Abigail (Abby) Marsh

Thank you for having me.

Yes, it's an incredibly busy freeway, very heavily trafficked.

I was coming into Tacoma on I-5 South from Seattle when the freeway rises up over an overpass.

And so there are no shoulders whatsoever.

And yet somehow a dog had made it onto the freeway that night and it ran across the freeway right in front of my car.

And I did what I now know you should never do, which is I swerved to try to avoid it.

And unfortunately, I hit it anyways.

And the combination of hitting the dog and swerving sharply sent my car into a series of fishtails across several lanes of freeway.

It's a miracle I didn't hit anybody.

And then it ended up, as I tried to wrestle back control of the car, spinning in these huge donuts around and around until finally it came to a rest in the fast lane of the freeway facing backward.

into the oncoming traffic just past the crest of the overpass.

In the fast lane.

And the engine had died as a result of all of this spinning around.

And there's no shoulder because it's an overpass that didn't have an end.

So there was nowhere I could drive the car to or that I could jump out of the car and run to.

I was just stuck in this fast lane of the freeway with cars barely swerving in time to avoid me because they just...

you know, just caught sight of me as they were coming across the crest of the overpass.

And so my car would shake every time these big cars and semis would swerve around it at the last minute.

And I knew, I just knew it was a matter of time until one of them was going to hit me.

I did.

I did.

It was the most terrified I've ever been in my life.

And I remember trying over and over to turn the car back on, and I couldn't figure out why.

I couldn't get the engine to reengage.

I remember turning on the brights.

I turned on the flashers just to try to alert people to my presence.

But I didn't have a phone because it was the 90s, and so there was absolutely nothing else I could do.

And I thought that eventually I was going to get hit, and I would either get very badly hurt or killed.

Yeah, one of the great shocks of my life.

So it was a summer night and the windows were rolled down.

And I was very surprised in the middle of all this to hear a knock on the passenger side window, which because of which way I was facing was on the very narrow sort of tiny ridge on the edge of the fast lane.

And I turned to see a man standing outside the car wearing as best as I can recollect a suit.

And he had a shaved head and chains around his knackle jewelry and sunglasses, even though it was the middle of the night.

And I remember the silly thought flashing through my head of like, oh, no, oh, no, you know, this is a stranger.

I'm not supposed to let strangers into my mom's car.

And he said, you look like you could use some help, which was quite an understatement.

And of course, I said, yeah, I do.

So then he said, okay, do you mind if I get into the driver's seat?

So I said, okay, that's fine.

And I scooched myself over the central console into the passenger seat while he waited for a break in the traffic, which took a minute because of course, all while we're talking to each other, the cars are still continuing to blow by.

So he waited for a break, ran around the car at top speed, opened the driver's door and hopped in the driver's seat.

So now he's put himself in great danger because now we're both gonna get killed if we get hit.

He figured out the car was still in drive, which is why I couldn't get it to turn back on, put it in park, turn it back on, waited again for a break and all the cars blowing by us.

And then he gunned it real fast and arced us across the freeway into the off ramp on the other side of the sort of stripy section by the off right where his car was parked.

And there we came to a stop.

And we were more or less safe at that point.

And again, I remember the sound of his voice as he looked at me.

I'm gray, I'm sure, and sweaty and shaking.

I felt awful.

And he said, you're going to be okay.

Do you need me to follow you home?

And I said, no, no, I'm going to be okay.

I'll be okay.

You know, I wasn't thinking quite straight in the moment.

And he said, okay, you take care of yourself.

And out of the car he got and went back to his own car and drove off into the night.

And that is the last I ever saw of him.

It is one of the things that eats at me to this day that I don't think I said thank you.

And I didn't get his name, so I'll never be able to thank him.

It's a great question.

I only figured it out later.

And what I realized is that he must have been among all of those cars that came across the crest of the freeway and saw my stranded car there.

He was the one that decided in the fraction of a second he had to make a decision to pull over into the off-ramp area and then run across six lanes of freeway traffic in the middle of the night to get to my car.

Well, in the immediate aftermath, I was so shaken up that my mom could tell when I woke up the next morning something terrible had happened.

I was in a little bit of shock, I think.

Dog lover that I am, I was horrified that I had killed a dog.

That really ate at me for a long time.

But more than that, I was in real shock over how close I had come to dying, closer than I have ever come before since dying.

And that dissipated over time, as it does.

What didn't dissipate is this worm in my brain that I sort of felt at the idea that the reason I had died or been terribly injured was because of the decisions of this man and struggling to understand what caused him to make the choice that he did, to endanger his life multiple times so seriously to help a person he'd never met and whose identity he could not possibly have known when he made the choice to help me.

That's a hard question to answer.

I have never been put in exactly that situation, but I've never done anything so dangerous to help a stranger.

Certainly not.

No, I think it's a very, very rare decision to make, and I have never made it.

In retrospect, absolutely.

I had already taken a course in psychology and had fallen in love with the idea that there is a science of human cognition and behavior.

But what very quickly happened after that is I started thinking about the psychology of why people help other people.

Why on earth somebody would make the decision to risk their own life to help another person?

And very quickly, my research took a turn toward that specific topic.

The first group of people that I chose to study to try to understand real-world extraordinary altruism was altruistic kidney donors, or as they're sometimes called, non-directed kidney donors, who give a kidney to an anonymous stranger knowing they may never meet them or know anything about what happened to them at the time of the donation.

And I chose altruistic kidney donors to study in part because it had only very recently become even permissible in the United States to donate a kidney to a stranger, and at the time it was very, very rare.

And luckily, there are databases of people who have donated kidneys to strangers.

So I was able to reach out to start recruiting participants that way.

Yes, it was incredible.

When you're studying a rare group of people, which I have done in other contexts, it sometimes can take a long time, years, to recruit enough people to fill even a small study.

And I was shocked when I started recruiting altruistic kidney donors that the very first missive I sent out asking for altruistic kidney donors to please reach out if they would like to participate in research, I had sent right before leaving for a conference.

And I remember getting to the conference, sitting down in the coffee shop of the hotel, I think, opening my laptop to check my email and seeing an absolute flood of emails from people who had donated kidneys to strangers offering to participate in research in the most cheerful and just helpful way you could possibly imagine.

He did.

He did.

I couldn't believe it.

I said, no, no, no, of course, we will pay.

You don't have to pay to take part in our research.

We will cover everything for you.

It was incredible.

Absolutely.

And taking part in research is an altruistic thing to do because we don't compensate very much.

Unfortunately, we can't.

And that's also by design.

We don't want to be coercive and pay so much money that people will do it just for the money, even if it's something they don't want to do.

And so by design, psychology research is set up to require a little bit of altruism.

And I discovered just how much altruism plays a part when I started recruiting people who are altruistic.

The germ of this research was research I'd conducted previously in people who were at the opposite end of what I call the caring continuum.

So people vary quite a bit in their capacity to care about other people's welfare.

And at the low end of this continuum are people who are psychopathic.

So people who have callous personalities and engage in frequent antisocial behavior.

And what we've known from over a decade of research with people who are psychopathic is that they tend to be insensitive to other people's distress.

They have trouble recognizing it.

So if they see the face of somebody who's afraid, they might not even know what the expression is called.

A friend of mine, Essie Beding, in the United Kingdom was testing a psychopathic person in a jail once about their ability to recognize emotional facial expressions.

And this man failed to recognize every single fearful facial expression that she showed him.

And he knew he was doing badly.

And that is a pretty bad performance, even for somebody who's psychopathic.

Because when he got to the very last fearful expression, he said, you know, I don't know what that expression is called, but I know that's what people look like right before you stab them.

And this reveals a real sort of emotional blindness to other people's distress, which may help us understand why people who are psychopathic are so callous in response to other people's distress.

They don't even really know how to interpret it very well.

And the origin of that is partly deficits in a brain structure called the amygdala.

And the amygdala is a complicated brain structure.

It does a lot of different things.

But it's not essential for doing that many things.

One of the things that seems to be really important for doing is representing fear in other people.

So generating an internal representation of that state that helps you then recognize it in others.

And what we hypothesized at the beginning of our research with altruistic people is that if very uncaring people seem to be unusually insensitive to other people's distress, and that is underpinned by deficits in a structure called the amygdala, both in its reduced activation in response to other people's distress and its lower volume.

So people who are psychopathic have amygdalas that are unusually small on average.

Maybe people who are unusually caring and highly altruistic will look exactly the opposite.

They'll be sensitive to other people's distress, better recognizing it, and we would see increased amygdala activation in response to that distress and maybe larger amygdalas as well.

So those are our hypotheses setting out.

That was exactly what we found.

The altruistic people that we tested on our very first study looked the opposite of people who were psychopathic.

They were relatively better at recognizing other people's fear.

And they were not better at recognizing other expressions.

So we also tested how well they recognized anger.

And they didn't recognize anger better.

In fact, they recognized it a little worse.

But they were very specifically sensitive to other people's distress.

And we also found that in our brain scanning studies, their amygdala showed more activation in response to images of other people's fear.

Whereas again, it did not show that response to other people's anger.

And finally, their amygdalas were on average about 8% larger than in a comparable group of adults that we also tested who were not altruistic kidney donors.

So social discounting reflects how you value other people's outcomes as a function of their social distance from you.

Basically, how much are you willing to sacrifice to benefit another person?

And most people in standard social discounting tasks are very willing to sacrifice to benefit people close to them, but their willingness to sacrifice drops dramatically, hyperbolically, as people become more socially distant.

Exactly.

And across testing sessions and countries, we see that people have very limited desire to share resources, to sacrifice, to benefit people that they don't know or barely know.

When we tested the altruistic kidney donors in the social discounting task, we found a curve unlike any that's ever been found in any social discounting task, which was a curve that dropped almost not at all across social distances.

So people who donate kidneys to strangers...

are willing to sacrifice as much to help a stranger as most people are willing to sacrifice to help somewhere between a distant friend and an acquaintance, even though they don't know that person at all.

That person's welfare clearly intrinsically matters to them.

Exactly.

They have a much wider circle of caring.

They view the outcomes of people they've never met before as intrinsically valuable, as something that it's worth caring about and worth sacrificing for.

So Harold was one of the first altruistic kidney donors in the country, and he was the first in Washington, D.C.

He actually donated to Georgetown, where I work.

And Harold came up with the idea to donate a kidney to a stranger on his own.

He had never known anybody who'd done it before, but he knew you could donate bone marrow to strangers, and he knew you could donate kidneys to people you know.

And so he thought, hey, if I could donate a kidney to somebody I know, and I don't know anybody that needs a kidney, why don't I just donate to somebody that needs a kidney?

And so he called around to several transplantation organizations and they sent him a bunch of pamphlets for deceased donation.

And he said, well, that's not what I want.

I want to donate to somebody now who needs my kidney.

And he didn't hear anything for a while.

And then eventually they ran a pilot program in D.C.

to try non-directed altruistic kidney donation.

The person that was chosen to receive Harold's kidney was a woman who had no eligible donors in her own circle and other people had been tested and was dying of kidney disease.

It's an awful disease.

Living on dialysis is like a living death is how people describe it.

And Harold didn't know who she was when he decided to donate to her.

He went into surgery, had a kidney removed.

It was planted into his recipient.

Transplant surgeons describe it as a Lazarus effect.

When there are very few diseases like this that you can perform a surgery, the kidney starts working immediately.

It starts producing urine right away.

And the person is like brought back to life.

You know, that a plant that has been watered in a time lapse...

is how quickly they're restored to health and life and vigor.

And it was a tremendous success.

I'm sure it contributed to the fact that we now have programs like this on a wider scale.

And Harold and his recipients remain very good friends to this day.

Yes, that's one of the most important things to know about altruistic kidney donors is that although many people who themselves would not consider donating a kidney find the choice to donate a kidney to a stranger in need of explanation,

actual donors feel exactly the opposite.

They think if you have two kidneys and you could survive just fine with one, which is true, that if another person is going to die unless they get your kidney, the choice to donate to them is the obvious choice.

It feels to them so intuitive and so clear that they have trouble understanding why anybody wouldn't make that decision.

Yes, it was something I was really surprised to discover when I started working with altruistic kidney donors.

And I thought maybe how humble they were about their choice to donate was sort of just a quirky little bug.

But I now believe it's an intrinsic feature of the decision to help other people.

Many donors I've worked with, I would say most donors, including Harold,

have told me that they're happy to take part in my research.

They're glad I'm doing it, but they're pretty sure I'm not going to find any differences between them and other adults because there's nothing special about them or anybody else who wants to donate a kidney.

It's just a function of having the right information, being in the right place at the right time.

It's something anybody could do.

And I've had many altruists reassure me that there's nothing special about them.

And that to me makes perfect sense because if you really do believe that you're the most special person, why would you want to share with somebody less special?

That doesn't make any sense.

The most special person should have all the kidneys.

But if you're such a humble person that you don't think you're any more special than anybody else, it does make complete sense that you would say, well, why should me, who's not in any way special, have all the kidney resources?

It really makes much more sense to allocate them among anybody who happens to need one.

I'm familiar with Danny Trejo from his role in Spy Kids, where he plays a villain, as he often does in the movies, because he has this very gravelly sounding voice and a craggy face and looks very forbidding.

And so he usually plays villains in the movies.

And so how did he come to your attention as an altruist?

Well, he was in the news for something very altruistic and heroic that he did.

He was running errands, I think, near his home one day when he witnessed a terrifying car crash when a sedan next to his car collided with an SUV and it resulted in this chain reaction that flipped this SUV upside down and inside was trapped a little boy who I believe had special needs along with his mother and his grandma.

And Trejo, as is often the case in these situations, reacted immediately.

He could smell gas trickling out of the wreckage of the cars.

But despite that, he crawled into the SUV, which was upside down at that point, and figured out how to extract the boy from the car and then sat by him and helped keep him calm while emergency rescuers got the rest of his family out of the car.

Absolutely.

His quotation was perfectly characteristic of how so many altruists and heroes describe their own actions.

What he said afterward was, people have to understand that God put us on this earth to help each other.

We're here to serve.

We're here to welcome.

We're here to love.

That's what we're supposed to be doing.

I'm just thankful to God because he let me do that today.

I think the implicit message was, it's not about me.

I'm not special.

I was just doing what any of us should do and what any of us could do in a similar situation.

Well, the researchers who study emotion know that there are different ways that you can appraise emotional situations or interpret those situations that do change the way that you're likely to act in those situations.

When you see a distressing situation, if somebody is in danger, for example, it's very upsetting.

And sometimes people tend to interpret those situations differently.

in a way that reduces their own negative feelings but doesn't induce them to act.

For example, there's probably nothing I can do.

Somebody else will help, for example.

But there are also hopeful ways that you could appraise situations like that.

For example, I bet that there's something I can do to alleviate that person's distress.

Maybe I could donate money in a way that would help people like this elsewhere in the world.

And we did find in a study that we conducted of altruists and controls that having a more hopeful appraisal pattern

was associated with being more likely to help people in need.

One of the really interesting things about altruistic kidney donors is even though they do have a lot of time to make their decision, it's not sort of a flash decision they have to make like a heroic rescuer.

They do report that the decision itself was made very quickly and spontaneously.

They discover that it's possible to donate a kidney to a stranger and that there's tens of thousands of Americans in need of a kidney on the waiting list.

And they often think essentially immediately, I'll do it.

I would love to do that.

Lenny Skutnik was a government worker who, in the early 80s, was carpooling home from his job in D.C.

to Virginia.

And while he was in the car, a plane taking off from Reagan National Airport crashed into the Potomac River.

It was a really horrific plane crash.

And, of course, all the traffic backed up on the bridge, and Skutnik ended up getting out and walking to the bridge and seeing...

all of these people who miraculously had survived the crash, but now were slowly freezing to death and or drowning in the icy river.

It was the middle of winter and the de-icing problem had been why the plane had crashed.

And obviously it took crews a long time to get to the scene of the crash, in part because of all the backups.

And Skutnik incredibly decided that he was going to help.

And he walked down to the banks of the Potomac and I think he took off his shoes and his coat and leaped into the river and ended up rescuing a woman who had been clinging, I think, to a piece of ice or a piece of wreckage in the river and bringing her to shore at enormous risk to his own life.

Absolutely not.

No, they almost always report that they didn't even think about anything before they started to act.

That oftentimes they hardly even realized what they were doing until they were in the middle of rescuing somebody.

And that afterwards, they often think, oh my gosh, I could have really been badly hurt or something else terrible could have happened.

But in the moment, no, they're not thinking about the risks and costs to themselves at all.

They really act immediately on a very, I think, sort of deep impulse.

Absolutely.

I think many people are surprised when I say that humans are an unusually altruistic species, but there's no question about it.

We are.

If you look across, for example, other primate species, humans are the most altruistic.

They're the most likely to share freely with other people with no expectation of benefit for themselves.

And the reason seems to be, maybe a little bit surprisingly, that humans are also what's called an alloparental species.

And that means that human adults are prepared to care and do care for infants who are not their own.

And that's not something you see in that many primate species.

But if you look across species, the very best predictor of how altruistic a species is, is how much care they provide for babies that are not their own.

And humans do this a lot.

And it seems to be the best explanation for why we're so altruistic.

It's truly astonishing.

And I think one of the reasons it's easy to forget is we spend so much of our life immersed in stories about the worst things that happen all around the world, which, of course, unfortunately, is what many social media and some traditional media sources are incentivized to tell us about.

And all that information pours into our brain about the terrible things that people do.

And it can leave people with sort of a cynical view that, oh, humans are so awful.

We do such awful things.

But what I always tell people is think about the interactions you have.

Think about the people around you in your real life that you spend time with and that you interact with.

How have those interactions been?

Have those people genuinely been pretty helpful, pretty cooperative, willing to help each other out in a pinch?

And when you do that, I think most people think, oh my gosh, I'm really lucky.

I spend my life surrounded by a lot of really nice people.

That's certainly true.

Humans, we believe, evolved to live in societies of 100 to 150 people where they very rarely would have encountered strangers.

And when they did, it was just as likely to be a dangerous interaction as one in which there would be any cooperation.

And it's only quite recently in the course of our species history that we've even had the capacity to know what is happening to people on the other side of the world and people that we've never met before.

Never mind help them.

And so I think in that context, it's really remarkable just how much time and energy and money people spend trying to help people who don't live in their town, don't live in their country, they've never met, they never will meet.

But still that person's welfare matters enough that people, many people, are willing to give and help.

Absolutely.

I think many people aren't aware of just how strange it was considered when blood donation first became a thing that anybody would want to open up their veins and let blood be taken out by a stranger and given to another stranger.

And in fact, you know, there are many places in the world where people really don't give blood in this way.

but I think in part because people are becoming generally more altruistic and certainly more toward a widening group of people over time.

And as that is happening, things like blood donation are becoming more normative.

And so it's become sort of a matter of course for many people that, oh,

blood donation is something you do.

If there's a national emergency, if there's a blood shortage, this is a way that we can all pitch in to help.

And so it's gone from, I think at one time, being a somewhat extraordinarily altruistic thing to do to being a more ordinary form of altruism.

And I hope that in the future, rare forms of altruism like donating bone marrow or donating organs will maybe follow the same course.

At the national level, we find that countries that are overall wealthier, that are healthier, people live longer, that have higher levels of education, and also where people report higher levels of flourishing and life satisfaction, we see much higher levels of altruism than countries in which both objective and subjective well-being are lower.

Isn't that remarkable?

I think that it's something that we should not overlook and think, oh, well, that's what billionaires are expected to do.

Why would they be expected to do that?

It's incredible that this is something that is so common among very wealthy people to just give their money away to help various causes.

And

Fortunately, it is something of a norm among the very wealthy.

Now, I will also say that it's true that people who are very selfish and narcissistic and greedy often desire to have a lot of money and power and status.

And so of course there are people of any strata of the wealth distribution who are very unselfish and people who are very selfish.

There's no question that that's true.

And there are some very selfish people who do seem to seek out a lot of wealth.

That said, if you look across the whole spectrum of objective well-being, including variables like social status and wealth, on average, it seems like the better off people are, the more likely they're willing to give to help others, which I think suggests that when people have the physical and psychological resources to help other people, helping other people is the natural thing to do, and it is what most people do.

It may seem a little bit paradoxical that if improved well-being leads to greater altruism, that times of crisis could also lead to greater altruism, but both things seem to be true.

This fact is very surprising because we're all familiar with stories like the Lord of the Flies where a disaster setting brings out the worst in people and causes them to turn on one another.

But if you look at real life scenarios of crises and disasters, it's astonishingly common how often people actually band together to help one another.

We saw after the COVID-19 pandemic that globally altruistic behavior went up in the aftermath of the pandemic.

People actually reported giving even more help to strangers, volunteering and donating to charity than they had before the pandemic.

Perhaps because that acute fear response we get in times of disaster actually motivates us.

It gives us the sort of urgency to help other people just the same way it gives us the sense of urgency about helping ourselves.

This is an incredible story.

A couple of years ago on a Florida beach, a riptide formed and sent two young boys, their parents and their grandmother, way out to sea.

And of course, riptides are very dangerous.

People drown on them all the time.

But what happened this particular day was that 70 strangers spontaneously formed a human chain out into the water that extended almost all the way to the drowning family.

And then a woman named Jessica Simmons and her husband swam out to the end of the human chain, rescued the family, and got them all back to safety one by one.

So it was a rush hour, a busy morning, and I had just returned from dropping my child off at school on foot.

And as I was walking down a very busy boulevard, I encountered a man standing on the side of the street with his hands cupped in front of him, but he was looking around into the trees around him.

And it was such strange behavior.

I had to stop and ask what was going on.

And he lowered his hands to reveal a fuzzy little baby blue jay crouched in them, its little black eyes glittering up at us.

Very calm, interestingly.

And he said, I saw this little baby bird out in the road, and I had to go and get it, but I have to go to work.

I don't know what to do.

And I said, well, I'll take over.

And so he dumped the little bird into my hands, and I –

took over scanning the trees around me, looking to see if there were any parents nearby that I could leave the baby with.

And there was just nothing.

And so I couldn't possibly leave it there.

And so I luckily was right next to a local vet.

And I wandered in with a bird, hoping dimly that maybe they would be able to help with the bird.

All they could do was give me a box to put it in.

And so I put the little baby bird in a box.

I walked home with it, called my local animal rescue center, and they said they would be happy to take the baby bird in.

And so I took about an hour out of my morning and dropped the baby bird off at a little wildlife center.

Absolutely.

And this really was a very good example of alloparental care when I look back on it.

I was not this baby bird's parent, but I was immediately willing to take over in loco parentis and provide the care it needed to make sure that it was going to survive.

And, again, it's such a tiny thing in the scheme of things.

It was just no huge sacrifice on my part.

But looking back, that altruistic impulse that I had to help, regardless of the fact that it was going to cost me certainly quite a bit of time and effort, really didn't matter to me at all.

I just needed to make sure that this little baby was going to be okay.

I found that I had grown very attached to it in a short period of time, and I kept track of it.

The Wildlife Center very kindly sent me emails about it, that it was being raised with a bunch of other blue jay fledglings that had been dropped off.

It had learned to fly.

It had learned to feed itself.

And then they let me know when it was finally ready to be released back into the wild.

Absolutely.

It's an incredible story.

So Booker was coming home one night with a couple members of his security detail.

And when they got close to his house, they discovered that the home of the neighbor next door was on fire.

Smoke was pouring through the windows and Booker's neighbor, whose name was Jacqueline Williams, was outside in the yard screaming that her daughter was still trapped inside the house on the second floor.

And what Booker said later is exactly what many, many heroic rescuers say, is that he acted without even thinking.

He jumped out of the car, he ran across the yard and started to run into the house with one of his security detail running right behind him.

And, of course, once he got into the door, he discovered that the air was full of smoke, and he could see hardly anything as he's gasping and choking his way up to the kitchen on the second floor.

Once they got there, they discovered that there were flames everywhere, going up the walls, across the ceiling.

They could hear little explosions, and the security detail, whose name was Rodriguez,

He was like, I've had enough.

We're not going any further.

He tried to get Booker to leave the house without rescuing his neighbor's daughter.

Booker refused.

They wrestled for a little bit.

Booker said, you know, you have to let me go in.

If I don't go in, she's going to die.

And so he, the detective said, okay.

And Booker plunged into the house, fought his way through the smoke into the bedroom where his neighbor's daughter was barely conscious.

flung her over his shoulder and staggered back through the kitchen, which was engulfed in flames at this point.

Burning embers are raining down on him.

And he finally makes it back out of the house and collapses into the yard where he was taken by ambulance to the hospital with injuries from smoke inhalation and second degree burns to his hands.

Absolutely.

So I think when we look at acts of courage like this from the outside, it's not obvious to us how the person is feeling on the inside.

And we often assume, well, I would be too afraid to do that.

That person must not have been afraid at all.

And some of the quotes on social media were really interesting.

hilarious in painting booker as this you know impervious to fear superhero um you know one of my favorite was uh when chuck norris the action hero has nightmares cory booker turns on the lights and sits with him until he falls asleep yeah one of my other favorites is somebody who posted cory booker isn't afraid of the dark the dark is afraid of cory booker

Absolutely not.

In every interview he gave after what happened, he was very honest about how terrified he had been throughout.

And I think it's really important to distinguish between people who are truly fearless, which is really a form of recklessness to not even log the danger that you're confronting in a scary situation, and people who are brave.

And people who are brave are people who recognize that there's a danger to themselves, who might feel quite frightened on their own behalf, but who realize that there's something more important than their fear for themselves and who act anyways in the face of their fear.

And that's real virtue.

And I hope that people can appreciate just how often real heroes are very frightened and they're acting anyhow.

Absolutely.

I've worked with many altruistic kidney donors who have true phobias of needles.

One 19-year-old altruistic kidney donor that we worked with would often faint when she got blood draws.

She was so frightened of needles.

And of course, you get a lot of blood draws in the process of donating a kidney.

But because she cared much more about the welfare of the person whose life she would be saving than she cared about her own discomfort or fear in the moment, it just didn't bother her that she would have to feel a little fear and discomfort in order to help.

That's exactly right.

Emotion is, I think, a good source of information, but it's a very bad boss.

We should never assume that our emotions are the true source of truth.

And oftentimes our fear is telling us to do things that aren't consistent with our values, right?

If you really do want to help somebody, it's normal to feel afraid when you know that there's a risk that you might be injured or that you might experience pain or discomfort.

And truly heroic people act in the face of that feeling and despite that feeling.

I think I had just a little taste of what some true heroes and altruists experience.

One summer afternoon when one of my kids was younger and had just learned how to swim and was paddling in a neighbor's pool and got trapped under like a life preserver shaped pool toy and didn't know how to tread water.

And so she started to sink underneath the surface of the water.

And just before her little face went under,

She screamed, Mommy, help me!

In this voice that like zapped like lightning through my brain.

And I truly acted without thinking.

I was in the pool, fully clothed, phone in my pocket, before I had thought even just for a second about what I was doing.

And I pulled her out from under the life preserver and I got her back onto shore.

And there was no thought whatsoever involved.

I was going to get in that pool and I was going to help her no matter what.

I can imagine the situation could have been much more dangerous for me and I would have acted exactly the same way.

And I think most parents would.

Absolutely.

I mean, it helps to remember that everybody out there once was a child, that many of us need help and assistance from other people as adults just the way that we all do when we're younger.

It's not something you ever completely grow out of.

And I think if we can adopt the same mentality when thinking of the needs of other people that we would when we're thinking about the needs of children, we would be much more inspired to help.

The capacity to work through your fear and frightening situations is a capacity that can be developed.

And there's pretty good evidence to suggest that people are more capable of acting bravely in dangerous situations when they've been in enough dangerous situations to be able to manage their fear and to have a good sense that they can handle it, right?

There's nothing like learning by experience that I've been in a dangerous situation, I felt scared, but it was okay.

I managed and I got through to the other side and I did what I wanted to do.

And so the more that we can expose ourselves to challenges and risks that give us the experience of feeling afraid and it being okay in the end, the more likely we are to act the way we want to in dangerous situations, including those when somebody else is in danger.

I think it's really quite interesting how often Hollywood actors who are action heroes leap in to help other people from danger, with Danny Trejo being one example, but the actors Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise and Kate Winslet and...

Benedict Cumberbatch.

There's an enormous number of celebrities who have helped real-life people in danger.

And I think it's not a 0% chance that that's because they have acted out, acting heroically in dangerous situations many times previously.

It's really as simple as that.

Oftentimes,

Changing your behavior comes before changing your mindset.

People often think, well, I need to change the way I feel about a situation before I change the way I act, when often it's the reverse.

Really, you have to just start doing the thing you want to do, and your brain, your mind, your mood will catch up later.

And so the best way to become more altruistic is to just start.

And start small.

Start as small as is comfortable.

Start as small as is easy.

But the best thing about altruism is that it feels really good.

for most people, it's intrinsically rewarding to help other people.

And this is true for a lot of reasons.

It's because we feel proud when we've done something consistent with our values.

We feel a sense of self-efficacy when we've acted to take on a situation that was challenging.

And of course, we feel the vicarious reward we get for making somebody else feel good.

And because altruism is reinforcing, the more we do it, the more we'll want to do it.

It is really hard when we confront all the suffering and challenges in the world to feel motivated to act because these problems can seem so big.

And I think there's very good reason to believe that our brains really didn't evolve to handle challenges at the kind of scope and scale that we have access to knowledge about at this moment in time.

And so I think it's really important to focus on the kinds of challenges that you can solve.

Just like forming any other plan, right?

If you want to act in ways that match your values, you think of what's the next step I can take to bring my actions closer to alignment with my values.

And so it's really important to just look around the world around you, the physical world that you inhabit, and think.

Take notice of situations where there's somebody who is in need.

This could be local charities where your actions really could make a difference.

It could be strangers that you pass by in the street who, if you're paying attention, you may see that they have a need, that they are in trouble in ways that you could help.

Yes, this was more recently on a local ski hill.

And one of my kids decided that they wanted to ski in the terrain park area of the ski hill.

And I am deeply afraid of terrain parks.

I am a fine skier, but I definitely do not like going very fast and I do not like doing jumps.

But I waited at the top of the terrain park while one of my kids decided to go down the terrain and

And lo and behold, they were not well enough equipped for this terrain park and ended up, you know, juddering over a bunch of bumps and then disappearing from sight, flying in the air and disappearing from sight.

And I panicked because I knew that they could have fallen in the spot that they were and hurt themselves really badly.

And before I knew it, I found myself flying through this terrain park, avoiding as best I could the really big jumps, much faster than I'm normally comfortable skiing.

to get to my child and make sure that she was okay.

Now, she had smashed her face pretty badly at the bottom of the series of jumps she'd been over and blood was pouring down her face and she wasn't very happy in the moment.

Luckily, she was okay.

But I do remember thinking afterward, that is the fastest I have skied in a very long time.

But I just, you know, as so many people I've talked to over the years have told me, you know, you don't think of yourself in the moment.

You just think of what the other person needs and about trying to help.