LONDON: One of the top qualities that people look for in a long-term relationship is kindness, new research suggests.

For the study published in the Journal of Personality, the research team picked over 2,700 college students from across the globe and asked them to build themselves an ideal lifelong partner by using a fixed budget to ”buy” characteristics.

While traits like physical attractiveness and financial prospects were important, the one that was given the highest priority was kindness, said the researchers.

“Looking at very different culture groups allows us to test the idea that some behaviors are human universals.

If men and women act in a similar way across the globe, then this adds weight to the idea that some behaviors develop in spite of culture rather than because of it,” said study principal researcher Andrew G. Thomas from Swansea University in Britain.

(Agencies)