September 20, 2021 • 32 mins
When Kitty Genovese was murdered, her family and the wider world was told that bystanders watched, but did nothing to intervene. Psychologists tried to explain this callous inaction with a popular theory - the "bystander effect".
Dr Laurie Santos was taught this theory - that most people won't in step help - but talking to Kitty's brother and Lady Gaga's mother she reveals that the "bystander effect" is wrong. People do like helping out, and we get a happiness boost from being kind. So how do we encourage more bystanders to intervene?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. On the morning of March thirteenth, nineteen sixty four,
a murder took place in Queens, New York that shook
the entire country. The crime itself was awful, but the
behavior of bystanders who witnessed the event caused widespread revulsion
in years of national soul searching. The incident became the
(00:39):
impetus for setting up the nine one one emergency call
system that we have today and transformed the path of
psychological research for decades to come. I first heard the
story when I took Intro psych as a college freshman
back in the nineties. I dug out my old textbook
to see how it was described here. It is on
page five forty four of Peter Grey's Psychology, second Edition.
(01:01):
In a normally quiet neighborhood in New York City, a
young woman named Kitty Genevec was brutally attacked for a
period of thirty minutes outside her apartment building. Her screams
drew the attention of at least thirty eight people who
watched through their apartment windows while she was repeatedly stabbed
and finally murdered. Not one of the bystanders came to
her aid or even called the police. The incident stirred
(01:25):
a national outcry, have we become so inured to horror
that we simply watch it without lifting a finger? More
than twenty five years on, I still remember how shocked
I was by that paragraph. Several dozen people stood there
and watched kitty scream. How could so many people witness
something so awful and just do nothing. At the time,
(01:47):
psychologists were still trying to make sense of the horrors
of World War Two, and they began to think that
awful incidents weren't just the result of a small number
of uncaring people, but might instead reflect a wider and
more sinister aspect of human nature. Social psychologist John Darley
and bib Latine decided to test that out In a
now famous nineteen sixty eight study. They created an experimental emergency.
(02:11):
They brought college students into the lab, put them inside
a room all by themselves, and hooked them up to
a headphone intercom system. An experimenter explained that the subject
would be taking part in a conversation about college life
with either one, two, or five other anonymous subjects, all
of whom were in different rooms. The experimenter then took
off and the discussion began. But soon into the conversation,
(02:34):
one of the participants began having a very real sounding emergency.
He started convulsing and screaming incoherently, saying things like I'm
having a real problem right now, I'm going to die,
help seizure. Even though the emergency was staged, the subjects
(02:56):
believed that the stranger was in real trouble. The scientists
reported that many of the participants gasped into the microphone,
My god, what should I do? But Latine and Darley
wanted to see if the subjects responded by actively trying
to help, specifically leaving the room to alert the experimenter
or to look for the stranger who was in distress.
When subjects thought that they were the only ones to
(03:17):
hear the strangers fit, eighty five percent of them took action,
and they tended to do so quickly, often in less
than a minute. That's the good news, But the bad
news is that this helping behavior drops significantly when the
subjects were told that other people were also on the call.
In fact, less than a third of subjects made any
move to help when they thought that more than one
(03:39):
other person was listening. In I've known about these findings
since I was in undergrad, but I still find them
so shocking. Nearly seventy percent of subjects in that condition
heard someone crying out for help while having a potentially
deadly seizure, and they did nothing. This study and others
(04:00):
like it demonstrated just how easy it is to be
apathetic in the face of other people's pain, which is
pretty bad for our collective happiness. There are lots of
situations in which others need our help, a colleague who's
struggling at work, or a neighbor who's feeling a little lonely,
or a child who's getting bullied, like Kitty Gen and
Visi's neighbors and latin Ae and Darley's subjects. There are
(04:22):
times when we see this and just don't intervene. Maybe
we feel it's not our place or that someone else
will probably do it, But our inaction means that lots
of people around us are left hurt and unhappy because
even though we all know someone should probably do something,
nobody does. But our inaction also poses a second problem
(04:43):
for our collective happiness. The science shows that you and
I would personally be happier if we did something to
help people in need. Study after study shows that when
we do nice stuff for other people, we get a
happiness boost. Give directions to a lost stranger, you feel happier.
Comfort someone who's upset, you feel happier. Take care of
an injured person, you feel happier. But latin Ae and
(05:05):
Darley's work shows that there are lots of situations in
which we don't step in, especially when it seems like
the people around us aren't doing anything to help either.
Kitty Genevici's story and the research that followed has always
made me really disappointed in human nature, But new research
suggests that her notorious story of collective apathy may not
(05:26):
be as clear cut as the textbooks claim, which raises
an important question. Have we've been given an incorrect picture
of human nature, one that's making us less happy since
we don't help whenever the opportunity arises. Our minds are
constantly telling us what's you to be happy? But what
(05:47):
if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are
lying to us, leading us away from what will really
make us happy. The good news is that understanding the
science of the mind can point us all back in
the right direction. You're listening to the Happiest Lab with
doctor Laurie Sanders. We had a snow day the day
(06:11):
of Kennedy's inauguration, so we're all sitting at home watching nut.
This is Bill GENEVEECI. I remember sitting in front of
it and being mesmerized because, you know, as a kid
growing up, all these old guys were presidents. Now all
of a sudden we had this young, healthy guy making
this statement. Ask, not what your country can do for you,
(06:32):
ask what you could do for your country. That speech
resonated with Bill. He's always had a deep sense of
duty towards his fellow man. He didn't ever want to
be the sort of person who stands by and doesn't help.
When Bill graduated from high school, his classmates were busy
(06:52):
finding ways to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War.
But not Bill. People who know me go, well, you
got drafted right, No, No, I volunteered you did? I mean,
how could you be so stupid? As a marine in combat?
Bill quickly developed a reputation for helping anyone in need,
no matter who it was or what the risk level,
(07:12):
Like the time he heard of an elderly Vietnamese man
who was hurt inside a dirty cave. I said, well,
how's he doing? I don't know. We're afraid to go
in there because it's probably booby trap, So me, of
course I'm going to go in there. Another time, he
rescued a woman who had been impaled on a spiked
booby trap and helped carry her to a chopper in
(07:33):
order to get her to a hospital. Despite heavy enemy fire.
The helicopters always drew fire, and as we were putting
around the helicopter, you could see the holes forming a helicopter.
You might be wondering, why didn't Bill think twice before
repeatedly putting his own life in danger to come to
the aid of perfect strangers. I've grown up with this
(07:54):
whole philosophy, this whole thing. When it's your time, you
step up and them. With my sister's experience, it was
like visceral. It's like people didn't step up, and look
what that did. As might have guessed from the last name,
Kitty Genovesi, the young woman murdered in Queen's was related
to Bill. Kitty was Bill's older sister. Bill was only
(08:18):
sixteen years old when she was murdered. It's six o'clock
in the morning. I'm in bed and I hear something
going on at the front door. A policeman came to
the Genovesi house. It took a while for Bill to
fully comprehend why the cop was there. When he heard
his mother getting upset, he assumed Kitty had just gotten sick, oh, pendix,
or maybe she broke a leg or fractured her finger.
(08:39):
You know. So it was a while before it registered,
like what. It was just shocking. It wasn't the world
I came from. Learning that his sister had been stabbed
to death was crushing, But Bill experienced another devastating blow
when he read about the attack in the New York Times.
The article read for more than an hour, thirty eight respectable,
(09:01):
law abiding citizens in Queen's watched a killer stock and
stab a woman in three separate attacks in ke Gardens.
Not one person telephoned the police during the assault. Well,
I was always like, thirty eight people, I'm witnessing this thing.
I mean, you can't believe it. What is it to
pick up the phone. The pain of Kitty's death, plus
the fact that thirty eight otherwise good people allegedly allowed
(09:24):
it to happen was too much for Bill's family. We
all tried to just sort of forget it and put
it away, partially because our job was to defend mom.
Because Mom was in a total meltdown state. She literally,
as they're lowering the coffin, was trying to climb on top.
Soon after the funeral, Bill's mother had a debilitating stroke.
(09:47):
In order to help her heal, the entire Genovesi family
agreed to avoid talking about Kitty's tragedy, but in spite
of decades of silence, Bill's anger at the apathy of
those thirty eight witnesses burned on what could be worse?
I mean, it's just what could be worse than you're thinking, Wow,
I'm in trouble, maybe dying. I'm calling now. I know
(10:09):
people are aware. Light's going on, nobody's doing anything. My
fellow man has deserted me. What Bill didn't know was
that he himself would soon experience the terror that comes
from desperately needing a savior and not knowing if someone
will actually step up to help. One day, on patrol
(10:30):
in Vietnam, Bill spotted a strange bamboo steak stuck in
the mud. He decided to ask a friend what it was.
Does this look right to you? Boom? It was a
bomb and Bill was standing right beside it. You actually
do get thrown into the air and you're flying in
the air, thinking, oh, this is high. When Bill landed,
(10:52):
he tried to move but couldn't. Both of his legs
were badly injured and would later need to be amputated,
but at the time he wasn't even sure he'd get
the help needed to make it out with his life.
A huge firefight broke out between his platoon and the
enemy who'd just blown him up. Amidst the chaos, it
didn't look like anyone was coming to Bill's aid. Okay,
(11:13):
am I just going to be left here? I mean,
I really had a flashback to what I imagined the
scene was like with Kitty. No one's coming to help me. God,
I'm feeling the way she must have felt back then.
And then I'm sort of in this imagined street scene
lying next to my sister. We're like just looking at
each other. And then of course I was bleeding so
(11:36):
much that then I started to lose consciousness. But Bill's
story had a different ending than Kitty's. In spite of
the danger, his fellow Marines didn't leave him to die.
They put their lives on the line and rushed in
to save him. Bill looks back on his time in
Vietnam as painting a very different picture of human nature.
(11:56):
I mean, I was there long enough to see plenty
of brave moves by our guys and the enemy, you know,
to help their compatriots. It made me forget I was
in a war zone. It was like, this is human
to h When we get back from the break, we'll
hear how these experiences caused Bill to question whether Kitty's
neighbors could really have been so callous and apathetic that night,
(12:19):
and whether the textbook story of her murder was really true.
And we'll see that what he learned has big consequences
for the happiness that all of us could be getting
by doing more to help others. The Happiness Lab will
be right back thirty eight eyewitnesses for half an hour
(12:40):
or watching this, how could that be? After his sister's murder,
Bill GENEVESI couldn't stop going over the details, despite the
fact that Kitty's name wasn't even to be said in
the family home. Bill initially believed what the papers reported
the same story that I and so many other students
learn in psych one oh one that thirty eight people
stood by and watched as Kitty was stabbed, and that
(13:03):
no one lifted a finger. But that story simply didn't
jibe with what Bill saw firsthand in Vietnam, that people
are willing to help those around them, and that they
often take great joy from doing so. The mismatch between
Kitty's story and what Bill knew to be true about
human kindness bothered him for decades, and my natural instinct
(13:23):
of question, question, question, question, I got to get the
bottom of this as best I can. After Bill's parents
passed away, he decided to get to the bottom of things.
He teamed up with a film crew to reopen Kitty's case.
Their movie, called The Witness follows Bill tracking down the
bystanders who allegedly saw Kitty get murdered and asking for
their version of the events. It was curious to me
(13:46):
how there were all these discrepancies, But wasn't thirty eight
witnesses watching for thirty minutes. Many of the people told
Bill a very different version of what happened that night.
Some alleged bystanders said that they told police they saw
and heard nothing, and yet they were still listed in
the Times article as one of those thirty eight eyewitnesses.
(14:06):
Others disputed having watched the attack at all. They recalled
hearing some screams, but said they couldn't actually see anything
when they looked out their apartment windows. Another big claim
from my psych text book was that none of the
neighbors called the police during the attack. Many told Bill
that actually they did. Yes, I got on the phone
and called the police. You got on the phone and
(14:28):
you called the police. Yes, of course, And they said, oh,
we already got that call, even though the police logs
from that night didn't reflect it. Bill thinks his interviewees
were telling the truth. The best I can make out
was some people did pick up the phone and the
police weren't being responsive. But the final error in the
New York Times report is one that could have saved
(14:50):
Bill and his family a lot of grief over the years,
the idea that Kitty bled to death all alone. Bill
interviewed one of Kitty's closest friends, Sophia Ferrar, who lived nearby.
Sophia told him that she'd woken up when she heard
someone screaming, but couldn't see anything when she looked out
the window, so she went back to bed. Twenty minutes later,
a neighbor rang to say that Kitty was downstairs in
(15:11):
the hallway hurt, so Sophia rushed to check on her friend.
When Sophia saw Kitty bleeding and badly injured, she stayed
with her and even held her until the ambulances arrived.
It would have been hugely helpful to my parents to
know that a close friend the kitties was there, rather
than she was completely alone from first stab to last breath.
(15:36):
I wasn't the only budding psychologist who was deeply disturbed
to learn about Kitty's story. Boy, it's just heartbreaking. I mean,
surely somebody could have done something to step in and
help her, and I think it contributes to a real
unease and a sense of frustration and dissatisfaction with the
human race. This is Ken Brown of the Tippy College
(15:57):
of Business at the University of Iowa. Ken psych one
on one course taught him the very same story of
bystander apathy as minded and the story never sat well
with him. It just didn't seem to match his real
life experience. Helping behavior happens every day on every street
corner in the world, somebody is doing something else, small
and positive to help other people. So when Ken was
(16:19):
asked to do a TEDx talk, he decided to revisit
Kitty's Awful tale. As he dug into new academic research,
he discovered that Bill wasn't the only one to find
discrepancies in the textbook version of Kitty's story. The psychologist
Rachel Manning and her colleagues published an article in two
thousand and eight which did a deep dive into the
archival research on her murder. Looking back at the original
(16:40):
legal documents and even conversations with local historians, and their
formal investigation found exactly what Bill did. Most people who
were listed as witnesses didn't see anything, and those that
did hear something found ways to try to help. The
paper concluded that there's simply no evidence for the claim
that thirty eight eyewitnesses watched Kitty get murdered and did nothing.
(17:02):
There's certainly a lot more that says that there were
good people trying to help that night, as opposed to
a cruel city that stood silently as Kitty gin Abc
was murdered. But that paper got Ken wondering If Kitty's
story didn't play out like the textbook suggest then what
about the scientific findings that followed after her death. The
(17:24):
original studies were really only studying one particular type of situation,
and that's a very strong situation in which an individual
has been instructed to be passive. Let's think back to
that Latinee and Darley study I told you about earlier.
Unlike the witnesses in Kitty's case, Latinee and Darley's subjects
weren't just passively doing their own thing when a random
(17:45):
emergency happened. The subjects in their study knew they were
taking part in an experiment, and a scary looking experimenter
had just told them to do something very specific. Sit
in this room and put your headphones on. Listen, do
these things. I'll be back in fifteen minutes. Don't leave.
Participants may have really wanted to help that stranger in distress,
(18:06):
but the instructions they were given by the experimenter could
have dissuaded them. They told me not to do anything.
They told me to sit here and do my job.
That pressure was bad enough for subjects who thought they
were the only person hearing the emergency, but subjects who
thought they were listening in with a larger group got
an extra signal that stepping in was the wrong move.
They could hear that none of the other subjects seemed
(18:27):
to be taking action either. Darle In Latina's nineteen sixty
eight study is the one that appears in all the textbooks,
but it wasn't the only experiment to explore the conditions
under which people decide to help. There were a bunch
of less famous studies that tended to give subjects a
bit more independence on how to react. Hey, pay attention
and if there's a problem, let me know. That's an
(18:49):
active instruction. And what they found is when you've been
instructed to be active, you're actually more likely to help
the more people that are present. It turns out that
simply telling subjects it's okay to help completely reverses Latinae
and Darley's original findings. Diffusion of responsibility completely leg goes
out the window as soon as people think it's okay
(19:12):
to do something kind for another person. But these results
raise a different question. What's the thing that sometimes does
stop good people from helping out? The real operating mechanism
here is uncertainty. What's the right thing for me to do?
What does society expect of me? What will happen if
(19:33):
I step forward? Ken has seen study after study in
which participants were totally willing to help, even sometimes at
real personal cost, as long as it was crystal clear
that helping was something they were supposed to do. And
if you can reduce the uncertainty and make it clear
that helping behavior is expected, it's normative, it is what
(19:53):
good people would do and should do, then you're going
to see a whole lot more helping behavior. Ken saw
how uncertainty can affect our tendency to help firsthand. While
waiting at an airport departure gate. The guy beside me.
He looked rough, unshaven, uncapped, a big dude, and he
was sleeping when we started boarding. You know, I sat
there and wondering, like, should I wake this guy up?
(20:15):
Kenn went back and forth on what to do. He
didn't want the man to miss his flight, but he
wasn't really sure the guy was even on his flight.
Maybe he'd be pissed if Ken woke him up. I
was uncertain if nudging him awake would be met with
gratitude or anger. You know that he might yell at
me or throttle me. As Ken thought back to all
the research he'd been reading, he decided to take action
(20:37):
and wake the guy up. I nudge him a couple
of times, and he sort of mumbled awake, and I said,
you know, are you going to whatever our flight was?
And he said yeah, And I said, well, we're on
last boarding. And I was still kind of nervous. I mean,
he seemed nice at first, but then he told me
his story. The man was a pastor, he'd spent the
last week on a spiritual retreat and had gotten very
little sleep. He was incredibly grateful. He just ended up
(21:01):
being one of the nicest people I've ever met in
my life. If I'm uncertain about whether somebody needs help,
I just remember that situation. Remember it may not always
resolve itself positively, but I can always ask the question.
I can always say, hey, I've noticed that you're struggling
or you look hurt. Is there anything I can do
to help you? After talking to Ken, I realize that
(21:23):
people simply aren't as indifferent to the plight of strangers
as my psyche text book claimed, and Ken's uncertainty interpretation
suggests an exciting possibility. If we can find ways to
reduce people's uncertainty about helping, if we can make it
normative to do nice stuff for other people, then we
may be able to increase the kindness we see in society.
(21:43):
And more kindness in society means more happiness for everybody.
The science shows that every time we take action to
help another person, whether with a huge act like saving
someone's life or with something tiny like donating five bucks
to charity, that kindness winds up giving us a happiness boost.
So finding ways to make kindness of the norm would
be a quick way to make us all feel better,
(22:05):
and it would come with the added benefit of making
society a little bit more passionate. But that raises a question,
can we actually make kindness the norm? I'll tell you
more when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. We
(22:29):
were so frustrated as young people with the way that
our school administration had handled it. When Hannah Mange was
in tenth grade, a student at her high school died
by suicide. She and her fellow students were devastated not
only by their peer's death, but also by the fact
that Hannah school did a little to acknowledge the tragedy
or the impact it had on other students. Hannah felt
(22:50):
like no one was doing anything to help. So we
created our own memorial. We created our own space to process.
We rented out our childhood park, and we had just
created a space for us to commemorate our peer who
had lost their life. The experience had a profound impact
on Hannah. She even got to speak about the importance
(23:12):
of teen stepping up to help others at the White House.
I saw that kindness was necessary. It wasn't just this soft,
nice thing, but rather it was like this vital, life
saving power. After she spoke at the White House, Hannah
was approached by the director of a foundation focused on
teen mental health, whose goal is to promote kindness and
(23:33):
the power of helping. She is one of the most
influential forces of our time today. Born This Way Foundation
is the passion project of one of my favorite pop
stars ladies and gentlemen, Lady Gaga. What I would like
to say is that it's surprising how many people really
(23:56):
want to bring human kind together to do great things.
This might be one of the best days of my life.
Dagas started Born This Way in collaboration where their co founder,
Cynthia Germinata. Of course, you know, I don't think she
could breathe without her music, but this is her real
(24:18):
purpose in life. In addition to being the foundation's co founder,
Cynthia is also Lady Gaga's mother, or, in the words
of my favorite Gaga song, her Mama, Mama. People talk
about their children being different, and I like to say
that she was unique growing up, and you know, those
qualities weren't always really appreciated by her peers. Gaga's uniqueness
(24:41):
prompted some of the other teams at her school to
be incredibly cruel. Some of her peers started a Facebook
page called Stephanie Germinata will Never be Famous. And you
know they did this because they could see how committed
she was to her music. This is all she thought about,
this is all that she did, and you know, the
bullying and the meanness just continued. She started to feel humiliated, isolated,
(25:04):
excluded from her peers, and as a result, she started
to question her self worth and her value and it
just shattered what was a very very confident young woman.
The stress caused Stephanie to develop anxiety and depression as
a middle schooler two mental health issues that she's publicly
struggled with ever since. But Stephanie's pain came not just
(25:26):
from the bullying itself, but from the fact that so
many other students saw what was going on and didn't
step into help. I think the most difficult thing for
her there was just not having anybody to rely on. Now,
over a decade later, Stephanie wants to make sure that
kids today don't have to go through the callousness that
she herself experienced. And that's where we come in, and
(25:47):
we try to understand what young people need, fill those
gaps for them and equip them with resources. And at
the heart of that is kindness. We're doing many things
to show that kindness is cool. The foundation's goal is
to help teams step in when they see others in need.
One campaign involves getting teams to intervene as a bystander
(26:08):
one of their peers is being bullied. Another has people
pledging to do one random act of kindness every day
for twenty one days. Since its launch in I Guess
twenty eighteen, now we've recruited over seven million participants, with
over one hundred and sixty million pledged acts of kindness
With catchy programs and a charismatic star like Lady Gaga
(26:29):
at the Helm, the Foundation is making Helping go viral.
They're getting bystanders all over the world to think of
stepping in to help someone in need as not only
cool but also normative. And as we know from the science,
bystanders are way more willing to step in and help
when they think that's the expected behavior. And that's where
interns like Hannah mang Get come in. Recruited at the
(26:51):
White House, Hannah had been tasked with collecting stories of
kindness and bystander intervention to publicly share on the Foundation's website,
with the goal of inspiring even more positive interventions in
the future. One of her biggest assignments was due just
after a family vacation to California, but the fun of
that trip had come to an abrupt when Hannah's brother
became ill and had to stay behind in a hospital. Unexpectedly,
(27:13):
Hannah's family was forced to take a red eye flight
home to regroup and work out what to do next
to help her brother. Like I was supposed to have
found kindness in the world and written about it, but
things were just so stressful that. My plan was to
text the channel kindness folks and say sorry, like I'm
not really seeing kindness in the world right now. But
we get off our flight and we're walking towards baggage
(27:33):
claim and it's like a completely barren airport and we
see a fellow passenger from our flight completely collapse and
fall to the ground. Hannah's parents, who were both doctors,
rushed over to help. They realized that the man had
gone into a diabetic shock and desperately needed to increase
his blood sugar. But the thing was, nobody had any
anything to eat. Everything was closed. And then we hear
(27:54):
this like small but powerful voice behind us who says,
I think I have a Snickers in my launchabole. That
voice came from Mecca, a nine year old boy who
taken the cross country flight all by himself. But when
he saw people rushing to help the collapse me he
wanted to help to so he shared the candy bar
he'd been given by his grandma to get him through
his first solo trip. In the end, Mecca's generous action
(28:18):
saved the man's life. It was just such a beautiful night,
I think for all of us, and it was just
such a symbol of like Mecca was so anxious, my
family was so anxious, but yet like in this moment
when he saw someone in need, everyone was able to
put something aside and help this fellow passenger of ours.
Hannah wrote up the story of Successful by Standard Intervention
(28:38):
not just for the Foundation's website, but also for a
new book entitled Channel Kindness, Stories of Kindness and Community
that she had a chance to co author not only
with other student reporters, but also with Lady Gaga herself.
Something we often say at the Foundation is that kindness
is contagious, and I think that couldn't be more true,
even as someone who was there. When I sat down
(29:00):
and reread that story for the first time in the book,
I was more hopeful. I felt, you know, and urged
to be kind of I think that there's so much
hour and just being reminded of kindness. Hannah is right here,
there's real power and witnessing acts of kindness. The urban
legend that sprang up around Kitty Geneves's murder was built
(29:21):
on the concept that indifference is part of human nature,
and the scientific work that followed seemed to fit with
this narrative of callousness. But we now know that Kitty's
urban legend was just that, an urban legend. The science
shows that people do help as long as they think
it's the normal thing to do. And when we start
hearing that helping is not just normal, but that hundreds
(29:42):
of millions of people are doing it, that's likely to
have a very very large effect on our collective happiness,
which would be pretty awesome, because all of us need
the happiness boost that comes from helping others, and it's
likely we'll each find ourselves needing a little help every
now and then too, even if we're as rich and
famous as Lady Gaga. My daughter was at Bibas one day,
(30:04):
and this was at a time when she was in
a lot of physical pain. Sure you know, many of
your listeners might have read about the fact that she
had an emergency hip surgery. And a young woman named
Emma came to the bus. And Emma's been in a
wheelchair her entire life. Emma has cerebral palsy. Emma has
(30:25):
had more surgeries than you can count on your hands.
And she came up to Stephanie and asked her if
she was okay, and she said, you seem like you're
in pain and you're not feeling well. So they bonded
over pain at the bus and they became lifelong friends,
(30:46):
and it's just a beautiful, heartwarming story. Many of us
won't ever be faced with some of the more extreme
situations we've talked about in this episode. We won't be
called upon to intervene in a violent crime or run
through a hail of bullets to save a life. But
all of us have opportunities to intervene to help other
(31:06):
people in some way, checking in on a friend, donating
a few bucks to people who need, offering to give
an ear to someone who's grieving, or checking in on
a fellow passenger at the departure gate. Our daily lives
give us lots and lots of chances to be an
active and caring bystander. All these acts of kindness can
be a huge happiness booster. Doing nice things for others
(31:29):
gives us a richer sense of social connection and community.
It can promote a sense of purpose and meaning, and frankly,
it just feels good. So let all that kindness rip,
And if you do no other good deed today, at
least do this. Let people know that kindness is the norm,
it's what's expected of you, and it's kind of cool.
(31:52):
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
mixing and mastering by Evan Biola. Joseph Friedman checked our facts.
Sophie Crane mckibbon edited our scripts. Emily Anne Vaughan offered
additional production support. Special thanks to Miela Belle, Carl mcgliorre
Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lucarne, Maya Kanig, Nicolemrano, Eric Sandler,
(32:18):
Royston Vizzer, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent Ben Davis. That
Pinus Lab was brought to you by Pushkin Industries. And
meet doctor Laurie Sanders
Pushkin. On the morning of March thirteenth, nineteen sixty four,
a murder took place in Queens, New York that shook
the entire country. The crime itself was awful, but the
behavior of bystanders who witnessed the event caused widespread revulsion
in years of national soul searching. The incident became the
(00:39):
impetus for setting up the nine one one emergency call
system that we have today and transformed the path of
psychological research for decades to come. I first heard the
story when I took Intro psych as a college freshman
back in the nineties. I dug out my old textbook
to see how it was described here. It is on
page five forty four of Peter Grey's Psychology, second Edition.
(01:01):
In a normally quiet neighborhood in New York City, a
young woman named Kitty Genevec was brutally attacked for a
period of thirty minutes outside her apartment building. Her screams
drew the attention of at least thirty eight people who
watched through their apartment windows while she was repeatedly stabbed
and finally murdered. Not one of the bystanders came to
her aid or even called the police. The incident stirred
(01:25):
a national outcry, have we become so inured to horror
that we simply watch it without lifting a finger? More
than twenty five years on, I still remember how shocked
I was by that paragraph. Several dozen people stood there
and watched kitty scream. How could so many people witness
something so awful and just do nothing. At the time,
(01:47):
psychologists were still trying to make sense of the horrors
of World War Two, and they began to think that
awful incidents weren't just the result of a small number
of uncaring people, but might instead reflect a wider and
more sinister aspect of human nature. Social psychologist John Darley
and bib Latine decided to test that out In a
now famous nineteen sixty eight study. They created an experimental emergency.
(02:11):
They brought college students into the lab, put them inside
a room all by themselves, and hooked them up to
a headphone intercom system. An experimenter explained that the subject
would be taking part in a conversation about college life
with either one, two, or five other anonymous subjects, all
of whom were in different rooms. The experimenter then took
off and the discussion began. But soon into the conversation,
(02:34):
one of the participants began having a very real sounding emergency.
He started convulsing and screaming incoherently, saying things like I'm
having a real problem right now, I'm going to die,
help seizure. Even though the emergency was staged, the subjects
(02:56):
believed that the stranger was in real trouble. The scientists
reported that many of the participants gasped into the microphone,
My god, what should I do? But Latine and Darley
wanted to see if the subjects responded by actively trying
to help, specifically leaving the room to alert the experimenter
or to look for the stranger who was in distress.
When subjects thought that they were the only ones to
(03:17):
hear the strangers fit, eighty five percent of them took action,
and they tended to do so quickly, often in less
than a minute. That's the good news, But the bad
news is that this helping behavior drops significantly when the
subjects were told that other people were also on the call.
In fact, less than a third of subjects made any
move to help when they thought that more than one
(03:39):
other person was listening. In I've known about these findings
since I was in undergrad, but I still find them
so shocking. Nearly seventy percent of subjects in that condition
heard someone crying out for help while having a potentially
deadly seizure, and they did nothing. This study and others
(04:00):
like it demonstrated just how easy it is to be
apathetic in the face of other people's pain, which is
pretty bad for our collective happiness. There are lots of
situations in which others need our help, a colleague who's
struggling at work, or a neighbor who's feeling a little lonely,
or a child who's getting bullied, like Kitty Gen and
Visi's neighbors and latin Ae and Darley's subjects. There are
(04:22):
times when we see this and just don't intervene. Maybe
we feel it's not our place or that someone else
will probably do it, But our inaction means that lots
of people around us are left hurt and unhappy because
even though we all know someone should probably do something,
nobody does. But our inaction also poses a second problem
(04:43):
for our collective happiness. The science shows that you and
I would personally be happier if we did something to
help people in need. Study after study shows that when
we do nice stuff for other people, we get a
happiness boost. Give directions to a lost stranger, you feel happier.
Comfort someone who's upset, you feel happier. Take care of
an injured person, you feel happier. But latin Ae and
(05:05):
Darley's work shows that there are lots of situations in
which we don't step in, especially when it seems like
the people around us aren't doing anything to help either.
Kitty Genevici's story and the research that followed has always
made me really disappointed in human nature, But new research
suggests that her notorious story of collective apathy may not
(05:26):
be as clear cut as the textbooks claim, which raises
an important question. Have we've been given an incorrect picture
of human nature, one that's making us less happy since
we don't help whenever the opportunity arises. Our minds are
constantly telling us what's you to be happy? But what
(05:47):
if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are
lying to us, leading us away from what will really
make us happy. The good news is that understanding the
science of the mind can point us all back in
the right direction. You're listening to the Happiest Lab with
doctor Laurie Sanders. We had a snow day the day
(06:11):
of Kennedy's inauguration, so we're all sitting at home watching nut.
This is Bill GENEVEECI. I remember sitting in front of
it and being mesmerized because, you know, as a kid
growing up, all these old guys were presidents. Now all
of a sudden we had this young, healthy guy making
this statement. Ask, not what your country can do for you,
(06:32):
ask what you could do for your country. That speech
resonated with Bill. He's always had a deep sense of
duty towards his fellow man. He didn't ever want to
be the sort of person who stands by and doesn't help.
When Bill graduated from high school, his classmates were busy
(06:52):
finding ways to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War.
But not Bill. People who know me go, well, you
got drafted right, No, No, I volunteered you did? I mean,
how could you be so stupid? As a marine in combat?
Bill quickly developed a reputation for helping anyone in need,
no matter who it was or what the risk level,
(07:12):
Like the time he heard of an elderly Vietnamese man
who was hurt inside a dirty cave. I said, well,
how's he doing? I don't know. We're afraid to go
in there because it's probably booby trap, So me, of
course I'm going to go in there. Another time, he
rescued a woman who had been impaled on a spiked
booby trap and helped carry her to a chopper in
(07:33):
order to get her to a hospital. Despite heavy enemy fire.
The helicopters always drew fire, and as we were putting
around the helicopter, you could see the holes forming a helicopter.
You might be wondering, why didn't Bill think twice before
repeatedly putting his own life in danger to come to
the aid of perfect strangers. I've grown up with this
(07:54):
whole philosophy, this whole thing. When it's your time, you
step up and them. With my sister's experience, it was
like visceral. It's like people didn't step up, and look
what that did. As might have guessed from the last name,
Kitty Genovesi, the young woman murdered in Queen's was related
to Bill. Kitty was Bill's older sister. Bill was only
(08:18):
sixteen years old when she was murdered. It's six o'clock
in the morning. I'm in bed and I hear something
going on at the front door. A policeman came to
the Genovesi house. It took a while for Bill to
fully comprehend why the cop was there. When he heard
his mother getting upset, he assumed Kitty had just gotten sick, oh, pendix,
or maybe she broke a leg or fractured her finger.
(08:39):
You know. So it was a while before it registered,
like what. It was just shocking. It wasn't the world
I came from. Learning that his sister had been stabbed
to death was crushing, But Bill experienced another devastating blow
when he read about the attack in the New York Times.
The article read for more than an hour, thirty eight respectable,
(09:01):
law abiding citizens in Queen's watched a killer stock and
stab a woman in three separate attacks in ke Gardens.
Not one person telephoned the police during the assault. Well,
I was always like, thirty eight people, I'm witnessing this thing.
I mean, you can't believe it. What is it to
pick up the phone. The pain of Kitty's death, plus
the fact that thirty eight otherwise good people allegedly allowed
(09:24):
it to happen was too much for Bill's family. We
all tried to just sort of forget it and put
it away, partially because our job was to defend mom.
Because Mom was in a total meltdown state. She literally,
as they're lowering the coffin, was trying to climb on top.
Soon after the funeral, Bill's mother had a debilitating stroke.
(09:47):
In order to help her heal, the entire Genovesi family
agreed to avoid talking about Kitty's tragedy, but in spite
of decades of silence, Bill's anger at the apathy of
those thirty eight witnesses burned on what could be worse?
I mean, it's just what could be worse than you're thinking, Wow,
I'm in trouble, maybe dying. I'm calling now. I know
(10:09):
people are aware. Light's going on, nobody's doing anything. My
fellow man has deserted me. What Bill didn't know was
that he himself would soon experience the terror that comes
from desperately needing a savior and not knowing if someone
will actually step up to help. One day, on patrol
(10:30):
in Vietnam, Bill spotted a strange bamboo steak stuck in
the mud. He decided to ask a friend what it was.
Does this look right to you? Boom? It was a
bomb and Bill was standing right beside it. You actually
do get thrown into the air and you're flying in
the air, thinking, oh, this is high. When Bill landed,
(10:52):
he tried to move but couldn't. Both of his legs
were badly injured and would later need to be amputated,
but at the time he wasn't even sure he'd get
the help needed to make it out with his life.
A huge firefight broke out between his platoon and the
enemy who'd just blown him up. Amidst the chaos, it
didn't look like anyone was coming to Bill's aid. Okay,
(11:13):
am I just going to be left here? I mean,
I really had a flashback to what I imagined the
scene was like with Kitty. No one's coming to help me. God,
I'm feeling the way she must have felt back then.
And then I'm sort of in this imagined street scene
lying next to my sister. We're like just looking at
each other. And then of course I was bleeding so
(11:36):
much that then I started to lose consciousness. But Bill's
story had a different ending than Kitty's. In spite of
the danger, his fellow Marines didn't leave him to die.
They put their lives on the line and rushed in
to save him. Bill looks back on his time in
Vietnam as painting a very different picture of human nature.
(11:56):
I mean, I was there long enough to see plenty
of brave moves by our guys and the enemy, you know,
to help their compatriots. It made me forget I was
in a war zone. It was like, this is human
to h When we get back from the break, we'll
hear how these experiences caused Bill to question whether Kitty's
neighbors could really have been so callous and apathetic that night,
(12:19):
and whether the textbook story of her murder was really true.
And we'll see that what he learned has big consequences
for the happiness that all of us could be getting
by doing more to help others. The Happiness Lab will
be right back thirty eight eyewitnesses for half an hour
(12:40):
or watching this, how could that be? After his sister's murder,
Bill GENEVESI couldn't stop going over the details, despite the
fact that Kitty's name wasn't even to be said in
the family home. Bill initially believed what the papers reported
the same story that I and so many other students
learn in psych one oh one that thirty eight people
stood by and watched as Kitty was stabbed, and that
(13:03):
no one lifted a finger. But that story simply didn't
jibe with what Bill saw firsthand in Vietnam, that people
are willing to help those around them, and that they
often take great joy from doing so. The mismatch between
Kitty's story and what Bill knew to be true about
human kindness bothered him for decades, and my natural instinct
(13:23):
of question, question, question, question, I got to get the
bottom of this as best I can. After Bill's parents
passed away, he decided to get to the bottom of things.
He teamed up with a film crew to reopen Kitty's case.
Their movie, called The Witness follows Bill tracking down the
bystanders who allegedly saw Kitty get murdered and asking for
their version of the events. It was curious to me
(13:46):
how there were all these discrepancies, But wasn't thirty eight
witnesses watching for thirty minutes. Many of the people told
Bill a very different version of what happened that night.
Some alleged bystanders said that they told police they saw
and heard nothing, and yet they were still listed in
the Times article as one of those thirty eight eyewitnesses.
(14:06):
Others disputed having watched the attack at all. They recalled
hearing some screams, but said they couldn't actually see anything
when they looked out their apartment windows. Another big claim
from my psych text book was that none of the
neighbors called the police during the attack. Many told Bill
that actually they did. Yes, I got on the phone
and called the police. You got on the phone and
(14:28):
you called the police. Yes, of course, And they said, oh,
we already got that call, even though the police logs
from that night didn't reflect it. Bill thinks his interviewees
were telling the truth. The best I can make out
was some people did pick up the phone and the
police weren't being responsive. But the final error in the
New York Times report is one that could have saved
(14:50):
Bill and his family a lot of grief over the years,
the idea that Kitty bled to death all alone. Bill
interviewed one of Kitty's closest friends, Sophia Ferrar, who lived nearby.
Sophia told him that she'd woken up when she heard
someone screaming, but couldn't see anything when she looked out
the window, so she went back to bed. Twenty minutes later,
a neighbor rang to say that Kitty was downstairs in
(15:11):
the hallway hurt, so Sophia rushed to check on her friend.
When Sophia saw Kitty bleeding and badly injured, she stayed
with her and even held her until the ambulances arrived.
It would have been hugely helpful to my parents to
know that a close friend the kitties was there, rather
than she was completely alone from first stab to last breath.
(15:36):
I wasn't the only budding psychologist who was deeply disturbed
to learn about Kitty's story. Boy, it's just heartbreaking. I mean,
surely somebody could have done something to step in and
help her, and I think it contributes to a real
unease and a sense of frustration and dissatisfaction with the
human race. This is Ken Brown of the Tippy College
(15:57):
of Business at the University of Iowa. Ken psych one
on one course taught him the very same story of
bystander apathy as minded and the story never sat well
with him. It just didn't seem to match his real
life experience. Helping behavior happens every day on every street
corner in the world, somebody is doing something else, small
and positive to help other people. So when Ken was
(16:19):
asked to do a TEDx talk, he decided to revisit
Kitty's Awful tale. As he dug into new academic research,
he discovered that Bill wasn't the only one to find
discrepancies in the textbook version of Kitty's story. The psychologist
Rachel Manning and her colleagues published an article in two
thousand and eight which did a deep dive into the
archival research on her murder. Looking back at the original
(16:40):
legal documents and even conversations with local historians, and their
formal investigation found exactly what Bill did. Most people who
were listed as witnesses didn't see anything, and those that
did hear something found ways to try to help. The
paper concluded that there's simply no evidence for the claim
that thirty eight eyewitnesses watched Kitty get murdered and did nothing.
(17:02):
There's certainly a lot more that says that there were
good people trying to help that night, as opposed to
a cruel city that stood silently as Kitty gin Abc
was murdered. But that paper got Ken wondering If Kitty's
story didn't play out like the textbook suggest then what
about the scientific findings that followed after her death. The
(17:24):
original studies were really only studying one particular type of situation,
and that's a very strong situation in which an individual
has been instructed to be passive. Let's think back to
that Latinee and Darley study I told you about earlier.
Unlike the witnesses in Kitty's case, Latinee and Darley's subjects
weren't just passively doing their own thing when a random
(17:45):
emergency happened. The subjects in their study knew they were
taking part in an experiment, and a scary looking experimenter
had just told them to do something very specific. Sit
in this room and put your headphones on. Listen, do
these things. I'll be back in fifteen minutes. Don't leave.
Participants may have really wanted to help that stranger in distress,
(18:06):
but the instructions they were given by the experimenter could
have dissuaded them. They told me not to do anything.
They told me to sit here and do my job.
That pressure was bad enough for subjects who thought they
were the only person hearing the emergency, but subjects who
thought they were listening in with a larger group got
an extra signal that stepping in was the wrong move.
They could hear that none of the other subjects seemed
(18:27):
to be taking action either. Darle In Latina's nineteen sixty
eight study is the one that appears in all the textbooks,
but it wasn't the only experiment to explore the conditions
under which people decide to help. There were a bunch
of less famous studies that tended to give subjects a
bit more independence on how to react. Hey, pay attention
and if there's a problem, let me know. That's an
(18:49):
active instruction. And what they found is when you've been
instructed to be active, you're actually more likely to help
the more people that are present. It turns out that
simply telling subjects it's okay to help completely reverses Latinae
and Darley's original findings. Diffusion of responsibility completely leg goes
out the window as soon as people think it's okay
(19:12):
to do something kind for another person. But these results
raise a different question. What's the thing that sometimes does
stop good people from helping out? The real operating mechanism
here is uncertainty. What's the right thing for me to do?
What does society expect of me? What will happen if
(19:33):
I step forward? Ken has seen study after study in
which participants were totally willing to help, even sometimes at
real personal cost, as long as it was crystal clear
that helping was something they were supposed to do. And
if you can reduce the uncertainty and make it clear
that helping behavior is expected, it's normative, it is what
(19:53):
good people would do and should do, then you're going
to see a whole lot more helping behavior. Ken saw
how uncertainty can affect our tendency to help firsthand. While
waiting at an airport departure gate. The guy beside me.
He looked rough, unshaven, uncapped, a big dude, and he
was sleeping when we started boarding. You know, I sat
there and wondering, like, should I wake this guy up?
(20:15):
Kenn went back and forth on what to do. He
didn't want the man to miss his flight, but he
wasn't really sure the guy was even on his flight.
Maybe he'd be pissed if Ken woke him up. I
was uncertain if nudging him awake would be met with
gratitude or anger. You know that he might yell at
me or throttle me. As Ken thought back to all
the research he'd been reading, he decided to take action
(20:37):
and wake the guy up. I nudge him a couple
of times, and he sort of mumbled awake, and I said,
you know, are you going to whatever our flight was?
And he said yeah, And I said, well, we're on
last boarding. And I was still kind of nervous. I mean,
he seemed nice at first, but then he told me
his story. The man was a pastor, he'd spent the
last week on a spiritual retreat and had gotten very
little sleep. He was incredibly grateful. He just ended up
(21:01):
being one of the nicest people I've ever met in
my life. If I'm uncertain about whether somebody needs help,
I just remember that situation. Remember it may not always
resolve itself positively, but I can always ask the question.
I can always say, hey, I've noticed that you're struggling
or you look hurt. Is there anything I can do
to help you? After talking to Ken, I realize that
(21:23):
people simply aren't as indifferent to the plight of strangers
as my psyche text book claimed, and Ken's uncertainty interpretation
suggests an exciting possibility. If we can find ways to
reduce people's uncertainty about helping, if we can make it
normative to do nice stuff for other people, then we
may be able to increase the kindness we see in society.
(21:43):
And more kindness in society means more happiness for everybody.
The science shows that every time we take action to
help another person, whether with a huge act like saving
someone's life or with something tiny like donating five bucks
to charity, that kindness winds up giving us a happiness boost.
So finding ways to make kindness of the norm would
be a quick way to make us all feel better,
(22:05):
and it would come with the added benefit of making
society a little bit more passionate. But that raises a question,
can we actually make kindness the norm? I'll tell you
more when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. We
(22:29):
were so frustrated as young people with the way that
our school administration had handled it. When Hannah Mange was
in tenth grade, a student at her high school died
by suicide. She and her fellow students were devastated not
only by their peer's death, but also by the fact
that Hannah school did a little to acknowledge the tragedy
or the impact it had on other students. Hannah felt
(22:50):
like no one was doing anything to help. So we
created our own memorial. We created our own space to process.
We rented out our childhood park, and we had just
created a space for us to commemorate our peer who
had lost their life. The experience had a profound impact
on Hannah. She even got to speak about the importance
(23:12):
of teen stepping up to help others at the White House.
I saw that kindness was necessary. It wasn't just this soft,
nice thing, but rather it was like this vital, life
saving power. After she spoke at the White House, Hannah
was approached by the director of a foundation focused on
teen mental health, whose goal is to promote kindness and
(23:33):
the power of helping. She is one of the most
influential forces of our time today. Born This Way Foundation
is the passion project of one of my favorite pop
stars ladies and gentlemen, Lady Gaga. What I would like
to say is that it's surprising how many people really
(23:56):
want to bring human kind together to do great things.
This might be one of the best days of my life.
Dagas started Born This Way in collaboration where their co founder,
Cynthia Germinata. Of course, you know, I don't think she
could breathe without her music, but this is her real
(24:18):
purpose in life. In addition to being the foundation's co founder,
Cynthia is also Lady Gaga's mother, or, in the words
of my favorite Gaga song, her Mama, Mama. People talk
about their children being different, and I like to say
that she was unique growing up, and you know, those
qualities weren't always really appreciated by her peers. Gaga's uniqueness
(24:41):
prompted some of the other teams at her school to
be incredibly cruel. Some of her peers started a Facebook
page called Stephanie Germinata will Never be Famous. And you
know they did this because they could see how committed
she was to her music. This is all she thought about,
this is all that she did, and you know, the
bullying and the meanness just continued. She started to feel humiliated, isolated,
(25:04):
excluded from her peers, and as a result, she started
to question her self worth and her value and it
just shattered what was a very very confident young woman.
The stress caused Stephanie to develop anxiety and depression as
a middle schooler two mental health issues that she's publicly
struggled with ever since. But Stephanie's pain came not just
(25:26):
from the bullying itself, but from the fact that so
many other students saw what was going on and didn't
step into help. I think the most difficult thing for
her there was just not having anybody to rely on. Now,
over a decade later, Stephanie wants to make sure that
kids today don't have to go through the callousness that
she herself experienced. And that's where we come in, and
(25:47):
we try to understand what young people need, fill those
gaps for them and equip them with resources. And at
the heart of that is kindness. We're doing many things
to show that kindness is cool. The foundation's goal is
to help teams step in when they see others in need.
One campaign involves getting teams to intervene as a bystander
(26:08):
one of their peers is being bullied. Another has people
pledging to do one random act of kindness every day
for twenty one days. Since its launch in I Guess
twenty eighteen, now we've recruited over seven million participants, with
over one hundred and sixty million pledged acts of kindness
With catchy programs and a charismatic star like Lady Gaga
(26:29):
at the Helm, the Foundation is making Helping go viral.
They're getting bystanders all over the world to think of
stepping in to help someone in need as not only
cool but also normative. And as we know from the science,
bystanders are way more willing to step in and help
when they think that's the expected behavior. And that's where
interns like Hannah mang Get come in. Recruited at the
(26:51):
White House, Hannah had been tasked with collecting stories of
kindness and bystander intervention to publicly share on the Foundation's website,
with the goal of inspiring even more positive interventions in
the future. One of her biggest assignments was due just
after a family vacation to California, but the fun of
that trip had come to an abrupt when Hannah's brother
became ill and had to stay behind in a hospital. Unexpectedly,
(27:13):
Hannah's family was forced to take a red eye flight
home to regroup and work out what to do next
to help her brother. Like I was supposed to have
found kindness in the world and written about it, but
things were just so stressful that. My plan was to
text the channel kindness folks and say sorry, like I'm
not really seeing kindness in the world right now. But
we get off our flight and we're walking towards baggage
(27:33):
claim and it's like a completely barren airport and we
see a fellow passenger from our flight completely collapse and
fall to the ground. Hannah's parents, who were both doctors,
rushed over to help. They realized that the man had
gone into a diabetic shock and desperately needed to increase
his blood sugar. But the thing was, nobody had any
anything to eat. Everything was closed. And then we hear
(27:54):
this like small but powerful voice behind us who says,
I think I have a Snickers in my launchabole. That
voice came from Mecca, a nine year old boy who
taken the cross country flight all by himself. But when
he saw people rushing to help the collapse me he
wanted to help to so he shared the candy bar
he'd been given by his grandma to get him through
his first solo trip. In the end, Mecca's generous action
(28:18):
saved the man's life. It was just such a beautiful night,
I think for all of us, and it was just
such a symbol of like Mecca was so anxious, my
family was so anxious, but yet like in this moment
when he saw someone in need, everyone was able to
put something aside and help this fellow passenger of ours.
Hannah wrote up the story of Successful by Standard Intervention
(28:38):
not just for the Foundation's website, but also for a
new book entitled Channel Kindness, Stories of Kindness and Community
that she had a chance to co author not only
with other student reporters, but also with Lady Gaga herself.
Something we often say at the Foundation is that kindness
is contagious, and I think that couldn't be more true,
even as someone who was there. When I sat down
(29:00):
and reread that story for the first time in the book,
I was more hopeful. I felt, you know, and urged
to be kind of I think that there's so much
hour and just being reminded of kindness. Hannah is right here,
there's real power and witnessing acts of kindness. The urban
legend that sprang up around Kitty Geneves's murder was built
(29:21):
on the concept that indifference is part of human nature,
and the scientific work that followed seemed to fit with
this narrative of callousness. But we now know that Kitty's
urban legend was just that, an urban legend. The science
shows that people do help as long as they think
it's the normal thing to do. And when we start
hearing that helping is not just normal, but that hundreds
(29:42):
of millions of people are doing it, that's likely to
have a very very large effect on our collective happiness,
which would be pretty awesome, because all of us need
the happiness boost that comes from helping others, and it's
likely we'll each find ourselves needing a little help every
now and then too, even if we're as rich and
famous as Lady Gaga. My daughter was at Bibas one day,
(30:04):
and this was at a time when she was in
a lot of physical pain. Sure you know, many of
your listeners might have read about the fact that she
had an emergency hip surgery. And a young woman named
Emma came to the bus. And Emma's been in a
wheelchair her entire life. Emma has cerebral palsy. Emma has
(30:25):
had more surgeries than you can count on your hands.
And she came up to Stephanie and asked her if
she was okay, and she said, you seem like you're
in pain and you're not feeling well. So they bonded
over pain at the bus and they became lifelong friends,
(30:46):
and it's just a beautiful, heartwarming story. Many of us
won't ever be faced with some of the more extreme
situations we've talked about in this episode. We won't be
called upon to intervene in a violent crime or run
through a hail of bullets to save a life. But
all of us have opportunities to intervene to help other
(31:06):
people in some way, checking in on a friend, donating
a few bucks to people who need, offering to give
an ear to someone who's grieving, or checking in on
a fellow passenger at the departure gate. Our daily lives
give us lots and lots of chances to be an
active and caring bystander. All these acts of kindness can
be a huge happiness booster. Doing nice things for others
(31:29):
gives us a richer sense of social connection and community.
It can promote a sense of purpose and meaning, and frankly,
it just feels good. So let all that kindness rip,
And if you do no other good deed today, at
least do this. Let people know that kindness is the norm,
it's what's expected of you, and it's kind of cool.
(31:52):
The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
mixing and mastering by Evan Biola. Joseph Friedman checked our facts.
Sophie Crane mckibbon edited our scripts. Emily Anne Vaughan offered
additional production support. Special thanks to Miela Belle, Carl mcgliorre
Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lucarne, Maya Kanig, Nicolemrano, Eric Sandler,
(32:18):
Royston Vizzer, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent Ben Davis. That
Pinus Lab was brought to you by Pushkin Industries. And
meet doctor Laurie Sanders
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