A Secret Source of Connection

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam:

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.

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 reexamined 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.

Gary Knight:

My name's Gary Knight. I'm the CEO of the VII Foundation, which is a media nonprofit. I'm also a very keen amateur cyclist.

Shankar Vedantam:

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 VII.

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.

Gary Knight:

The thing that we're looking for the most are really steep climbs, incredible views, and sort of mythological rides.

Shankar Vedantam:

On his most recent trip before our meeting, Gary and his friends decided to go biking in the west of Scotland.

Gary Knight:

We got up very early, drove for an hour to this climb called Bealach na Bà, which is an old cattle road that goes over a mountain. It's one of the steepest roads in the British Isles, reaches about 20% on a bike, and it's a single-track road, so that means that there's really only room for one car and a bicycle, or perhaps a motorcycle. My friends usually climb on their bikes a lot faster than I do, because I'm a lot heavier than they are, but I descend much faster, because I'm a lot heavier than they are, and I have a lot of confidence on the bike. So, after this torturous climb, which I think took about an hour-and-a-half, we descended down into this little town where we had a coffee and something to eat.

And I remember passing this sort of group of motorcyclists on the way down this road. They waved at us, we waved at them. They were pretty much doing the same trip we were, except on bikes.

Shankar Vedantam:

Soon, it was time for the next section.

Gary Knight:

We set off again up a gentle climb, and then another really steep descent. And I was quite far ahead of my friends. I remember I was doing 55 kilometers an hour, which I think is about 32, 34 miles per hour going down this road. And I could see quite far ahead there was a bend in the road, and a bridge on the bend, and there were two Volkswagen camper vans coming quite fast in the opposite direction.

And as we got closer to each other, I lost sight of the white camper van, it was so close to the black one, but when I came around this corner, it appeared, and it was on my side of the road. And traveling at that speed, I had nowhere to go. There was no room on the road. I had to come off the road.

I went over a concrete ledge and then went airborne and hit a huge lump of granite with my shoulder and my head, and I saw it coming towards me, and it was inevitable what was going to happen. I had the impact and it was incredibly painful, and the bike sort of skidded off ahead of me, and I came to a real halt, but the van ... both vans drove off up the mountain. And I have no doubt that both drivers would have seen me, that it's impossible ... unless they're on their phones ... that they wouldn't.

Shankar Vedantam:

Gary landed at the bottom of a ditch. He didn't black out, but he felt fuzzy-headed. The one thing he was grateful for was that his friends were coming down the mountain behind him. They would come to the same bend and stop to help.

Gary Knight:

But my friends who were riding behind me, who had lost sight of me, rode straight by. I could hear them riding by. I was quite distraught. I called out, I think, to them a little bit, but feebly, and they'd gone and they left, and so I picked up my phone to call them to ask them to come back, but I had no reception, so I couldn't reach them.

Shankar Vedantam:

Gary knew he was in trouble. He guessed his friends would eventually figure out he was not in front of them and turn back, but how long would that be? 20 minutes? An hour? And once they turned back, how would they know to come to this particular spot?

Gary Knight:

I was in, really, the middle of nowhere. I lifted up my bike, tried to get back on the bike, but realized I could move my shoulder.

Shankar Vedantam:

Slowly, painfully, Gary pulled himself and his bike back to the edge of the road.

Gary Knight:

At that point, I was standing on the side of the road with a ripped shirt, and clearly not quite right, and a number of vehicles passed me, and nobody stopped. People looked, but nobody stopped.

Shankar Vedantam:

Would you have stopped? You're driving on a remote mountain road in the west of Scotland and you see a man with a ripped shirt by the side of the road.

But after some time, someone did stop.

Gary Knight:

Three motorcycles came down the road, and these were the motorcyclists that I had passed earlier in the day, and we'd been waving to each other. The first two sort of looked at me and went by, and started to slow down, and the third one put his thumb up and down at me as if ... and he was asking me the question, "Are you okay?"

Shankar Vedantam:

Gary indicated he needed help.

Gary Knight:

And so he stopped his motorbike and he asked me what had happened, and then said, "Look, sit down, and we're going to check you out." And he explains ... His name is Martin, and 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 had just the week before finished all of their training. And so they check me out, check my head, did all the tests to see if I had a concussion. They then took out bandages, strapped me up, immobilized my arm. I mean, I couldn't have wished for more.

Shankar Vedantam:

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.

Gary Knight:

They were so incredibly generous. They spent a lot of time with me whilst they were on vacation. 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 just talking about them makes me very emotional. Sorry. It's ironic, because I've had a very traumatic and violent career. You know, I photographed wars for 20 years, and the 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 stop at the side of the road and take care of me was remarkable, actually, and an incredible act of kindness. I hope I have the opportunity to do the same thing for somebody else one day.

Shankar Vedantam:

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.

Amit Kumar:

We used to spend a lot of time together, and 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 a lot, and so at this stage in our lives we were quite close indeed.

Shankar Vedantam:

Toward the end of grad school, Jen and her partner got married. It was a small wedding; just close friends and family.

Amit Kumar:

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. So, it is a thrilling experience, I think, to be a part of those festivities.

Shankar Vedantam:

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 through mutual acquaintances and via social media. The news he heard was not happy.

Amit Kumar:

I had learned that she had recently gotten separated from her partner, she was about to go through a 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 I hadn't heard it from her myself.

Shankar Vedantam:

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 their relationship not working out, but you've also sort of fallen out of touch. I'm imagining it must have been difficult to pick up the phone at that point and just call her, right? Because it's not like you were friends anymore.

Amit Kumar:

Well, when I found out was actually particularly interesting, I think. This was actually during a period of the pandemic ... Maybe other people have experienced this. I felt that it had been a little too long since I had seen my family. I wasn't yet comfortable getting on an airplane though, and so I cautiously kind of decided that it would be worth it to drive from where I live in Austin, Texas to where I grew up, where my parents are in New Jersey, in order to see them.

But, this travel did have me passing through several cities that I might not otherwise visit, and in fact I was aware of the fact that this old friend of mine from grad school, Jen, happened to be living in one such city that was near the route that I was on.

Shankar Vedantam:

Amit considered stopping to pay Jen a visit, but then he asked himself what he would say.

Amit Kumar:

I hadn't talked to her myself in years. She didn't know that I would be driving through. I didn't give her advance notice. I thought maybe that's not very courteous to just show up and tell someone you're around. I also thought about, of course, 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?

Shankar Vedantam:

Amit did what many of us might do in such a situation; he drove through Jen's town and didn't reach out.

As a psychologist, the incident got him thinking. Someone who didn't know him well might've concluded he was callous in not reaching out to a friend going through tough times. But Amit didn't feel callous. He wanted to reach out to Jen, but didn't know how she would react. Amit didn't lack for kindness, he lacked for confidence.

"How often," he asked himself, now wearing his psychologist hat, "does this happen in everyday life, where people fail to extend help, not because they are unable or unwilling to help, but because they feel they might not be able to do the right thing?"

In time, the question bloomed into a full-blown research project. Amit quickly came by lots of examples of other people who found themselves in similar situations. The author George Saunders describes an incident that took place when he was in the seventh grade. A new kid had just arrived at his school.

George Saunders:

Ellen was small, shy. She wore these blue cat's eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it, which didn't help her popularity at all.

Shankar Vedantam:

At a commencement address at Syracuse University, George Saunders described how most kids ignored Ellen. When they did pay attention to her, it was often to mock her.

George Saunders:

"Your hair taste good?" That sort of thing. I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she'd look after such an insult; eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying as much as possible to disappear.

Shankar Vedantam:

George Saunders didn't bully Ellen himself. He also didn't try to stop the bullies.

George Saunders:

And then they moved. One day she was there, the next day she wasn't. End of story. Now, why do I regret that? Why, 42 years later, am I still thinking about her? Relative to most of the kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even mildly defended her. But still, it bothers me.

So, here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it. What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Shankar Vedantam:

Failures of kindness. We often think that people who fail to act kindly are unkind people, but the more Amit studied the phenomenon, the more he saw the truth was much sadder than that. There is, in fact, a plentiful supply of kindness in the world, and there is lots of demand for that kindness, but there is a quirk in our minds that keeps us from closing the loop and actually showing kindness when it's needed.

Amit Kumar:

I think the language that economists use can actually be somewhere helpful here, even though we're talking about these everyday interactions where one could be kind to another person. Economists talk about things like expected utility. 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. 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.

Shankar Vedantam:

Think about the thoughts that ran through Amit's head as he drove through the town of his old friend. He worried that reaching out unexpectedly might seem rude. He worried that he wouldn't know exactly what to say. He worried that she would ask him how he had found out she was going through a divorce and he wouldn't know how to respond. Notice that none of these motivators involve Amit not wanting to help his friend.

Amit Kumar:

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.

Shankar Vedantam:

In a series of experiments, Amit has shown that givers and recipients of kindness use completely different lenses to evaluate a kind deed. Givers worry a lot about whether they are being competent. Recipients care much more about something else.

In one experiment, Amit and his colleagues approached strangers at a skating rink and asked them to give away hot cocoa to someone nearby.

Amit Kumar:

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. You're giving to another person this delicious hot chocolate. You're expecting nothing in return. And after performing this act, what we did is we had these participants kind of report their own feelings and predict their recipient's experience, and we then got readings ... We asked the recipients of this act of kindness to tell us how they actually felt.

And when we followed up with these recipients, what became clear is that performers tend to underestimate the value of their kindness. As it turns out, both performers and recipients were in significantly better moods than normal after this exchange, after giving a hot chocolate to a stranger, and in fact recipients of that act of kindness felt significantly better than performers of that act anticipated.

Shankar Vedantam:

The people who gave away the hot chocolate obviously expected that recipients would appreciate the beverage, but they underestimated just how much recipients would appreciate it. Givers focused mostly on the worth of a hot chocolate on a cold winter's day. Recipients loved not only the hot chocolate, but the idea that a stranger had suddenly done something nice for them.

Of course, in this initial experiment, it was hard to disentangle people's enjoyment of the hot chocolate from their appreciation of an act of kindness, so Amit ran a follow-up study.

Amit Kumar:

We returned to the same public park ... Contrary to popular belief, it eventually gets warm in Chicago, and so the skating rink had melted because the seasons had changed, so we had participants giving cupcakes away to a stranger, but we had these cupcakes given to participants in our study in a couple of different ways. In one case, participants again sort of gave a cupcake away to somebody else as an act of kindness, but in another case we had sort of what you might think of as a control condition in which no act of kindness was performed, but people still received a cupcake. So, in this other case, recipients are simply getting a cupcake for participating in the experiment rather than from another person as a random act of kindness. So, one of these cases includes the warmth associated with a kind exchange; the other also has somebody receiving a cupcake, but without getting it from somebody else.

So, what we do, again, is we compare expected versus actual experiences in these two cases. And what we found was that people again underestimated how positive recipients would feel after this act of kindness when they had given the cupcake to somebody else.

Shankar Vedantam:

Givers tend to focus on the specific help they are giving, whether that's a phone call to someone in need or a cupcake to a stranger in a park. They evaluate the success of their acts of kindness using a lens of competence. This is why they ask themselves, "Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right thing?" Recipients focus less on whether the gift is perfect. They care more about the warmth that comes with an act of kindness. Think about what Gary Knight said about the three Polish travelers who stopped to help him. Yes, he was grateful they had some medical expertise, but in a moment when he felt all alone, the fact other human beings had stopped to help him meant the world to him.

Amit Kumar:

What we're kind of missing out on is this understanding of the additional warmth that comes from being on the receiving end of one of these acts. We get that people like cupcakes, but it turns out that getting a cupcake as a result of an act of kindness can be surprisingly good.

Shankar Vedantam:

Amit, it turns out that we make something of the same error when it comes to people in our own lives, not just strangers. There was a study led by Zita Oravecz and Chelsea Muth at Penn State some years ago that asked people what made them feel most loved. What did they find, Amit?

Amit Kumar:

Yeah, what they found was that the sort of daily acts of kindness, the expressions of appreciation, even simple compliments, those are the types of things that people say make them feel most loved by those that are closest to them in their lives. I think what's interesting about that research, though, is that it focuses on the recipient's perspective, so if you're asking people about what 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.

Shankar Vedantam:

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 Prosociality Paradox.

Amit Kumar:

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.

Shankar Vedantam:

The Prosociality Paradox doesn't just lead kind people to withhold their kindness; it also keeps people from asking for kindness. In a study by Nick Epley and Xuan Zhou, 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.

Amit Kumar:

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 help for you, they think that people are going to feel more inconvenienced 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.

Shankar Vedantam:

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.

Amit Kumar:

Yeah. We have these egocentric biases, 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. I'm not the first person to suggest that being kind to other people improves well-being, and yet we have tons of opportunities to be kind to other people that we don't take advantage of, and I think it's interesting to think about why we don't act in ways that are likely to make us feel better.

And one of the explanations for why we sometimes choose not to do those things that are going to make both us and someone else feel better is that we don't fully understand the magnitude of the impact that we're having on another person. Recipients feel, they say things like, "A little good goes a long way"; what we find in our research is that it actually goes even further than people expect that it will. We underestimate how much value these acts will have on the people that we're kind to.

Shankar Vedantam:

There is one last dimension to the Prosociality Paradox. It's not only the case that we underestimate how much people will appreciate our acts of kindness, it's not only that we underestimate how willing others are to help us; we fail to foresee the downstream effects of being kind.

News Anchor:

USA Today and the Tampa Bay Times both report a woman at the drive-thru paid for her coffee at the Starbucks on Tyrone Boulevard around 7:00 a.m. yesterday. She also paid for the driver behind her, who in turn paid for the next customer, and so on, and so on. In all, 378 people decided to pay it forward. Employees say the 379th person who broke the chain was confused about how it all worked.

Shankar Vedantam:

Amit and his team have run experiments to test if kindness is really contagious. They have brought people into a lab and given them a small gift, like a chocolate bar or a box of gourmet tea.

Amit Kumar:

We had recipients of that act of kindness kind of play one of these economic games that are used to explore what are sometimes called pay-it-forward effects. So, participants are assigned the role ... They're told that they're sort of the decider. They're asked to allocate some money between themselves and another person. This is someone that they'd never meet. And so, everybody that received an item ... in this case, again, it was either from the experimenter for their participation, or as a result of their act of kindness. They're assigned to be this decider. There's real money on the line. These are consequential choices.

And what we found was that those who had just been on the receiving end of an act of kindness gave substantially more to this anonymous person in this subsequent game, so this other person was now being kind to someone else, basically because someone had been kind to them for someone else.

Shankar Vedantam:

The downstream effects, in some ways, of being kind.

Amit Kumar:

Yeah, you can think of this as a potential virtuous cycle of sort of giving to other people, but we don't always realize that we have the capacity to create cycles like that.

Shankar Vedantam:

Our actions can have surprising ripple effects on the world, but first, we have to work up the courage to overcome our own feelings of awkwardness. For his part, Amit eventually did reach out to Jen, his grad school friend. It was a lot less awkward than he had feared.

Amit Kumar:

I wish the story was I reflected on how I behaved, and I changed my behavior right away and called her up on the phone, but we ended up ... There was some shared memory, essentially, that led to us having a little bit of a text exchange. We ended up talking to each other as a result of that, and from that conversation, I knew that it would've been great if we had talked to each other. When you're close to someone, those feelings of closeness come back pretty quickly in reality, but sometimes it's hard to realize that when you're thinking about the prospect of reconnecting with somebody else.

Shankar Vedantam:

We all have moments in our lives when we see an opportunity to step in, but don't. Maybe an elderly stranger needs some help at the grocery store, or a friend in trouble could benefit from a phone call. Rather than doing something, even if it's small, many of us hold back. We worry we will be awkward, or that our kindness will be misconstrued. Yet, when we are on the receiving end of small kindnesses, we are often moved to tears. This paradox plays out every day, robbing us of opportunities to offer kindness, and opportunities to receive it.

When we come back, how to fight the Prosociality Paradox. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Like many people, psychologist Amit Kumar had trepidations about returning to the office after spending months away during the COVID pandemic.

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, 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 it ... 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.

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.

Shankar Vedantam:

It's those different lenses again. Amit focused on the warmth of the act of kindness; his colleague focused on how much effort it took her to water the plants.

Amit Kumar:

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? 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 watering a plant to a performer, but it's actually somebody doing something nice for me when you're a recipient.

Shankar Vedantam:

In recent years, Amit and his colleagues have started to ask how they can help people overcome the Prosociality Paradox. One experiment conducted with Nick Epley at the University of Chicago points in a useful direction.

Amit Kumar:

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 wellbeing, 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.

Shankar Vedantam:

I understand that you use a similar exercise when you teach. What do you ask your students to do?

Amit Kumar:

Yeah, so, it's essentially participating in this experiment. They write a letter to somebody else, they make a prediction about how that person will feel, we contact their recipients, we find out how they really feel, and I kind of show the data to the students in my class. I think what's powerful for the students is that they learn that they exhibit the same effects that have been found in published research, so we've replicated these results kind of time and time again. I suspect that it's useful, or this research might be more meaningful, it might potentially have a bigger impact on one's own life if you kind of participate directly, if you experience it yourself rather than just kind of hearing about the results from experiments you didn't participate in.

Shankar Vedantam:

Professors at other universities have adopted Amit's letter-writing exercise. He sometimes hears stories about how it's impacted students. One story stands out to him. An international student studying at a Canadian university decided to write a letter to his mother.

Amit Kumar:

Thanked her for everything that she had done for him, and at the end of his letter, he wrote the words 'I love you', and he realized that he had never said that to his mom before, and his mother's response started with four words back: "I love you too." Imagine sort of hearing that from your mom after the first time that you told her that. That's a particularly powerful example, of course, but it's actually not an unusual reaction. We've done this with lots and lots of participants at this point, and I've had participants in our studies and in my class kind of write to me telling me that they were ecstatic, that they were bubbling over with joy after receiving a letter of appreciation. That's not the usual type of comment that a researcher gets in the open-ended feedback when they're asking someone to complete a questionnaire.

Shankar Vedantam:

So, after studying this phenomenon for many years, Amit, I understand that there are things that you have done in your own life to make it easier and more automatic for you to reach out a helping hand. Tell me about those things. What do you do?

Amit Kumar:

I'd say that I probably have started expressing gratitude more often in my day-to-day life as a result of conducting this research, so all of this work is just an attempt to get a better understanding of our everyday lives and how they might be improved, and so what makes us more likely to express gratitude? Well, we know that people are more likely to do something if it's kind of top of mind, if we can think about a clear way to get it done, and so one thing that I do is I just have cards on hand that's an easy reminder to me ... More than the stationery itself, it's just, "Oh, yeah, I could express gratitude to somebody else. Why not go ahead and do it?" The research, of course, suggests that people are more impacted by these expressions than we expect.

Shankar Vedantam:

Some time ago, Amit found himself at an airport with an opportunity to practice the ideas that he preaches.

Amit Kumar:

So, I was waiting at the gate. I happened to be sitting next to a woman who was clearly getting frustrated with something on her phone. She tried asking a couple of folks nearby for help in Spanish, without much luck, and so in doing so I kind of learned that she didn't really speak English. I guess an aside, mind you, the last time I took a Spanish class was in 11th grade, so I'm probably always ... Listeners can't see the gray in my beard on a podcast, but that was a while ago, and so I'm probably always speaking in the present tense, not really communicating effectively. So, this is a case where I think concerns about competence really loomed large here. I have very little confidence in my ability to effectively communicate in Spanish, but nevertheless, in sort of knowing my own research, I thought I'd just try to help her as best I could.

And so, in my broken Spanish, I kind of pieced together that she was traveling to the US for the first time. She was trying to get in touch with her brother to pick her up when she landed, and she needed to connect to the wifi in order to sort of talk to him on WhatsApp. She had an international phone. Connecting to the free airport wifi required kind of filling out one of those standard forms with your email address and your ZIP code; things that some people are very accustomed to doing, but others might not be. I guess I'll mention that I have no clue how to say 'ZIP code' in any other language besides English.

And so, after a few failed attempts at explaining what she needed to do, she just kind of handed me her phone. I ended up filling out the form with my own personal contact information to get her connected, and we ... It was a kind of broken conversation, but I pieced together she was kind of telling me how nervous she was traveling. She made it clear how appreciative she was of my help, kind of allowing her to interact with her brother. I don't know if I would've done that if I wasn't studying topics like these in my research. It's kind of easy to stay reserved. "Maybe someone else will help. I don't want to get involved." Those are the thoughts that sometimes enter our minds, but this is something that obviously left her feeling positive, and it actually made me feel really good, too. So, those, I think, are exactly the kinds of actions that perhaps all of us should be engaging in a bit more often.

Shankar Vedantam:

Amit Kumar works at the University of Texas at Austin. Amit, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Amit Kumar:

Thanks so much for having me.

Shankar Vedantam:

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigid McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

For today's unsung hero, we turn the mic over to you, our listeners. It's a story from our show My Unsung Hero. Today's story comes from Julie Cadwallader Staub. In 2003, Julie's husband Warren died of cancer at just 49. Not long after, she decided to go visit a friend in Boston.

Julie Cadwallader Staub:

I had driven to Boston many times for my husband's chemo treatment at Dana-Farber, so I had plenty of false confidence about being able to make the trip. Mind you, this was in the days before GPS and cell phones were ubiquitous, and I had neither. Also keep in mind, which I did not, that my husband had always been with me on these previous trips, and unlike me, had an impeccable sense of direction. But, needless to say, he was not with me on this trip.

I arrived there fine. My friend had given me good directions, and I figured I would just do the reverse in order to get back home. After her ceremony, I walked back to my car and found that the parking lot exited onto a one-way street. "No problem," I thought. "I'll just take this road, and then take the first left, and then another left, and I'll be heading back out of the city."

So, I did that, and it took me deeper into Boston. "No problem," I thought, "I'll stop and ask directions." I did. I followed those directions. I became seriously lost. I had absolutely no idea where I was. By now, I was fighting panic. I finally found a neighborhood gas station. I was in a rundown part of Boston, but I pulled in. By this time, my hands were shaking, and I was just plain scared. I pulled up to the pump and asked the attendant ... Yes, there were attendants ... "How do I get back onto 93, or the Everett Parkway, or anything that would head me back north to Vermont?"

He looked at me blankly, shook his head kindly, and said just a few words in Spanish that meant, "I don't speak English." I was stuck. No map, no idea which way to go. I was panicking. I couldn't think straight. I couldn't even think at all.

Then the unsung hero was the woman at the next pump. She turned to me and said, "Listen, it's way too complicated. Just follow me and I'll take you there." And I followed her, and she did. And the last thing I saw was her hand out the car window, waving to me and pointing to the highway sign. I was waving, too, thanking her with every ounce of my being as I zipped off onto the highway and heading towards home.

So, to my unsung hero, I have not forgotten your kindness over all these years, and I'm so happy to send this out to you. I hope that you get to hear it.

Shankar Vedantam:

Julie Cadwallader Staub of Burlington, Vermont. If you would like to help us build more stories like this, please act now. Visit support.hiddenbrain.org and join the hundreds of other Hidden Brain listeners who have signed up to help. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.