Amit Kumar

I think all of us can probably that have had this experience can remember how strange it is to go back to a place when you haven't been there in many months.

And so there was already some anxiety around going back to the office.

I was nervous about doing that.

I basically didn't go to the office at all for many months during the height of the pandemic.

And when I eventually did come back to campus, I was expecting to kind of find

a half-eaten sandwich from a past life and a bunch of dead plants in my office.

Much to my surprise, though, the plants in my office were not only alive, they were miraculously thriving to the point of looking way healthier than they looked when I was coming in regularly and trying to tend to them.

And it turned out, so there's a person on our administrative staff here who does all sorts of seemingly small things that kind of really loom large, I think, in the minds of those that are receiving her help.

But of course, it turned out that it was her who had kind of made this miracle happen.

She had been coming into the office, at least with a little bit of frequency.

And this was, again, something she didn't have to do.

Nobody asked her to do this.

In fact, when I talked to her about this is another kind of real life experience of what we're measuring in these experiments, because when I talked to her about it, she basically framed it as

this super concrete, simple act.

You know, it's just pouring water out of a container every once in a while is kind of how she described what she was doing.

But to me, when you're already anxious about returning to the office, you think that your plants have died.

This was somebody that was thinking about me, somebody that cared about me, somebody that was doing something nice for me.

And so all of those positive feelings, I think, really came to mind in that instance, even though she, of course, thought of it as some small thing that she was doing to kind of pass the time.

So this goes back to sort of this asymmetry in terms of what are people focusing on?

What are people paying attention to in these interactions?