth-century nobleman predicted a 2026 personality study.” It’s narrower than that, and it holds up better for being narrower: La Rochefoucauld’s specific claim was that generosity frequently operates as self-interest in a more presentable costume. This study measured a specific, nameable version of that costume — kindness aimed at rivals, correlated with a trait literally named after calculated self-interest — and found the relationship exactly where the maxim said to look.

It connects directly to Rousseau’s account of amour-propre — the kind of self-regard that only exists in relation to what other people think of you. Rousseau and La Rochefoucauld disagreed about whether amour-propre was avoidable; they didn’t disagree about what it does. Competitive altruism, as this study measured it, is amour-propre with a clipboard: kindness performed because an audience is present to register it as kindness.

It sits close, too, to Goffman’s account of the self as a performance — the idea that so much of social behavior is staged for whoever’s watching, “front stage” conduct distinct from what happens once the audience leaves. The CAS’s public-display subscale is almost a direct measurement of Goffman’s front stage: kindness that knows it’s being observed, and adjusts accordingly.

There’s a sharper fit in Sartre’s account of bad faith, the self-deception that requires already knowing, at some level, the thing you’re hiding from yourself. A woman scoring high on competitive altruism isn’t necessarily lying when she calls her kindness generosity — she may believe it fully. Sartre’s bad faith and La Rochefoucauld’s self-love describe the same trick from different angles: the motive is there, doing its work, while the story being told about the motive is something nicer.

And it rhymes with Beauvoir’s account of the unpaid social labor placed on women — the expectation that women manage relationships, warmth, and social maintenance as a kind of job. If kindness is partly expected of women as labor, it isn’t a surprise that some of that labor gets put to strategic use. The expectation doesn’t create the self-interest. It just hands self-interest a socially acceptable disguise to wear.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

It’s worth being precise about the size of this, because the framing invites more confidence than the data earns.

A Small, New-Scale Sample

103 women is enough to find a correlation, not enough to call it settled. The CAS is a brand-new instrument. The authors themselves call this “preliminary evidence” in the paper’s own title — that’s not false modesty, it’s the accurate description.

A Narrow Demographic Window

The sample was heterosexual, cisgender women, ages 18 to 45, overwhelmingly from the UK, US, and Canada, well-educated (nearly two-thirds held a bachelor’s degree or higher). Whether the same pattern holds for queer women, non-Western cultures, or different age brackets is a separate, untested question.

Correlational, Not Causal

The study found Machiavellianism and competitive altruism move together. It didn’t manipulate either one. A strong correlation tells you the traits travel as a pair in this sample — it doesn’t tell you Machiavellianism causes the strategic kindness, or that the kindness causes anyone to become more Machiavellian over time.

Self-Report All the Way Down

Every measure here — the CAS, the Machiavellianism scale, the self-rated traits — came from the same women describing their own behavior and character. That’s a reasonable way to test whether people recognize and admit to strategic kindness in themselves. It isn’t a behavioral measure of what they actually do when a rival is in the room.

What Actually Follows From This

1. Stop treating “she’s being so nice to me” as either compliment or accusation. The study’s whole point is that kindness and competition aren’t opposites — a gesture can be generous in effect and strategic in origin at the same time, and sorting which is operating takes more than a feeling.
2. Watch where kindness concentrates, not just whether it exists. The study found the sharper edge of competitive altruism pointed at other women, in public, among people scoring higher on Machiavellianism specifically. Pattern matters more than any single nice gesture.
3. Take La Rochefoucauld’s cynicism as a question, not a verdict. He wasn’t arguing that no kindness is real. He was arguing that the motive underneath it is worth checking before taking the nicer story at face value — which is exactly what this study built an instrument to do.

La Rochefoucauld never ran a correlation and never heard of Machiavellianism as a named, measurable trait — the word existed in his century, the construct didn’t. He had a court full of nobles performing loyalty and generosity for advantage he could see plainly and describe precisely, three hundred and sixty-one years before anyone built a survey to put a number on it. The number came in at 0.54. Kindness toward a rival scored higher than kindness toward anyone else. Self-love, it turns out, still runs the operation. It just learned to smile while doing it.

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This post discusses a 2026 study published in Frontiers in Psychology and François de La Rochefoucauld’s 1665 Maximes. The study’s findings come from 103 heterosexual cisgender women, primarily from the UK, US, and Canada, using a newly developed survey instrument — they describe correlations within that sample, not a causal account of why kindness happens, a measure of actual behavior toward real rivals, or a claim about men, other age groups, or non-Western populations.