Amit Kumar
speaker
301 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
Amit Kumar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I thought maybe, you know, that's not very courteous to just show up and tell someone you're around.
I also thought about, of course, you know, she might wonder how I knew what was going on in her life, even though we hadn't been in touch with each other.
And so maybe she'd wonder how I even knew about her relationship troubles.
How uncomfortable might that be?
I think the language that economists use can actually be somewhat helpful here, even though we're talking about these everyday interactions where one could be kind to another person and and and
Economists talk about things like expected utility, that they'll tell you that wise decisions are guided by an accurate assessment of the expected value of a given action.
And so what we're often thinking about is our expectations, and we've got expectations of both costs and benefits.
You know, there's potential costs that come with any interaction.
It could be awkward.
It could be uncomfortable.
It could seem weird.
You could be rejected.
That's a risk of any potential interaction with another person.
But of course, there's potential benefits to interacting with other people as well in terms of the support that you're providing and in terms of both how you and they feel.
One way that psychologists will sometimes talk about these costs is sort of an inordinate concern with how competent we seem.
Are we doing just the right thing at just the right time?
If it seems like we're not, then we might not act in the direction of kindness, as George Saunders put it, these other oriented interactions.
We essentially had participants perform a random act of kindness for just a stranger who happened to be nearby.
So we had these participants at a skating rink in a public park in Chicago.
They were giving away hot chocolate on a cold winter's day to someone else in the area.
Showing 101–120 of 301 · page 6 of 16
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