The Kindness of Strangers

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. 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 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, 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. 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, 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

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 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

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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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. 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, 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 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.

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 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 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, 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,

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 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. 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, 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

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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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? 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

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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, Royston Vizzer, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent Ben Davis. That

Pinus Lab was brought to you by Pushkin Industries. And meet doctor Laurie Sanders