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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Early one morning in March 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was on her way home from the bar where she worked. She parked her car and was walking toward her apartment building when a man attacked and killed her. Over the years, Kitty Genovese's murder has been the focus of countless books, movies, and psychology research papers.
It drew attention not only because it was a grisly crime, but because it supposedly explained a deep flaw in human nature.
Chapter 2: How does the bystander effect relate to our willingness to help others?
The New York Times published an article that said dozens of people saw the murder or heard Kitty Genovese screaming for help, but no one intervened. When someone did call the police, it was too late. In the decades that followed, the case came to symbolize a psychological phenomenon known as the bystander effect.
When lots of people see something is wrong, the theory goes, each person wrongly assumes someone else will step up to help. The net effect is that as the number of potential helpers increases, the number of people who actually help decreases. In recent years, psychologists and journalists have re-examined the facts of the Kitty Genovese story and walked back some of the claims.
The Times has said that its initial reporting was flawed and exaggerated. I think the power of the Kitty Genovese story lies in the fact that in everyday life, we all notice that we are not as helpful and brave as we would like to be. We look away from people who are suffering, we cross the street to avoid an altercation.
Even when the stakes are low for personal safety, we don't extend a hand to others who need help. This week on Hidden Brain, the curious psychology behind a phenomenon that is all around us, and how understanding a quirk inside our minds can help us become the kind of people we admire.
My name is Gary Knight. I'm the CEO of the Seven Foundation, which is a media nonprofit. I'm also a very keen amateur cyclist.
I first met Gary in 2009 at a journalism fellowship program. A big man with a gregarious personality, he filled every room he entered. Gary was a photographer and had covered conflicts around the world, including in the Balkans, the Arab world and Southeast Asia. He was a member of the iconic photo agency called Seven. I hadn't been in touch with Gary for some years, but recently met up with him.
He seemed to be moving his shoulder gingerly and I asked him what happened. The story he told me made me think about some surprising research into the nature of kindness. We'll get to that in a moment. Gary told me that each year he plans a biking adventure with friends.
The thing that we're looking for the most are really steep climbs, incredible views and sort of mythological rides.
On his most recent trip before our meeting, Gary and his friends decided to go biking in the west of Scotland.
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Chapter 3: What surprising research findings challenge our understanding of kindness?
And so he stopped his motorbike and he asked me what had happened and then said, look, you know, sit down and we're going to, you know, check you out. And he explains, his name's Martin. He explained that he and his friends, Max and Anita, were all Poles. They're Polish. They lived and worked in the United Kingdom and they were all trained paramedics. And they just, the week before,
finished all of their training. And so they checked me out, checked my head, did all the tests to see if I had concussion. They then took out bandages, strapped me up, immobilized my arm. I mean, I couldn't have wished for more.
One of them went and found Gary's friends, while another called emergency services. All three waited with him for almost an hour until the medics arrived.
They were so incredibly generous. They spent a lot of time with me whilst they were on vacation. And the only people who stopped for me in Scotland weren't people from Britain, my own people. They were, in fact, foreigners, which is sort of ironic at a time of Brexit when Britain is rejecting the idea of allowing foreigners in so easily. I'm hugely, hugely grateful for them.
And, you know, just talking about it makes me very emotional. Sorry. It's ironic because I've had a very dramatic and violent career. You know, I photographed wars for 20 years And closest I ever came to dying was on my bike. And, you know, I felt very alone when I came off the bike. And having three strangers, you know, stop at the side of the road and take care of me was remarkable, it seems.
and an incredible act of kindness. And I hope I have the opportunity to do the same thing for somebody else one day.
I feel so grateful that those three Polish paramedics stopped to help my friend. But there is another way to look at this. Sure, it's no fun to take an hour out of your vacation to help a stranger. But really, it's just an hour. And surely, knowing you helped another person in desperate need has to make you feel great about yourself. So why are stories of Good Samaritans so rare?
In daily life, why don't we extend help to others more often? Are people just selfish? Actually, new psychological research reveals a quirk in our mental makeup that may be to blame. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When psychologist Amit Kumar was in graduate school, he became close friends with another student.
We're going to call her Jen.
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Chapter 4: How can we overcome our hesitation to offer help?
And, you know, those late night conversations, sometimes they're about work, sometimes they're about life. When you're a social psychologist, those conversations kind of blend together. I also knew her partner quite well. You know, the graduate school was at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, which is a pretty small college town.
And so you end up running into the same people when you go to restaurants there. You see each other And so at this stage in our lives, we were quite, quite close indeed.
Toward the end of grad school, Jen and her partner got married. It was a small wedding, just close friends and family.
I mean, I think the thing that's amazing about weddings in particular is that you have all of these people from these different parts of your life come together. And it's just so nice to see how much everybody cares for each other and how happy they are that these two people found each other and decided to try to make this work.
And so it is a thrilling experience, I think, to be a part of those festivities.
Amit finished his dissertation. Grad school ended. The long, late-night conversations between friends turned into busy careers and family demands. Amit began working as a professor in Texas. Over time, he and Jen lost touch. On and off, Amit would hear news about his friend via mutual acquaintances and via social media. The news he heard was not happy.
I had learned that she had recently gotten separated from her partner. She was about to go through divorce. They had actually recently had a child as well. So I didn't know that they were having any trouble with their relationship. I learned this through a mutual friend.
And so it was one of those situations where I kind of was a third party that knew what was going on in her life, but hadn't heard it from her myself.
And I guess at this point, you're someone who this is a friend you were close to in grad school. You obviously went to the wedding. You felt happy to be there. You felt happy for the couple. You heard about this unfortunate news about the relationship not working out. But but you've also sort of fallen out of touch.
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Chapter 5: What role does feeling seen play in our emotional wellbeing?
really matters to them, what makes them feel positive in these ways, they'll tell you that it's these expressions of warmth that happen on a day-to-day basis and the types of interactions we could have all the time. And yet, I think if you were to ask the people that
love those participants, the potential compliment givers or gratitude expressors or performers of acts of kindness, they might think that they're doing something relatively inconsequential as opposed to one of the most important things that they could do for another person.
Amit says the different lenses employed by gift givers and gift recipients to evaluate the value of an act of kindness leads to what he calls the pro-sociality paradox.
I think the paradox is really that these are actions that tend to feel good for both the people doing them and the people on the receiving end. And yet, even though it feels good, it's seen as good, it's perceived to be good, we are reluctant to behave in these ways that in everyday life will leave us feeling happier.
The pro-sociality paradox doesn't just lead kind people to withhold that kindness. It also keeps people from asking for kindness. In a study by Nick Epley and Shu-An Zhao, visitors at a botanical garden were encouraged to ask others to take a photo of them. The visitors were then asked to guess whether the strangers being asked to take the photos would feel happy or inconvenienced by the request.
So there's a beautiful scene in this conservatory, essentially, with these lush plants, this lush foliage around. And so when you ask people how inconvenienced would somebody feel if you asked them to take a picture for you, how positive would they feel as a result of offering this helpful for you. They think that people are going to feel more inconvenience than they actually feel.
And in fact, they don't realize how positive the other person will feel as a result of sort of helping you out. People are generally, they tend to be delighted to offer a helping hand. It doesn't take very much effort. It's an easy opportunity to do something nice for somebody else. And people are happy to do this, but we don't always recognize that.
And in some ways, isn't this partly connected to the idea that we find it really difficult to put ourselves in other people's shoes? So we're seeing the world so often through our own perspective that we fail to see that somebody else could see it quite differently.
Yeah, we have these egocentric biases. This is sort of the scientific term for these perspective-based asymmetries where we're thinking about things from our perspective. But in these contexts, these are interpersonal exchanges. They involve other people. And so it really matters what's going on in the mind of another person, what their perspective is.
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Chapter 6: How can we foster a sense of mattering in our relationships?
Amit focused on the warmth of the act of kindness. His colleague focused on how much effort it took her to water the plants.
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? So when we're a potential performer of an act of kindness, our perspective just tends to focus less on warmth than targets do when we're considering our own behavior.
It seems like a plant watering a plant to a performer, but it's actually somebody doing something nice for me when you're a recipient.
In recent years, Amit and his colleagues have started to ask how they can help people overcome the pro-sociality paradox. One experiment conducted with Nick Epley at the University of Chicago points in a useful direction.
So it turns out that these acts are pretty easy. They don't necessarily involve lots of effort. They're the types of things that you can do in just a matter of minutes. Folks have been making the case for about two decades now that expressing gratitude improves well-being. And yet again, we don't necessarily walk around in our daily lives giving thanks to people all that often.
And that makes a scientist curious as to, well, why don't we? And so one of the ways that we investigated this was by having participants write a gratitude letter to somebody else who had impacted them in some way. And we again had those participants make predictions about how their recipient would feel as a result of their letter.
And what we found when recipients told us how they really felt, and we kind of compare those responses to expectations, was that Senders significantly underestimated how surprised recipients would be about why they were grateful. They overestimated how awkward or uncomfortable recipients would feel.
And they didn't realize just how positive it would feel to be on the receiving end of one of these letters.
I understand that you use a similar exercise when you teach. What do you ask your students to do?
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Chapter 7: What are the psychological benefits of expressing gratitude?
As we've heard in today's episode, small acts of kindness often have an outsized impact on us. That's partly because they show that another person has seen us. A listener named Jessica recently called in with a story about one such act of kindness. About a decade ago, Jessica was struggling with loneliness and depression. She felt like she was lost in an abyss.
I remember just thinking, the people who I am around, they're just constantly disappointed by me. They're constantly telling me all the things that I just can't get right. And it had been building up so much that the burden was much too heavy.
One day, a group of co-workers gathered around her.
I just remember them saying, like, what's going on with you? What's going on with you? Like, something's really wrong now. And I just remember being like, nothing, everything's okay. What are you talking about? And then... It was about six of them that just stood around me and said, what's wrong with you? We see that something's going on. Don't lie. And we see you.
And I remember thinking, like, what do you mean? You see me? And they're like, yeah, we see you. We know that you're lying. We know that something's wrong. We see you.
Jessica had felt dismissed by her friends and family. But now, these co-workers were sending her a different message.
And for that, I am very grateful. And because of them I'm still alive today, and for the rest of my eternity here on Earth, we'll be grateful to those individuals for doing that to me.
There are some things we all need in life. Food, water, shelter. We also have a need that's harder to define, but is vital to our survival. We need to feel like we matter. When we come back, stories about the importance of feeling seen and heard. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Humans are social creatures.
We want to feel like we belong. But we also crave something even deeper. We want to feel like we matter. The psychologist Gordon Flett is the author of The Psychology of Mattering, Understanding the Human Need to be Significant. He recently joined us for an episode titled, Do You Feel Invisible? Today, he responds to your questions and comments about the importance of feeling seen.
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Chapter 8: How can we balance the need to matter with maintaining healthy boundaries?
And then, you know, just a little bit of appreciation or thoughtfulness can go an incredibly long way. I heard another story recently of a family member who returned to a job after being off and leave for a bit of time. And the workplace had lost track of him and forgot that he actually was coming back that day. And he was there on two days online for it was online work.
And it was like he was a total ghost. And all it takes is a little bit of thoughtfulness where people are thinking at the top and, you know, management level, who's where and who's coming back. And for those who are wondering, well, do we have time for this?
Well, you have to think about the time that you would need to find somebody to replace these people, because inevitably that hurt feeling can translate into health and mental health issues that result in needing to find someone else for these roles. So. You know, there's a lot to unpack there in terms of what David told us.
But the key takeaway I'd like people to focus on is that he got back to a more hopeful approach by doing things that could make a difference for others and from a perspective that others could relate to. And we do have to remember that people who are in these vital roles in society can find ways through
not getting the kinds of interaction or the acknowledgement or the recognition they deserve to end up feeling like they don't matter at all and then thinking some very dark thoughts.
You've said that we need to be especially sensitive to feelings of mattering when we or others are going through significant life transitions, such as retirement. Talk about this idea, Gord. Why is it these transitions affect us so deeply?
When we have a transition, we get very uncertain about ourselves. Some of these transitions include being away from those people who we're close to, who usually provide us our daily sense of mattering.
But I've found that if people are able to develop a sense of what I call the deep mattering, where it's not conditional on anything, it's just you being you and you matter to people, that that will carry forward and help you in these situations. Some of it is when you're in a new situation, you're faced with all kinds of different feelings and senses of arousal.
And the people with a feeling of mattering have a capacity to manage their emotions and to calm down and to keep faith in themselves and in their surroundings and in their extended social network that they'll be able to get through and be able to deal with most of the transitions. Unfortunately, of course, there are the transitions where we actually have lost someone.
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