Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dacher Keltner

The Evolution of Empathy

CHRISTOPHER BOEHM, PH.D., is a professor of anthropology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California and the author of Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Harvard University Press).

Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith

WE ARE WITNESSING a revolution in the scientific understanding of human nature. Where once science painted humans as self-seeking and warlike�simplified notions of killer apes and selfish genes that still permeate popular culture�today scientists of many disciplines are uncovering the deep roots of human goodness.

Greater Good magazine, which was launched in 2004, highlights this exciting new scientific research and fuses it with inspiring stories of compassion in action. In the process, it provides a bridge between social scientists and parents, educators, community leaders, and policy makers.

Greater Good magazine is published by the University of California, Berkeley�s Greater Good Science Center, an interdisciplinary research center devoted to the scientific understanding of happy and compassionate individuals, strong social bonds, and altruistic behavior. While serving the traditional tasks of a university research center�fostering groundbreaking scientific discoveries�the GGSC is unique in its commitment to helping people apply scientific research to their lives.

In the pages that follow, we present some of the best and most pathbreaking essays to have appeared in Greater Good magazine. These essays are the fruits of radical new developments in science: new evolutionary studies of peacemaking among our primate relatives; neuroscientific experiments that have identified the neural bases of emotions like love and compassion; discoveries of how hormones like oxytocin promote trust and generosity; and psychological studies of how and why people can be moved to practice kindness, even when it seems to cut against their own self-interest.

Taken together, this research challenges some long-held notions about human nature, revealing that the good in us is just as intrinsic to our species as the bad. Empathy, gratitude, compassion, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation, once thought to be aberrations from the tooth-and-claw natural order of things, are now being revealed as core features of primate evolution.

What�s more, as the essays in this volume reveal, this research offers new pathways to healthier bodies, marriages, workplaces, families, and cultures. For example, neuroscience suggests that when we give to others, our brain shows heightened activity in the nucleus accumbens, a region known to have many dopamine receptors and process rewards; in other words, kindness really is its own reward. Moreover, kindness is contagious: research finds that when we offer modest expressions of gratitude�the simple �thank you,� smile, or warm gaze�we prompt other people to reciprocate the kindness toward us and toward others.

This research suggests that compassionate behavior not only exemplifies a good, moral way to live, but carries great emotional and physical health benefits for compassionate people, their families, and their communities. More and more, it seems that rather than being irrational and superfluous, behaviors like compassion and kindness are actually conducive to human survival�and essential to human flourishing.

Our expectations for ourselves play a strong role in shaping our behavior. For too long a view of humans has prevailed that presupposes that we are wired to compete, to act aggressively, to pursue unbridled self-interest. These are no doubt facets of human nature, but they represent only half of the story. The essays in this volume reveal another story, one that places goodness at the center of human nature. Our contributors don�t deny the existence of the violence and selfishness we see in the world around us. But they do offer scientific evidence that another world is possible.

Dacher Keltner

HUMANS ARE SELFISH. It�s so easy to say. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good.

These kinds of claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotion. For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. Plato compared the human soul to a chariot: the intellect is the driver and the emotions are the horses. Life is a continual struggle to keep the emotions under control.

Even compassion, the concern we feel for another being�s welfare, has been treated with downright derision. Kant saw it as a weak and misguided sentiment: �Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings,� he said of compassion. Many question whether true compassion exists at all�or whether it is inherently motivated by self-interest.

Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest. These studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive�a view that has its origins in Darwin�s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Compassion and benevolence, this research suggests, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.

Frans B. M. de Waal

ONCE UPON A TIME, the United States had a president known for a peculiar facial display. In an act of controlled emotion, he would bite his lower lip and tell his audience, �I feel your pain.� Whether the display was sincere is not the issue here; how we are affected by another�s predicament is. Empathy is second nature to us, so much so that anyone devoid of it strikes us as dangerous or mentally ill.

At the movies, we can�t help but get inside the skin of the characters on the screen. We despair when their gigantic ship sinks; we exult when they finally stare into the eyes of a long-lost lover.

We are so used to empathy that we take it for granted; yet it is essential to human society as we know it. Our morality depends on it. How could anyone be expected to follow the golden rule without the capacity to mentally trade places with a fellow human being? It is logical to assume that this capacity came first, giving rise to the golden rule itself. The act of perspective taking is summed up by one of the most enduring definitions of empathy that we have, formulated by Adam Smith as �changing places in fancy with the sufferer.�

Even Smith, the father of economics, best known for emphasizing self-interest as the lifeblood of human economy, understood that the concepts of self-interest and empathy don�t conflict. Empathy makes us reach out to others, first just emotionally, but later in life also by understanding their situation.

This capacity likely evolved because it served our ancestors� survival in two ways. First, like every mammal, we need to be sensitive to the needs of our offspring. Second, our species depends on cooperation, which means that we do better if we are surrounded by healthy, capable group mates. Taking care of them is just a matter of enlightened self-interest.

Robert M. Sapolsky

IT USED TO BE THOUGHT that humans were the only savagely violent primate. �We are the only species that kills its own,� narrators intoned portentously in nature films several decades ago. That view fell by the wayside in the 1960s as it became clear that some other primates kill their fellows aplenty. Males kill; females kill. Some use their toolmaking skills to fashion bigger and better cudgels. Other primates even engage in what can only be called warfare�organized, proactive group violence directed at other populations.

Yet as field studies of primates expanded, what became most striking was the variation in social practices across species. Yes, some primate species have lives filled with violence, frequent and varied. But life among others is filled with communitarianism, egalitarianism, and cooperative child rearing.

Patterns emerged. In less aggressive species, such as gibbons or marmosets, groups tend to live in lush rain forests, where food is plentiful and life is easy. Females and males tend to be the same size, and the males lack secondary sexual markers, such as long, sharp canines or garish coloring. Couples mate for life, and males help substantially with child care. In violent species, such as baboons and rhesus monkeys, the opposite conditions prevail.

The most disquieting fact about the violent species was the apparent inevitability of their behavior. Certain species seemed simply to be the way they were, fixed products of the interplay of evolution and ecology, and that was that. And although human males might not be inflexibly polygamous or outfitted with bright red butts and 6-inch canines designed for tooth-to-tooth combat, it was clear that our species had at least as much in common with the violent primates as with the gentle ones. �In their nature� thus became �in our nature.� This was the humans-as-killer-apes theory popularized by the writer Robert Ardrey, according to which humans have as much chance of becoming intrinsically peaceful as they have of growing prehensile tails.

That view always had little more scientific rigor than a Planet of the Apes movie, but it took a great deal of field research to figure out just what should supplant it. After decades� more work, the picture has become quite interesting. Some primate species, it turns out, are indeed simply violent or peaceful, with their behavior driven by their social structures and ecological settings. More importantly, however, some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen and whether we humans can manage the trick ourselves.

Dave Grossman

DURING WORLD WAR II, U.S. Army Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall asked average soldiers how they conducted themselves in battle. Before that, it had always been assumed that the average soldier would kill in combat simply because his country and his leaders had told him to do so and because it might be essential to defend his own life and the lives of his friends. Marshall�s singularly unexpected discovery was that of every 100 men along the line of fire during the combat period, an average of only 15 to 20 �would take any part with their weapons.� This was consistently true, �whether the action was spread over a day, or two days, or three.�

Marshall was a U.S. Army historian in the Pacific theater during World War II and later became the official U.S. historian of the European theater of operations. He had a team of historians working for him, and they based their findings on individual and mass interviews with thousands of soldiers in more than 400 infantry companies immediately after they had been in close combat with German or Japanese troops. The results were consistently the same: only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run or hide�in many cases, they were willing to risk greater danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages. They simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.

Why did these men fail to fire? As a historian, psychologist, and soldier, I examined this question and studied the process of killing in combat. I have realized that there was one major factor missing from the common understanding of this process, a factor that answers this question and more: the simple and demonstrable fact that there is, within most men and women, an intense resistance to killing other people�a resistance so strong that in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it.

Indeed, the study of killing gives us good reason to feel optimistic about human nature, for it reveals that almost all of us are overwhelmingly reluctant to kill a member of our own species under just about any circumstance. Yet this understanding has also propelled armies to develop sophisticated methods for overcoming our innate aversion to killing, and as a result, we have seen a sharp increase in the magnitude and frequency of posttraumatic response among combat veterans. Because human beings are astonishingly resilient, most soldiers who return from war will be fine. But some will need help coping with memories of violence. When those soldiers return from war�especially an unpopular one like Iraq�society faces formidable moral and mental health challenges in caring for and reintegrating its veterans.

Christopher Boehm

RECENT AMERICAN POLITICS has been defined by a series of bitter power struggles�as when, for example, the Bush administration was accused of overstepping its authority with wiretaps and torture. In such conflicts we can see traces of countless earlier struggles, from the American Revolution to Watergate. Similar struggles for dominance and power take place in countries all over the world, and we even see them crop up in our local communities and family life.

Because they seem so universal, we have to consider that these problems might be intertwined with our genetic code, that they�re part of our evolutionary history. Indeed, if we are to fully understand why and how these conflicts arise, we must examine what comes naturally to us as a highly political species: Are humans predisposed to live freely, side by side as equals? Or are we more likely to form hierarchies where one person or group tries to dominate or subjugate another?

This question has generated long-standing philosophical disputes, but we now have enough data to propose some definite answers. Discoveries in the fields of anthropology and primatology suggest that though we may have a deeply rooted instinct to exert power over others, we also have what may be an equally strong aversion to abuses of power, along with some natural tendencies to punish people who commit those abuses.

Consider this fact: Before 10,000 years ago, only egalitarian societies existed on our planet�tiny societies with no strong leaders at all. Keeping in mind that gene selection requires at least a thousand generations to change our nature significantly, we must assume that most of our genes have evolved from the genetic makeup of people living in these small Paleolithic bands. This includes our �political genes,� if I may call them that. Yet, of course, we do not only see egalitarian societies in the world today; we also see nations ruled by fierce despots. So, somehow, prehistoric egalitarians set us up to live not only in egalitarian democracies but in these despotic nations as well.

I am careful to say �set us up,� for we are not speaking of hardwired, innately fixed patterns of action like an eyeblink or an uncontrollable scream of fear. Rather, we are talking about softwiring�behavioral propensities that make it very easy to learn certain kinds of behavior rather than others.

Over the years, researchers have tried to hypothesize what our softwired political and social propensities may be. But it was only in 1987 that Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham made a major breakthrough in his study of how human behavior relates to that of our closest primate relatives. In view of the fact that humans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees share a recent ancestor and more than 98 percent of their genes, Wrangham determined that any behaviors that all four of these species exhibit today must also have been present in their shared predecessor, which would have lived about 7 million years ago. He called this ancient ape the �common ancestor.�

Wrangham identified some social behaviors shared by all four species, including the tendency to live in groups and the willingness to attack members of the same species. But with respect to the common ancestral uses of power, he faced a problem: bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas were distinctly hierarchical, with aggressive alpha males; by contrast, human hunter-gatherers were egalitarian, suggesting that our species lacked both innate hierarchical tendencies and tendencies to develop leaders. This inconsistency made it impossible for Wrangham to determine how this ancestor used power, and therefore made it difficult to offer any definitive conclusions about human nature.

Puzzled by this human anomaly, I surveyed almost 50 small, nonliterate cultures, both bands and tribes�to see exactly how egalitarian they were, and why. I discovered that their egalitarian political arrangements were quite deliberate. They believed devoutly in maintaining political parity among adults. This belief was so strong that males who turned into selfish bullies or even tried to boss others around for reasons useful to the group were treated brutally, as moral deviants. The fact that on all continents, hunter-gatherers faced bullies or self-aggrandizing political upstarts�and faced them in spite of these strong egalitarian beliefs�told me that if these people had not so vigilantly worked against inequality, they would have soon turned hierarchical.

This new interpretation meant that by nature, today�s hunter-gatherers were prone to try to dominate one another, just like the three species of living apes�and therefore so were the common ancestor and humans all down the evolutionary line. In fact, because this urge to dominate is so intrinsic to humans� political nature, hunter-gatherers who wish to stay egalitarian have to use not only ostracism and shaming but also ejection from the group and sometimes even capital punishment to hold down power-hungry political upstarts. We must ask, then, why a species so inclined to domination has been motivated to insist that power be shared so equally. And here, I believe, is the answer: Just as all four of the aforementioned species have strong propensities to domination and submission, so do they also naturally resent being dominated.

This is obvious enough in a human hunting band, where upstarts who attempt to dominate others are dealt with so harshly. But it�s also obvious with chimpanzees that have been studied extensively. Both wild and captive males are extremely ambitious politically, and they invariably form political coalitions to try to unseat the alpha male. More striking is the fact that large coalitions can form in the wild to challenge domineering former alphas and run them out of the community. Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal�s studies with captive chimpanzees show that females, too, can band together to partially control their alphas. Captive gorillas, like wild and captive chimpanzees, may attack a dominant silverback they don�t like. And bonobos have relatively small female coalitions that routinely raise the power of female subordinates to a degree that puts females virtually on a par with the individually dominant males in competitive situations.

Because such rebellious behavior is found in all four primate species, the roots of this behavior appear to stretch back at least 7 million years. The common ancestor not only disliked being dominated; it ganged up actively in coalitions to cut down the power of its alphas or would-be alphas. And once we recognize that humans throughout prehistory have had to cope with this tension between attraction to power and desire for social parity, it�s much easier to see why power has always posed such a problem for our species�and why there can be such variety in human expressions of power today.

Nations are so large that it takes considerable concentration of power at the political center just to make them run, and they come, basically, in two brands. At one extreme is a centralized, autocratic government that has so much military or police power that it can impose degrees of political control beyond a chimpanzee alpha male�s wildest dreams. Typically, people ruled in this way�whether in the former Soviet Union or contemporary Iran�are highly ambivalent about the authority above them.

As a practical matter we may, of course, see benefits in having a strong, highly powerful figure govern us, especially when our groups become large and unwieldy. And if those in power are both generous and sensitive to people�s natural inclinations to dislike being dominated, even a strong dictatorship may be popularly accepted as �benign.� The problem with this unguarded approach is that the next strong leader to come along may be a selfish individual with despotic tendencies.

At the other extreme is our American democracy, in which people realize they need to be governed by a central authority but are determined to keep their leaders from accumulating power beyond what is necessary to keep the nation functioning. The basic assumption about human nature is that leaders will just naturally want to aggrandize their power. That�s why all democracies write checks and balances into their constitutions, which curb the power of leaders and guarantee rights to citizens. Democratic nations are never as egalitarian as hunting bands, yet the political dynamics are similar. For instance, just as an arrogant hunter can be deposed as band leader, Richard Nixon�s abuse of power led to his being forced to resign from office.

I do not mean to oversimplify the picture. As psychiatrist Erich Fromm has claimed, people may sometimes appreciate a powerful and even ruthlessly despotic leader. And long before Hitler came to power, sociologist Max Weber argued that people may submit their autonomy to an especially charismatic leader. (Think not only of Hitler but of the revered Japanese emperor Hirohito, a figure like Lenin, and perhaps, to a lesser degree, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.) But of course, many despots are without charisma and use bald coercive force to dominate resentful populations. In such situations, change may come either through violent revolution or, often enough, by historical evolution when a tyrant like Stalin dies.

For the most part, though, human history has rebuffed the claims of those political thinkers, most notably Thomas Hobbes, who have assumed that strong, authoritarian leadership is required to rule our inherently unruly species. Humans became both anatomically and culturally modern at least 45,000 years ago, and it�s a safe bet that the main political behavior we see today in foraging bands�their uniform insistence on keeping their political life reasonably egalitarian�goes even further back than that.

In effect, these egalitarian bands did something very special about the problem of power. They arrived at a largely implicit �social contract,� by which each political actor conceded his or her personal pursuit of dominance in order to remain at political parity with his or her peers. In doing so, hunter-gatherers were able to cooperate effectively because their societies were so small. Similarly, a large national democracy can do its best to vigilantly limit power and uphold civil rights. But just like a hunting band, it must watch carefully for would-be dictators in order to preemptively curb their power if need be and stand up to them decisively if they do get the bit in their teeth.

This theory about our political evolution helps us understand why we are so often ambivalent about power. Our genetic nature makes both its abuse and our counterreactions equally likely. And if these counterreactions don�t come strongly enough and in a timely fashion, this may bode badly for a nation�s citizens, subjecting them to harsh restrictions of their pursuits of liberty and happiness. Indeed, if that nation happens to be a world superpower, this can have disastrous consequences for an entire world of nations.

Michael E. McCullough

EARLY ON THE MORNING of October 26, 2001, 25-year-old Chante Mallard was driving home along Interstate 820, just southeast of Fort Worth, Texas, after a long night of partying. Fatigue, combined with the many substances in her bloodstream�alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy�had impaired her judgment and slowed her reaction time. As she rounded the horseshoe-shaped curve to merge onto Route 287, Mallard drove her car straight into a man who had been walking along the dark highway. Gregory Biggs, 37 years old, was catapulted onto the hood of Mallard�s car. His head and upper body went crashing through the windshield and landed on the passenger-side floorboard. His legs remained trapped inside the windshield.

With all of the drugs and the noise and the broken glass, Mallard was so disoriented at first that she didn�t even know that a human being was stuck in her windshield. When she realized what had happened, she stopped the car, got out, and went around to try and help. But as soon as she touched Biggs�s leg, she panicked. In her drug-addled state, she couldn�t figure out what to do next. So with Biggs still immobilized in the windshield, she drove the final mile back to her house, pulled into the garage, and closed the garage door behind her. Mallard let Biggs bleed to death right there in the garage. Over and over, Biggs begged Mallard to help him, but Mallard, a nurse�s aide, insisted there was nothing she could do for him. So she left him to die. Medical examiners would later testify that Biggs would surely have survived the crash had he received prompt medical attention.

The next night, Mallard and two friends dumped Biggs�s body in a nearby park. An informant told police that she had joked about the event later.

It was several months before the police received the tip that would lead them to Mallard. After her arrest, Mallard was tried and convicted of murder. She was sentenced to 50 years in prison. At her sentencing hearing, Biggs�s son Brandon had the opportunity to make a victim impact statement. Instead of using this opportunity to request the harshest possible sentence, Brandon said to the court and to Mallard�s family, �There�s no winners in a case like this. Just as we all lost Greg, you all will be losing your daughter.� Later, Brandon would go on to say, �I still want to extend my forgiveness to Chante Mallard and let her know that the Mallard family is in my prayers.�

An act of forgiveness like this is astonishing, but Brandon Biggs is hardly unique. In more than a decade of researching forgiveness, I�ve come across hundreds of stories like Brandon�s�acts of forgiveness for transgressions small and large. Over and over, I�ve been amazed by stories of people who seem to transcend the natural urge for revenge and, instead, find a way to forgive.

But for every one of those stories, you could probably counter with an equally astonishing story of vengeance. I also know these stories well: The grieving father who murders the air traffic controller he blames for his family�s death. The disenfranchised loner who, feeling abused by the system, takes a giant bulldozer, converts it into an assault vehicle, then razes the homes and workplaces of people who have caused him pain. The men whose desire for vengeance against what they view as an unjust foreign occupation leads them to capture westerners, behead them, and incinerate their bodies for the world to see.

In light of these outrageous, often tragic stories of revenge, you might be tempted to assume that people like Brandon Biggs possess some special trait that enables them to bypass the desire for vengeance. At the same time, it may seem that people who act on those urges for revenge are somehow defective, sick, or morally misshapen.

Both of those assumptions are wrong. My research on forgiveness has led me to this unsettling conclusion: The desire for revenge isn�t a disease that afflicts a few unfortunate people; rather it�s a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it helped our ancestors adapt to their environment.

But there�s some good news, too. Evolutionary science leads us squarely to the conclusion that the capacity for forgiveness, like the desire for revenge, is also an intrinsic feature of human nature, crafted by natural selection. Because revenge and forgiveness both solved problems for ancestral humans, these capacities are now typical of modern humans.

If the capacity to forgive and the desire for revenge really are standard-issue human social instincts, then there�s a hopeful possibility waiting in the wings: that we can make the world a less vengeful, more forgiving place, even when we�re forced to work with a fixed human nature. How do we do that? By making our social environments less abundant in the factors that elicit the desire for revenge and more abundant in the factors that elicit forgiveness. In other words, to increase forgiveness in the world, it doesn�t make sense to try to change human nature. It makes a lot more sense to try to change the world around us.

But to do that, we need to make sure that we�re seeing human nature for what it really is. Consider these three simple truths about forgiveness and revenge and their place in human nature.

Everett L. Worthington Jr.

WHEN CHRIS CARRIER was 10 years old, he was abducted near his Florida home, taken into the swamps, stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen with an ice pick, and then shot through the temple with a handgun. Remarkably, hours after being shot, he awoke with a headache, unable to see out of one eye. He stumbled to the highway and stopped a car, which took him to the hospital.

Years later, a police officer told Chris that the man suspected of his abduction lay close to death. �Confront him,� suggested the officer. Chris did more than that. He comforted his attacker during the man�s final weeks of life and ultimately forgave him, bringing peace to them both.

Chris Carrier�s act of forgiveness might seem unfathomable to some, an act of extreme charity or even foolishness. Indeed, our culture seems to perceive forgiveness as a sign of weakness, submission, or both. Often we find it easier to stigmatize or denigrate our enemies than to empathize with or forgive them. And in a society as competitive as ours, people may hesitate to forgive because they don�t want to relinquish the upper hand in a relationship. �It is much more agreeable to offend and later ask forgiveness than to be offended and grant forgiveness,� said the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. I think many people today are inclined to agree with him.

Surely now is a time when the world could use some more forgiveness. Americans resent the Muslim world for September 11. Iraqis and much of the Middle East feel humiliated by the United States. Diplomats in the United Nations bicker and insult each other, igniting or reigniting national rivalries. Still, many people hesitate to ask for or grant forgiveness when they feel they have nothing to gain in return.

But a new line of research suggests something different. This research has shown that Chris Carrier�s story isn�t an anomaly. Forgiveness isn�t just practiced by saints or martyrs, nor does it benefit only its recipients. Instead, studies are finding connections between forgiveness and physical, mental, and spiritual health and evidence that it plays a key role in the health of families, communities, and nations. Though this research is still young, it has already produced some exciting findings�and raised some important questions.

Michael Kosfeld

IMAGINE A BARE ROOM and two players sitting face to face, about to play a game. The first player is the �investor� the second player is the �trustee.�

At the outset of the game, both players are endowed with a set number of points�say, 12 each�with each point equivalent to real money.

The investor can transfer any amount to the trustee. On the way to the trustee, the investor�s transfer is tripled. So if the investor decides to transfer 8 points, the trustee receives 24 points on top of her original 12, for a total of 36.

The trustee can then return any amount of her points back to the investor. After she has made her transfer back, that�s it. The game is over. Each player tallies her points and the money she�ll receive.

The investor�s decision in this game is a decision of trust, which is why social scientists refer to this as the �trust game� and use it to test trusting behavior in different situations. The more the investor transfers to the trustee, the more she stands to profit in the end. But she must trust that the trustee will return a sufficiently large amount�at least as large as the original transfer�for the game to be profitable for her. And what if the trustee returns nothing?

The game nicely captures the fundamental dilemma of trust in human society. The decision to trust always entails the risk of being exploited or betrayed. Yet if people trust and the trust is rewarded, everyone is typically better off. To gain the benefits that come with trust, the trusting person must always overcome her natural aversion to the risk of betrayal.

Conventional economic theory maintains that people will always behave in a purely self-interested manner. According to this worldview, it makes no sense to trust, whether in a trust game or in real life, as any trust will be exploited. The trustee will always keep her entire windfall for herself, so the investor would be better off not transferring any money in the first place.

And yet when researchers like Joyce Berg and others have had people play the trust game with real monetary stakes, they have repeatedly found that the average investor will transfer half of her initial endowment and receive similar amounts in return. Through the trust game, researchers have also discovered a number of factors that seem to drive levels of trust. Familiarity breeds trust�players tend to trust each other more with each new game. So does introducing punishments for untrustworthy behavior or even just reminding players of their obligations to each other.

These studies have demonstrated the strength of human trust and that humans are truly worthy of this trust from one another. They have also improved our understanding of the social factors that determine trust. But two important questions remain: Is trust truly a biologically based part of human nature, and if so, what is it in the brain that makes humans trust each other?

Robert A. Emmons

ELIZABETH BARTLETT is a professor of political science at a midwestern university. At the age of 42, her irregular heartbeat had become life-threatening. A heart transplant was her last hope, and she was fortunate to receive one. In a book chronicling her journey, she writes that she felt thankful for her new lease on life�but simply feeling thankful wasn�t enough.

Jonathan Haidt

HERE�S A PUZZLE: Why do we care when a stranger does a good deed for another stranger? Most theories in the social sciences say that people�s actions and feelings are motivated by self-interest. So why are we sometimes moved to tears by the good deeds or heroic actions of others?

I believe we cannot have a full understanding of human morality until we can explain why and how human beings are so powerfully affected by the sight of a stranger helping another stranger. For the past several years, I have studied this feeling, which I call �elevation.� I have defined elevation as a warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.

Elevation is widely known across cultures and historical eras. You probably recognize it yourself. But for some reason, no psychologist has studied it empirically. Instead, psychologists have focused most of their energies on the negative moral emotions, especially guilt and anger. Psychologists have thought about morality primarily as a system of rules that prevents people from hurting each other and taking their possessions.

But I believe that morality is much richer and more balanced. Most people don�t want to rape, steal, and kill. What they really want is to live in a moral community where people treat each other well and in which they can satisfy their needs for love, productive work, and a sense of belonging to groups of which they are proud. We get a visceral sense that we do not live in such a moral world when we see people behave in petty, cruel, or selfish ways. But when we see a stranger perform a simple act of kindness for another stranger, it gives us a thrilling sense that maybe we do live in such a world. The fact that we can be so responsive to the good deeds of others�even when we do not benefit directly�is a very important facet of human nature. Yes, people can be terribly cruel, and we must continue our study of racism, violence, and other social ills. But there is a brighter side to human nature, too, and psychology ought to look more closely at it.

Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith

IT�S ONE THING to recognize the potential for human goodness, as contributors did in the previous section; it�s something else to realize that potential.

The essays that follow are intended to help us do just that. Each one offers concrete, research-tested steps for building stronger, more compassionate relationships with spouses, coworkers, friends, family, and other people in our daily lives.

It goes without saying that it can be difficult to take these steps, for human relationships are complicated and shaped by social context. Take, for example, empathy, a skill that is a fundamental building block to our individual happiness and well-being, as well as to a peaceful society. Like many pieces of advice, the age-old adages to �put yourself in someone else�s shoes� and �see the world from someone else�s perspective� can sound painfully naive. Indeed, they seem to go against human nature, serving as moralistic attempts to rein in our tendencies toward self-interest. Can we truly understand what other people are thinking or feeling�and if so, how?

Those are the questions at the heart of many of the following essays, several of which explore the human capacity for empathy and how it is related to behaviors like gratitude, forgiveness, and altruism. But it�s not always clear what the term empathy means and how it differs from other concepts, like sympathy. In this section, many contributors highlight what is sometimes called �perspective taking�: understanding what another person is seeing and feeling to the point that you actually begin to feel those same emotions yourself. (By contrast, sympathy involves recognizing the suffering of another person and feeling sorry for that person, but not sharing his or her sad or distressed emotions.)

With that definition of empathy in mind, it�s not hard to see why we should try to cultivate it. Perspective taking enables us to see things from our spouse�s point of view or helps us to build workplaces that demonstrate care and compassion for employees. Our sense of justice and fairness stems from our ability to really understand other people�s emotions and therefore respond to their suffering.

Gratitude is another seemingly simple skill that just doesn�t seem to fit into contemporary American society. Indeed, argues psychologist Robert Emmons in Part I of this book, �We�ve come to overlook, dismiss, or even disparage the significance of gratitude.� It�s easy to understand why. After all, �thank you� is one of the first phrases we teach children to say�how complicated could the concept be? We see gratitude as a basic form of politeness, like chewing with your mouth closed, and we don�t usually consider what deeper significance it may hold.

Yet the fact that we try to make �thank you� such an essential part of a child�s vocabulary and that children (and adults) often have a hard time bringing themselves to utter those two words suggests that gratitude is more complex than we typically assume. Indeed, as many contributors to this book make clear, true gratitude is more a state of mind than a single act, and it takes real effort to cultivate. The same can be said of forgiveness and apology and indeed any act that acknowledges our interdependence with other people and deepens our social ties.

Fortunately, we have good reason to believe that most of us can develop empathy and gratitude, as well as forgiveness and apology and other related skills�and there�s overwhelming evidence to suggest that we should. As several essays in this book reveal, skills like these can serve as powerful tools to build health, trust, cooperation, and respect between people in a number of daily situations, from home to work to politics.

The essays in this section do not deny that humans are capable of great selfishness and insensitivity and that there�s sometimes no greater challenge than simply getting out of our own skin and identifying with another human being. But while the advice to see from another person�s perspective may at times sound unrealistic, the following essays make clear that it�s advice we can all learn to follow.

Philip A. Cowan, Carolyn Pape Cowan, and Neera Mehta

RICK AND ANNA met on a blind date and immediately became enchanted with each other. They moved in together four months later, and after two more years they decided to get married. They planned to have kids after four years, and that worked like a charm. Jason came along right on schedule and his sister Debby arrived two years later. Unfortunately, somewhere over the years, not everything went according to plan. As we look in on Rick and Anna after they�ve been together for almost ten years, their early enchantment seems to exist only in wistful memory.

Rick returned home from work about half an hour ago. He�s slumped on the couch when Anna sees him in the living room.

Jess Alberts and Angela Trethewey

Fred Luskin

DELORES WAS GOOD-NATURED and attractive, but I could see the hurt in her eyes and the sorrow in the way she held herself. Though her parents were successful businesspeople who raised her in an upper middle-class neighborhood, her mother was cold and critical, while her father was quiet and aloof. Delores grew up feeling unattractive and uncared for, and she struggled to create strong relationships.

When Delores was 30, her fianc� Skip decided he was more interested in sleeping with local waitresses than remaining faithful to her. One day she came home and found him in bed with someone else. She saw this betrayal as an example of how unfair the world was�as proof that she never got a break. She was angry, hurt, confused, scared, and lonely. Skip moved out, but Delores constantly thought of begging him to return.

I met Delores when she came to a class I teach to help people learn to forgive others. She rarely spoke without mentioning at least one of the many people who had done her wrong. When she began the forgiveness training, she doubted it would do her any good. She was there because her therapist had recommended the class.

I�ve known many people like Delores. There�s no shortage of people in the world who�ve been hurt�by someone they love, by a friend, by someone they didn�t know at all. My classes rest on the simple and radical notion that how we react to these hurts is up to us. I teach people to make forgiving choices.

For eight years, I have directed the Stanford Forgiveness Projects, the largest interpersonal forgiveness training research projects ever conducted. In conjunction with this research, I teach classes and workshops that offer a concrete method for forgiving others. I stress that while pain and disappointment are inevitable, they need not control us. It is vital to our health and well-being that we handle what comes our way without getting mired in blame and suffering.

Through my research and teaching, I have found that forgiveness isn�t just wishful thinking. It�s a trainable skill. My colleagues and I have developed a nine-step method for forgiving almost any conceivable hurt. We have tested this method through a series of studies with people who had been lied to, cheated, abandoned, beaten, abused, or had their children murdered. They ranged from neglected spouses to the parents of terrorist victims in Northern Ireland.

What we have found is that forgiveness can reduce stress, blood pressure, anger, depression, and hurt, and it can increase optimism, hope, compassion, and physical vitality. For instance, in a study we conducted with Protestants and Catholics from Northern Ireland who had lost a family member in the violence there, participants reported a 40 percent decline in symptoms of depression after undergoing the forgiveness training. Another study involved people who had suffered a variety of hurts, from business partners lying to them to best friends abandoning them. Six months after their forgiveness training, these people reported a 70 percent drop in the degree of hurt they felt toward the person who had hurt them, and they said they felt more forgiving in general.

This does not mean that forgiveness is ever easy. It certainly wasn�t easy for Delores. But forgiveness was something she could learn to practice, even if it didn�t come naturally to her. Difficult as it was, Delores�s experience is emblematic of many others I�ve seen through this forgiveness training. Each story is different, but most follow a similar trajectory across the nine steps of forgiveness.

Jill Suttie

FIVE-FOOT TALL PANELS divide the physician�s billing department into a maze of cubicles at Foote Hospital, in Jackson, Michigan. Each cubicle contains one of the 39 employees who make up the billing office staff. Most of the employees are women, many are single mothers, and they spend each day on the phone trying to collect unpaid debts owed to the hospital. The work is repetitive and may seem uninspiring. Yet the hospital staff widely considers this department one of the best places to work at Foote.

�Our department is special,� said Sarah Boik, head of the billing unit. �People care about each other here.�

Deb LeJeune agrees. LeJeune had been on Boik�s staff for only five months when her husband needed a kidney transplant. She said she was worried and distracted in the days leading up to his operation and couldn�t concentrate at work. She needed to take six weeks off without pay to care for her husband, a financial strain she wasn�t sure she could handle. When her coworkers learned of her situation, they pitched in to make her a basket full of puzzles, books, and snacks she could take to the hospital, took up a collection to help her make her house payments, gave her gas cards to use for the drives back and forth from the hospital, and visited her at home just to check in on her.

�It was amazing!� said LeJeune. �I couldn�t have gotten through without their support. They are like family to me.�

These days, it�s rare to find people who consider their workplace �special� and feel close to their coworkers, let alone call them �family.� Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University, traces that fact to a steady deterioration in employer-employee relationships that began in the 1980s, when changes in technology, globalization, and a volatile stock market pushed major manufacturers to lay off large numbers of employees. Other organizations followed suit, and soon managers were hiring and firing their workers at will. �The downsizing surge in the �80s left employees feeling betrayed,� said Rousseau. �Employees no longer felt they could trust their employer to provide for them, so they had less attachment and loyalty toward their places of work.� Rousseau�s statements are borne out by statistics from a recent Gallup poll, which found that 59 percent of American workers are disengaged from work�putting in their time, but with no energy or passion for it�while another 14 percent are actively disengaged, acting out their unhappiness at work and undermining coworkers.

But a growing number of researchers, mainly at business schools across the country, are working to determine what�s behind anomalies like the Foote billing department, where ennui and malaise are displaced by excitement and compassion. This movement, called positive organizational scholarship, or POS, breaks with traditional business research. Instead of analyzing organizational failures, POS looks for examples of �positive deviance��cases in which organizations successfully cultivate inspiration and productivity among workers�and then tries to figure out what makes these groups tick, so that others might emulate them. �We�re a combination of positive psychology, sociology, and anthropology,� said Jane Dutton, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Michigan and a leader in the POS movement. �POS seeks to cultivate hope and a sense of possibility that people don�t always know is there.�

Over the last six years, Dutton and her colleagues have studied an array of organizational settings, including hospitals, universities, and businesses like Newsweek, Reuters, Macy�s, and Cisco Systems, using a combination of surveys, structured interviews, and observation to learn how organizations respond to employees experiencing personal difficulty. Their studies yielded some stories of compassion, where distressed workers received cards, flowers, financial help, emotional support, or time off from work; in other cases, workers complained of receiving little sympathy or help. �We found that employees who�d experienced compassion at work saw themselves, their coworkers, and the organization in a more positive light,� said Dutton. �Statistically, they demonstrated more positive emotions, such as joy and contentment, and more commitment toward the organization.� Interestingly, she added, these results held regardless of whether employees received compassion directly or merely witnessed it.

Dutton sees compassion as a natural response of people witnessing others in pain or distress�something we are hardwired to do. The problem with bringing compassion into the workplace, she explains, is that people don�t know what�s acceptable to express in that setting. Many workers assume that they are supposed to check their personal problems at the door when they enter the office. �Ever since organizations began moving toward more bureaucracy and measuring success by reliability and efficiency, the relational aspects of work have been de-emphasized,� said Dutton. But when stress at home inevitably spills into the workplace, Dutton added, it can contribute to lost productivity and higher health care costs, and compassion becomes a vital response. �If compassion heals, as our research suggests, then people will be able to get back to work more quickly, to bounce back from life�s setbacks,� she said. �This has to be of interest to employers.�

Thomas Wright, a researcher in the University of Nevada�s managerial sciences department, agrees that managers would do well to pay more attention to the mental health of their employees. In several studies, Wright has found that psychological well-being accounted for 10 to 25 percent of an employee�s job performance and was predictive of positive employee evaluations up to five years in the future. �Organizations that are able and willing to foster a psychologically well workforce and work environment are at a distinct competitive advantage,� said Wright. �Managers should take note.�

Apparently, some are. At Cisco Systems, a California company that creates technologies for the Internet, whenever an employee suffered a significant loss, such as a death in the family, CEO John Chambers made it a policy to contact that employee within 48 hours to offer his condolences and help. His example gave others within the organization a green light to act compassionately toward their coworkers, and employees consistently rate the company as one of the best places to work in the country. �When an organization�s capacity for compassion comes from the top, it can result in a kind of compassion contagion that sweeps the whole organization,� said Dutton.

Of course, not all organizations have charismatic leaders to serve as compassionate role models, but that�s not necessarily an obstacle to building a compassionate workplace. According to Monica Worline, a professor of organization and management at Emory University and a POS scholar, overt displays of compassion usually come from coworkers, not management. But through in-depth case studies of several organizations, she has found that organizations that implicitly encourage positive contact among employees, through regular meetings or by providing spaces for employees to gather together informally tend to have higher levels of compassion. Frequent interaction gives workers more opportunities to notice when someone needs help and to offer it; when workers share news and ideas, it helps foster empathy between them. �An organization which has high-quality connections between people will have much more fertile ground for compassion to happen,� said Worline.

Still, many organizations have neither a compassionate manager nor an environment that fosters compassion among colleagues. One financial analyst, who works for a large national bank in the San Francisco Bay Area and asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, spoke in an interview about his office environment, where employees work side by side every day but barely acknowledge each other. Having come from a smaller, more familial software company, he was surprised by the lack of camaraderie at the bank. But he soon found himself adjusting to the new environment, keeping his own natural friendliness in check. Then a coworker on his floor died suddenly over the holidays. �I expected a supervisor or someone to at least explain why he wasn�t there, but nobody talked about it. It was really weird,� he said. �I didn�t learn he�d died until I needed an office space for a new hire, and they suggested I use his.� Given the culture of his office, the incident wasn�t surprising, he said, but it made him question the heart of the organization.

Worline said that such environments take their toll on people working within them. �In extreme cases, employees leave,� she said. �But even those that stay will often quit doing the discretionary things they used to do for the organization, when they thought it cared.�

It isn�t always easy for a boss to accommodate employees, even when one is committed to demonstrating compassion. �All supervisors have to balance the needs of the corporation�which is all about money, earnings per share, and profitability�with the needs of the worker,� said Renee Knee, a senior vice president for SAP, a leading software company. She cited an example of a senior employee who had to leave the country suddenly because of a death in his family, just before the deadline of a multimillion-dollar project for which he was responsible. Though Knee gave him the time off, the ill-timed departure created extra stress in an office already under deadline pressure.

Organizations, especially businesses in competitive industries, always walk a fine line when giving employees time off in emergencies. But Worline suggests that the POS message about compassion sometimes gets misconstrued, as managers only focus on the bigger acts of compassion, such as time off and monetary gifts, which may make a big difference to workers but are not always easy to provide. �Just stopping by and listening to an employee in pain can make all the difference,� insists Worline. When giving talks to groups of managers, she tries to convey the importance of just paying attention to employees and noticing when they need help.

Worline, Dutton, and their POS colleagues recognize that problems can arise in practicing compassion at work. They note that compassionate acts must be tailored to the particular needs of each person. If a person suffers a traumatic event and wishes to remain private about it, he or she may not welcome attention or help from others, well-meaning as it might be. Programs like vacation pools, where employees donate small amounts of vacation time for coworkers in need, can create complicated ethical dilemmas: If an employee doesn�t contribute to the vacation pool, should she be allowed to dip into it herself? �Compassion, if applied differently to different employees, may create a perception of inequity,� said Worline. If applied in this spirit, it may even alienate employees, she argues.

Then there are the researchers who take issue with some of the basic objectives of POS. Ben Hunnicutt, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa, argues that efforts to make work life more rewarding and pleasurable distract from what he considers bigger goals for workers, like higher pay and shorter workweeks. Encouraging people to pursue satisfaction through work means that they�ll spend more time there and have less left for family, health, art, religion�the things, he argues, that really give meaning to people�s lives. �Work can never replace these important aspects of life, and we shouldn�t expect it to,� he said. �Instead of trying to make work better, we should all be working less.�

Dutton agrees that working less may help improve people�s lives, but she thinks American society is a long way from moving in that direction. If anything, people are working more than they used to, she said, and economic realities require people to spend more time at work. And she added that her work on compassion is not just relevant to work settings, but to organizational settings in general. The conditions that foster compassion at work apply to other contexts as well. �Whether we�re talking about work, schools, churches, or hospitals, we all spend time in organizations,� said Dutton. �POS is trying to understand how all organizations can be places of healing, where people feel alive and can flourish.�

There are signs that Dutton and her colleagues� ideas are gaining wider recognition, including the publication of POS scholarly work in journals aimed at business managers and the inclusion of a chapter on compassion in two recent management textbooks. When a POS article appeared in the Harvard Business Review in January 2005, over 200 individuals from businesses, schools, and hospitals called in to participate in an online conference with the authors, arranged by the magazine. Dutton says none of this would have happened even a few years ago.

�It�s exciting to see how interested people are in our work, how it energizes them,� she said. �They want to move toward more humane interactions at work, more compassionate responding. This is deeply motivating to me and my colleagues.�

Robert I. Sutton

WHEN I ARRIVED at Stanford University as a 29-year-old researcher, I was an inexperienced, ineffective, and extremely nervous teacher. I got poor teaching evaluations in my first year on the job, and I deserved them. I worked to become more effective in the classroom and was delighted to win the best-teacher award in my department (by student vote) at the graduation ceremony at the end of my third year.

But my delight evaporated when a more senior colleague ran up to me immediately after the ceremony, gave me a big hug, and whispered in my ear in a condescending tone (while sporting a broad smile for public consumption), �Well, Bob, now that you�ve satisfied the babies here on campus, perhaps you can settle down and do some real work.� She secretly and expertly extracted every ounce of joy I had been experiencing.

When I encounter a mean-spirited person like this, the first thing I think is, �Wow, what an asshole!�

I bet you do, too. You might call such people bullies, creeps, jerks, weasels, tormentors, tyrants, serial slammers, despots, or unconstrained egomaniacs, but for me at least, �asshole� best captures the fear and loathing that I have for these nasty people. And most of us, unfortunately, have to deal with assholes in our workplaces at one time or another.

Who deserves to be branded an asshole? I like to use two tests before passing judgment. First, after talking to the alleged asshole, do you feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled? In general, do you feel worse about yourself? Second, does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

I can assure you that after that interaction with my colleague�which lasted less than a minute�I felt worse about myself. I went from being the happiest I�d ever been about my work performance to worrying that my teaching award would be taken as a sign that I wasn�t serious enough about research (the main standard used for evaluating Stanford professors).

My colleague�s behavior also passes the second test because when the episode occurred, this person was further up the ladder than I was. I learned a lot about her from the way she treated one of her subordinates�in this case, me.

I believe the best test of a person�s character is how he or she treats those with less power. The brief nasty stares, the teasing and jokes that are really camouflaged public shaming and insults, the exclusion from minor and major gatherings�they�re all exercises of power, and they don�t just hurt for a moment. They have cumulative effects on our mental health and our commitment to our bosses, peers, and organizations.

Georgia State University professor Bennett Tepper�s research on abusive supervision, for example, examined a cross section of 712 adults in a midwestern city who worked in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors. He found that many of these employees had bosses who used ridicule, put-downs, the silent treatment, and insults. These demeaning acts drove people to quit their jobs at higher rates and sapped the effectiveness of those who remained. A six-month follow-up found that those still trapped in their jobs suffered from less work and life satisfaction, reduced commitment to employers, and heightened depression, anxiety, and burnout. Similar findings have been uncovered in dozens of other studies. They all suggest that assholes can severely undermine an organization�s productivity.

Given the psychological and financial harm done by assholes, you�d think that most organizations would refrain from hiring them or be quick to expel these creeps once their true selves are exposed. But it�s not so simple. Although I suspect that some people are genetically predisposed to be nasty, years of research has suggested that under certain circumstances, almost any of us is susceptible to becoming an asshole. This is especially true of people who assume positions of power. Study after study has found that giving people even a little bit of power over others can induce them to abuse that power. It isn�t just a myth: power can turn any of us into assholes.

Fortunately, there�s also evidence that we can limit the negative influences of power and keep our offices civil, supportive, and even inspiring places to work. I�ve identified several strategies for combating assholes�and preventing ourselves from becoming one of them.

Keith Oatley

�YOU BE THAT ONE,� I remember my daughter saying to a companion. �And I�ll be this one.� My daughter was about 5 at the time, and, as in the imaginary games played by children of that age, she and her friend were arranging roles. But they weren�t about to play a game. They were preparing to watch a movie.

We tend to think of movie watching or book reading as passive activities. That may be true physically, but it�s not true emotionally. When we watch a film or read a novel, we join ourselves to a character�s trajectory through the story world. We see things from their point of view�feel scared when they are threatened, wounded when they are hurt, pleased when they succeed. These feelings are familiar to us as readers or viewers. But our propensity to identify with characters is actually a remarkable demonstration of our ability to empathize with others.

When we examine this process of identification in fiction, we appreciate the importance of empathy�not only in enjoying works of literature, but in helping us form connections with those around us in the real world. The feelings elicited by fiction go beyond the words on a page or the images on a screen. Far from being solitary activities, reading books or watching movies or plays actually can help train us in the art of being human. These effects derive from our cognitive capacity for empathy, and there are indications that they can help shape our relationships with friends, family, and fellow citizens.

Alfie Kohn

FRANZ KAFKA once described war as a �monstrous failure of imagination.� In order to kill, one must cease to see individual human beings and instead reduce them to an abstraction: �the enemy.� Even in popular entertainment, the bad guys are never shown at home with their children. It�s easy to cheer the death of a caricature, not of a three-dimensional person.

But to step outside one�s own viewpoint and consider how the world looks to another person is one of the most remarkable capabilities of the human mind. Psychologists call this skill �perspective taking,� and it offers a foundation for morality. People who can�and do�think about how others experience the world are more likely to reach out and help those people�or at a minimum are less likely to harm them.

Taking another person�s perspective means realizing that in war, each person underneath our bombs is the center of his universe, just as you are the center of yours: he gets the flu, worries about his aged mother, likes sweets, falls in love�even though he lives half a world away and speaks a different language. To see things from his point of view is to recognize all the particulars that make him human, and ultimately it is to understand that his life is no less valuable than yours.

Less dramatically, many of the social problems we encounter on a daily basis can be understood as a failure of perspective taking. People who litter, block traffic by double-parking, or rip pages out of library books seem to be locked into themselves, unable or unwilling to imagine how others will have to deal with their thoughtlessness.

Developing the skill of perspective taking is a challenge; it�s something people need to practice from the time they�re young. So it�s imperative that we try to cultivate it in our kids.

There are different levels of perspective taking, of course, and more sophisticated versions may elude very young children. The best we may be able to hope for in the case of a 4-year-old is the rather primitive ethics of the Golden Rule. We might say (in a tone that sounds like an invitation to reflect, rather than a reprimand), �I notice you finished all the juice and didn�t leave any for Amy. How do you think you would feel if Amy did that?� The premise of this question, probably correct, is that both kids like juice and would be disappointed to find none available.

But George Bernard Shaw reminded us that this sort of assumption doesn�t always make sense. �Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you,� he advised. �Their tastes may not be the same.� And, we might add, their needs or values or backgrounds might not be the same either. Older children and adults can realize that it�s not enough to imagine ourselves in someone else�s situation: we have to imagine what they�re feeling in that situation. We have to see with their eyes rather than just with our own. We have to�if I may switch metaphors�ask not just what it�s like to be in their shoes, but what it�s like to have their feet.

So how can we promote perspective taking in our children? How can we help them to develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how things look from points of view other than their own? First, we can set an example. After a supermarket cashier says something rude to us, we can comment to our child who has witnessed this: �Huh. He didn�t seem to be in a very good mood today, did he? What do you think might have happened to that man that made him so grouchy? Do you think someone might have hurt his feelings?�

It is enormously powerful to say things like this to our kids, to teach them that we need not respond to an individual who acts unpleasantly by getting angry�or, for that matter, by blaming ourselves. Rather, we can attempt to enter the world of that other person. It�s our choice: Every day our children can watch us as we imagine someone else�s point of view�or they can watch us remain self-centered. Every day they can witness our efforts to see strangers as human beings�or they can witness our failure to do so.

Besides setting an example, we can also encourage perspective taking by discussing books and television shows with our kids in a way that highlights the characters� diverse perspectives. (�We�re seeing all of this through the eyes of the doctor, aren�t we? But what do you think the little girl is feeling about what just happened?�) We can even use perspective taking as a tool to help siblings resolve their conflicts. �Okay,� we might say, after a blowup. �Tell me what just happened, but pretend you�re your brother and describe how things might have seemed to him.�

Finally, we can help younger children become more sensitive to others� emotions by gently directing their attention to someone�s tone of voice, posture, or facial expression and by inviting them to reflect on what that person might be thinking and how he or she might be feeling. The point here is to build a skill (learning how to read other people), but also to promote a disposition (wanting to know how others are feeling and being willing to figure it out): �I know Grandma said it would be okay to go on another walk with you, but I noticed that she paused a few seconds before agreeing. And did you see how tired she seemed when she sat down just now?�

The very act of teaching kids to pick up on such cues can help them to develop the habit of seeing more deeply into others. It will encourage them to experience the world as another person does and perhaps to get a feel for what it�s like to be that other person. This is a major step toward wanting to help rather than to hurt�and, ultimately, toward becoming a better person oneself.

Jason Marsh

GROWING UP IN SAN FRANCISCO, a city renowned for its hedonism, Eve Ekman faced more than her fair share of temptations, especially when she got involved in the local punk scene as a teenager. Like most adolescents, she felt the urge to do some things she knew her parents wouldn�t approve of�go to clubs on weeknights, dabble with alcohol and marijuana�and which would require lying about where she was going and what she planned to do once she got there.

But unlike those other kids, Eve has a father who is one of the world�s leading experts on detecting lies. Paul Ekman, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, pioneered the scientific study of facial expressions and body language. For more than 50 years, his research has identified how emotions are subtly expressed through nonverbal cues; for much of that time, he has devoted special attention to how and why people tell lies and how others can catch those lies. His work has been used by police departments, teachers, and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In 2001, the American Psychological Association named Ekman one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century.

It sounds like every kid�s worst nightmare: the parent who always knows whether you�re telling the truth. But when it came down to it, Paul Ekman�s scientific expertise on lying was of limited usefulness to Paul Ekman the parent.

�I have been studying lying professionally for more than 20 years, but it was not easy to deal with it as a parent,� he wrote in his 1989 book, Why Kids Lie: How Parents Can Encourage Truthfulness, which includes chapters by his wife, Mary Ann Mason, a professor and former dean at the University of California, Berkeley, and his son Tom, Eve�s older brother. Indeed, as that book makes clear, it is one thing to be able to catch a kid in a lie; it�s something very different to be able to raise a trustworthy child.

So how does an expert on lying, deception, and truthfulness try to foster trust and trustworthiness? Paul and Eve, who is now 28, recently sat down with Greater Good�s editor-in-chief, Jason Marsh, to discuss the benefits of trusting your kids (even when it�s nerve-wracking to do so), how to encourage trustworthy behavior, and what it takes to build trust between parents and children.

EVE EKMAN: Do you ever remember catching me for anything when I broke your trust, or a time you caught me dead in a lie?

PAUL EKMAN: Nope. When I suspected that you had done something wrong, I went to some length to avoid putting you in a position where you would have to lie. Instead, when I was worried about you, I would ask leading questions like, �Is there something on your mind? Is there something you want to talk about?�

In that way, you had the opportunity to disclose on your own. I did not want to ask you every day if you had gotten into trouble, but there was a rule of disclosure. There were very few things I expected, but if you did not tell me, it was a lie.

I remember once, when I had heard you come in after curfew, I asked you, �What happened the other night? I heard you come in late.� So I was already telling you, �I know you did that,� without trying to catch you in a lie.

The issue clearly arises in every generation. I lied to my parents all the time. They were very restrictive, invading my privacy continuously. The challenge of my adolescence was learning how to outwit them, which I did. I had an entirely secret life.

EVE: So you are saying it is the nature of the relationship with the child that determines the role of trust and lying?

PAUL: Yes, certainly so. The role of the parent is an extremely difficult one because you have to keep moving backward. When parents start out, they are completely responsible for their child, who is totally helpless. As that child grows, you have to roll back, you have to grant control; otherwise, your child can�t grow. You have to be able to live with the fact that as you grant the child more autonomy, they will get into all sorts of trouble. But you ultimately have to leave it up to them.

JASON MARSH: It seems like this could be difficult advice to follow, to trust that much. What was it from your research, or personal experience, that motivated you to take this approach?

PAUL: It wasn�t based on research, mine or anyone else�s. It was based on my own experience with parents who did just the opposite. They did everything they could to try to interfere with my life, and they were the last people I would have ever turned to when I was a child. I wanted to be the first people my kids would turn to.

It took some restraint, because worry was my middle name, way before I ever had a child. But I think, for children, the most important thing is to feel they can trust that their parents, whether they approve or disapprove, will always be available for help and support. If that�s not the case, then I think you�ve really failed as a parent.

JASON MARSH: Eve, what kind of effect do you think this kind of parenting style had on your behavior growing up, and on your feelings of trust toward your parents?

EVE: I was not your conventional good girl. But I definitely did not want to disappoint the trust they gave me, because I thought they were cool, and I liked them. They weren�t just authority figures; they were very open and available and accessible. And if I challenged what they did, they would explain it to me. It wasn�t like, �Because I said so.� There was always an explanation of why, and I guess that helped build trust. I always felt like, even in the worst-case scenarios, they would be the first person I would call. Still, to this day, I call them first when I have trouble.

PAUL: I remember the call from jail.

EVE: That was when I was arrested for protesting the war in Iraq.

JASON MARSH: Paul, do you think that by being so trusting, you not only earned the trust of your kids but also actually helped make them more trustworthy?

PAUL: Yes. I didn�t want them to get started on my path of lying to my parents. Because I do believe that it�s a slippery slope: you start lying once, you lie another time, you lie about more things, and you�ve crossed the threshold. And I didn�t want to put them in a position where they would cross that threshold.

EVE: What kinds of difficulties do parents encounter even when they want to put this kind of trust in their kids?

PAUL: A major difficulty is that so much changes from generation to generation. What was normative in one generation can shift greatly�changing sexual morality, recreational drugs. Parents have a hard time trusting that their kids are prepared to deal with these things that are so new to the parents.

Beyond that, there is the difficulty of giving up control. Many parents are control freaks, and that is in part because they do not want to worry. And in ways they are right to worry�adolescents take risks that are very dangerous.

EVE: But it starts before adolescence, right?

PAUL: It stars at 3 to 5 years of age, and it gets really strong in adolescence.

The Dalai Lama asked me once, �What is destructive compassion?� And I said that destructive compassion is when you are so worried about your child that you overcontrol them.

Since I work in this area and think about this area, I try to be very explicit and never put anyone in the position where they feel they have to lie to me. If they think that I am going to be a strict disciplinarian, that will change the relationship as well. The major research I have done shows that the main reason people lie is to avoid being punished.

JASON MARSH: But it seems that a lot of parents feel caught in a catch-22. They may understand why it�s important to trust their kids, but they may not feel that their kid is worthy of that trust. What can parents do to help encourage the kind of truthfulness in their kids that makes them more comfortable trusting those kids?

PAUL: They can do things all the time�over the dining room table, with stories, when they�re playing Chutes and Ladders and kids get tempted to cheat in the game. I really think up to the age of 10 or 11, children are zealots for the truth�they really don�t want to mislead or be misled. So you can build on that.

You can do it by example. When Eve was born, I quit smoking after I had smoked for 30 years. And I also decided I was going to try to see if I could lead my life without lying to anyone about anything. It was much harder to do that�to figure out ways to be truthful without being harmful or insulting, to stay polite but be truthful. And it became a real challenge. But I also thought, �I�m going to try to do this because that�s the example I want to be showing. I want my kids to see that there�s a way to be truthful.� It was very deliberate.

Parents also need to establish the rules of disclosure and the obligations that come with their trust. For instance, we always made very clear to both of our kids that if they got into trouble in school, they were obliged to tell us. So if they didn�t tell us, then they were lying to us. That meant we had to define �trouble.� Trouble meant they were held after school or called to the principal�s office. That�s a rule of disclosure.

We need to spell out these rules and obligations in any relationship. In the business world, do you have to tell your employer if you�re looking for another job? Does your employer need to tell you if they�re thinking of cutting your position? What are the rules of disclosure? They�re never revealed. They�re kept ambiguous. That just makes for a lot of distrust and bad work relationships. Same in marriages. I have one colleague who told me, �My rule is that anything I do out of town is okay.� I said, �Does your spouse know that?� He never felt he needed to tell his spouse about it. There was no disclosure. It�s just the basis for misunderstanding and distrust.

JASON MARSH: Eve, do you think that growing up with those rules has affected your relationships with others?

EVE: It�s funny because as my dad was speaking, I was thinking about how I really do respect authority. Even though I think I�m a dissenter at heart, I definitely respect authority. You know, I�m afraid of getting caught, and that helps me not do things wrong. I was arrested once, but that was simply because I was protesting. Other than that, I�ve never broken the law. I�ve only gotten one ticket.

In general, I hope that when punishment is exacted, it�s fair and just, and I do think that was modeled to me from my family relationships. I think if there�s an inconsistent message, I could imagine feeling like, �Well, those laws don�t apply to me.�

And in my personal relationships with friends, as well as romantic relationships, I definitely think trust is core. I definitely know I�m someone people depend on. I�m a social worker, that�s my profession, but I also feel I�m the person who people call when things are really hard and they need someone they can trust. And I feel really respectful of that role, and I appreciate it.

I think you experience people�s family life through how they interact with you, and I feel like I�ve been the beneficiary of a great deal of trust, and I myself am trusting. But I�ve been burned. I remember talking with my dad about it at one point, like, �Why do I feel disappointed? I feel like I�m trusting, and I�m not sure that�s always met.� Like, in my early 20s, when I first started to have really meaningful and important relationships outside of family, I found there were some people for whom family wasn�t a model of trust and for whom learning trust was new. And so they would maybe play people off each other, do those kinds of things that ultimately will burn you.

JASON MARSH: So Paul, when you hear Eve talk about her ability to trust others and instill trust in others toward her, I wonder if you could step back and, putting on your psychologist�s hat, draw on some research to explain why that may be. How might the particular parenting style that you�ve practiced foster that trustworthiness over time? And perhaps even more importantly, what could be the negative consequences of not fostering that sense of trust and trustworthiness?

PAUL: There are a lot of clinical reports of people who are commitment adverse and can�t trust others. Based on their reports of their childhood, it seems that this is often a result of how they were brought up. They found they couldn�t trust their parents because their parents broke their promises or their commitments. And unreliability can be very damaging.

When I was 13, I spent five weeks rehearsing to play a role in a Gilbert and Sullivan show, The Mikado, for one performance, which my parents missed by 2 hours. I never forgave them for that. That was very decisive for me, that unreliability. Something like that can make it quite a struggle for you to trust others. Quite a struggle.

But there�s been much less scientific attention given to the positive side: What does positive parental behavior that earns trust look like? What are its benefits? Psychologists study problems; we don�t study success. But I would expect just the reverse�that people who were trusting as children grow up being able to be trustworthy.

JASON MARSH: Some parents might try to earn their kids� trust, but they might not exhibit trust toward their kids in return. What could be the consequences of not demonstrating trust toward your kids?

PAUL: You have children who are either crippled by the overcontrolling, micromanaging parent or who become devious in order to get their freedom. They�ve got to grow, and they are increasingly capable of acting independently. So they�re going to find a way to do so, or you�re going to destroy them.

If they find a way to gain autonomy through deviousness, through gaming the system, that�s really a bad way to learn it because once you learn how to do it with your parents, there�s a lot of temptation to do it with everybody else. That brings short-term gains and long-term losses. But if you�re the type who just goes from one relationship to another, then you may never realize what you�re losing�until you get late in your life and you feel you haven�t built anything.

JASON MARSH: Based on research and your own experience, is it possible for you to sum up what you believe is most important to raising kids who are both trusting and trustworthy?

PAUL: The two are related. People who are distrustful are usually not very trustworthy themselves, and difficult to deal with.

You have a fundamental choice to make about how you�re going to lead your life: Are you going to be suspicious and risk disbelieving people who are truthful? Or are you going to be trusting and risk being misled? As a parent, you always need to be trusting and risk being misled. Being wrongly accused is terrible. And it is less pleasant to live your life being suspicious all the time, unless you are a police investigator. And you do not need to be an investigator in your home.

EVE: Is there such as thing as too much trust?

PAUL: No.

EVE: Really? Even when your kids are lying to you, and you know they�re lying to you?

PAUL: There is no general rule.

EVE: I imagine people who read your book Why Kids Lie would want to be able to better catch their kids in lies.

PAUL: But that absolutely was not my intention; my intention was to explain to parents why kids lie, not how to catch them in lies. There is nothing in the book that teaches how to detect lies. That is not your job as a parent to be the cop, to be the interrogator. You must be the teacher, or the model. You want to talk to your kids about the real costs of lying. The real cost is not being trusted. If you are not trusted, it makes all intimate relationships impossible.

EVE: I did trust you and always felt you had my best intention in mind. I sometimes felt that I knew how to take care of myself more than you could give me credit for, but I think that is a pretty natural part of growing up and wanting full freedom.

To this day, I think that trust is present in my everyday thinking. When I am making a hard or risky decision, I think, �What would my parents think?�

PAUL: Having had parents who made every mistake you could make�they were good models of what not to do.

EVE: So, do you trust me?

PAUL: Of course.

Daniel Goleman

WE OFTEN EMPHASIZE the importance of keeping cool in a crisis. But sometimes coolness can give way to detachment and apathy.

We saw a perfect example of this in the response to Hurricane Katrina, whose devastation was amplified enormously by the lackadaisical response from the agencies charged with managing the emergency. As we all witnessed, leaders at the highest levels were weirdly detached, despite the abundant evidence on our TV screens that they needed to snap to action. The victims� pain was exacerbated by such indifference to their suffering. So as we prepare for the next Katrina-like disaster, what can the science of social intelligence�especially research into empathy�teach policy makers and first responders about the best way to handle themselves during such a crisis?

This brings me to psychologist Paul Ekman, an expert on our ability to read and respond to others� emotions. When I recently spoke with Ekman, he discussed three main ways we can empathize with others, understanding their emotions as our own. The differences between these forms of empathy highlight the challenges we face in responding to other people�s pain. But they also make clear how the right approach can move us to compassionate action.

The first form is �cognitive empathy,� simply knowing how the other person feels and what they might be thinking. Sometimes called perspective taking, this kind of empathy can help in, say, a negotiation or in motivating people. A study at the University of Birmingham found, for example, that managers who are good at perspective taking were able to move workers to give their best efforts.

But cognitive empathy can illustrate the �too cold to care� phenomenon: when people try to understand another person�s point of view without internalizing his or her emotions, they can be so detached that they�re not motivated to do anything to actually help that person.

In fact, those who fall within psychology�s �dark triad��narcissists, Machiavellians, and sociopaths�can actually put cognitive empathy to use in hurting people. As Ekman told me, a torturer needs this ability, if only to better calibrate his cruelty. Talented political operatives can read people�s emotions to their own advantage, without necessarily caring about those people very much.

And so cognitive empathy alone is not enough. We also need what Ekman calls �emotional empathy��when you physically feel what other people feel, as though their emotions were contagious. This emotional contagion depends in large part on cells in the brain called mirror neurons, which fire when we sense another�s emotional state, creating an echo of that state inside our own minds. Emotional empathy attunes us to another person�s inner emotional world, a plus for a wide range of professions, from sales to nursing�not to mention for any parent or lover.

But wait: emotional empathy has a downside, too, especially for first responders. In a state of emotional empathy, people sometimes lack the ability to manage their own distressing emotions, which can lead to paralysis and psychological exhaustion. Medical professionals often inoculate themselves against this kind of burnout by developing a sense of detachment from their patients.

Cultivated detachment in rescue, medical, and social workers can actually help the victims of disaster. Ekman told me about his daughter, a social worker at a large city hospital. In her situation, he said, she can�t afford to let emotional empathy overwhelm her. �My daughter�s clients don�t want her to cry when they�re crying,� he says.

The danger arises when detachment leads to indifference, rather than to well-calibrated caring. Today, we face this problem on a global level. �One of the problems of living in a television society is that every bit of suffering and misery that occurs anywhere in the world is shown to us,� says Ekman�and generally, we can�t do anything about it, at least not directly.

This can make emotional empathy seem futile and hinder the growth of the third kind of empathy, which Ekman calls �compassionate empathy.� With this kind of empathy, we not only understand a person�s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed.

Compassionate empathy was the vital ingredient missing from the top-level response to Hurricane Katrina�and in responses to many other disasters around the world, including the slow-burning disaster of global warming. Ekman calls compassionate empathy a skill, the acquired knowledge �that we�re all connected.�

This can lead to outbursts of what he calls �constructive anger.� In other words, reacting negatively to injustice or suffering can motivate us to work with others to make the world a better place. Just as empathy has its downsides, negative emotions like anger can have upsides. Staying cool in a crisis might bring some benefits. But sometimes we must let ourselves get hot in order to help.

Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith

CULTIVATING GOODNESS in ourselves is not just an end in itself; it is also a pathway to cultivating goodness in society at large. In fact, the main mission of Greater Good magazine is to show how the great potential for human goodness extends outward from the individual psyche to the larger society.

As research reveals, the ability to act on behalf of the greater good can not only improve our personal health and our relationships with other others�it can practically or symbolically promote peace in our society and between cultures. As Robert Reich, Steven Pinker, Dacher Keltner, Jan Egeland, and others argue in the following essays, empathy, compassion, generosity, and heroism are not luxuries, �discarded in disaster as one might shed a gold bar while trying to escape a sinking ship� (to quote sociologist Lee Clarke in an essay he wrote for the Summer 2008 issue of Greater Good). They are intrinsic to human nature and essential to our survival as a species.

Reading these essays cannot guarantee that you�ll spring to action the next time you see a pedestrian collapse on the sidewalk or that you will immediately seek solutions to global warming. The inhibitions to action can be overwhelming, and are sometimes justified.

But these essays provide scientific insight into why we so readily, and at times unconsciously, assume the role of the bystander. In the process, they help to displace the shame and confusion we sometimes feel when we don�t demonstrate the courage of our convictions.

Just as it takes practice to cultivate some of the other behaviors and emotions we�ve examined in this book�forgiveness, compassion, empathy�we may have to work to overcome our tendency to sit on the sidelines. But as Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo argue in their essay, our capacity for heroism is as natural to us as our inclinations toward apathy; nurturing heroism requires education, inspiration, and opportunities for reflection.

Of course, no cure exists for all the problems that plague this planet, just as there�s no easy fix for a damaged relationship. But the science and stories featured in this book convey that we can always take steps in the right direction. They show us again and again how true political and social progress often stems from changes we can all learn to make in the way we relate to ourselves and others.

Dacher Keltner and Jason Marsh

FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, Peggy Kirihara has felt guilty about Stewart.

Peggy liked Stewart. They went to high school together. Their fathers were friends, both farmers in California�s Central Valley, and Peggy would always say hi when she passed Stewart in the hall.

Yet every day when Stewart boarded their school bus, a couple of boys would tease him mercilessly. And every day, Peggy would just sit in her seat, silent.

�I was dying inside for him,� she says. �There were enough of us on the bus who were feeling awful. We could have done something. But none of us said anything.�

Peggy still can�t explain why she didn�t stick up for Stewart. She had known his tormenters since they were all little kids, and she didn�t find them threatening. She thinks if she had spoken up on his behalf, other kids might have chimed in to make the teasing stop.

But perhaps most surprising and distressing to Peggy is that she considers herself an assertive and moral person, yet those convictions weren�t backed up by her conduct on the bus.

�I think I would say something now, but I don�t know for sure,� she says. �Maybe if I saw someone being beaten up and killed, I�d just stand there. That still worries me.�

Many of us share Peggy�s concern. We�ve all found ourselves in similar situations: the times we�ve seen someone harassed on the street and didn�t intervene; when we�ve driven past a car stranded by the side of the road, assuming another driver would pull over to help; even when we�ve noticed litter on the sidewalk and left it for someone else to pick up. We witness a problem, consider some kind of positive action, then respond by doing�nothing. Something holds us back. We remain bystanders.

Why don�t we help in these situations? Why do we sometimes put our moral instincts in shackles? These are questions that haunt all of us, and they apply well beyond the fleeting scenarios described above. Every day we serve as bystanders to the world around us�not just to people in need on the street but to larger social, political, and environmental problems that concern us, but which we feel powerless to address on our own. Indeed, the bystander phenomenon pervades the history of the past century.

�The bystander is a modern archetype, from the Holocaust to the genocide in Rwanda to the current environmental crisis,� says Charles Garfield, a clinical professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine who is writing a book about the psychological differences between bystanders and people who display moral courage.

�Why,� asks Garfield, �do some people respond to these crises while others don�t?�

In the shadow of these crises, researchers have spent the past few decades trying to answer Garfield�s question. Their findings reveal a valuable story about human nature. Often, only subtle differences separate the bystanders from the morally courageous people of the world. Most of us, it seems, have the potential to fall into either category. It is the slight, seemingly insignificant details in a situation that can push us one way or the other.

Researchers have identified some of the invisible forces that restrain us from acting on our own moral instincts while also suggesting how we might fight back against these unseen inhibitors of altruism. Taken together, these results offer a scientific understanding for what spurs us to everyday altruism and a lifetime of activism, and what induces us to remain bystanders.

Jason Marsh

THE WEALTHIEST 1 PERCENT of Americans now make 70 times more in after-tax income than the bottom one-fifth of households. Since 2002, the average inflation-adjusted income of the wealthiest 1 percent has risen 42 percent, while the income of the bottom 90 percent of households has risen about 4.7 percent.

Robert Reich has been one of the most prominent critics of these growing inequities. Reich, who is now a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley, has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, where he implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act and led a national fight against sweatshops in the United States and illegal child labor around the world. He has also written 11 books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, and most recently, Supercapitalism.

Reich�s writings and lectures stand apart from those of other critics who focus on inequality. He doesn�t settle for easy condemnations of outsourcing or offshoring, nor does he think such effects of globalization can be easily undone. At the same time, he rejects the idea that these changes need result in greater disparities of wealth.

Instead, Reich attributes rising inequality not only to structural economic changes but to how Americans, and their policy makers, have failed to meet the social challenges posed by the new economy. While others point fingers at the government or big corporations, Reich also holds a mirror up to American society.

To Reich, rising inequality is intertwined with a breakdown of Americans� social contract�the norms, mores, and values that dictate their mutual commitments and responsibilities to one another. In this fall 2004 interview with Greater Good, Reich explored the political implications of our emotions and values.

Meredith Maran

PHILOSOPHER-PHYSICIAN ALBERT SCHWEITZER once said, �The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.�

Kate Hanni, 48, a real estate broker in Napa, California, is living proof�emphasis on living. On June 21, 2006, she was lured to a million-dollar home by a man who�d posed as a home buyer, then attacked her when she arrived. For 25 minutes he beat, stabbed, and tortured her, then left her on the floor to die. �My hair was torn out,� Kate says. �The skin on my hands and knees was gone. But worst of all, so was my dignity and my sense of safety in the world.�

Kate�s physical injuries healed over time, but the psychic damage she suffered was lasting and profound. �After six months of intensive therapy,� she says, �I was still afraid to be alone. If no one else was home, I had a panic attack every time I opened my own front door.�

In December of that year, Kate and her husband and sons were en route to a family vacation when their plane was stranded on the tarmac for 9 hours, leaving them and their fellow passengers without food, water, or working toilets. �Being trapped on that plane triggered the victimized feeling I�d had since the assault,� Kate says. �All of a sudden I thought, �Enough is enough.�� Within weeks Kate launched a Web site, flyersrights.com, to spearhead the swelling movement for airline passengers� rights. Within months she�d quit her job and become the executive director of the Coalition for an Airline Passengers� Bill of Rights�appearing on national TV, being interviewed by every major newspaper in the United States.

�When I took on this issue,� Kate says, �I�d tried everything therapy had to offer, but I was still a prisoner of my fears. Then I was invited to fly to New York to appear on Good Morning America. Either I was going to face my fears and go, or I was going to miss an opportunity to spread the word.�

�I went,� she says. �And I forgot to be afraid. Since then, my terror has been gone.� Kate exhales a long, jagged breath. �Taking on this cause has done me more good than any therapy ever could.�

Jeremy Adam Smith and Pamela Paxton

�TRUST NO ONE.�

That was the slogan of the TV series The X-Files, which followed two FBI agents in their quest to uncover �the truth� about a government conspiracy. Perhaps the most defining series of the 1990s, The X-Files touched a cultural nerve and captured a mood of growing distrust in America.

Since the series ended in 2002, however, our trust in each other has declined even further, despite a brief rebound after September 11. The mood of cynicism and distrust captured by The X-Files in the �90s seems just as relevant today�indeed, a new X-Files movie was released in 2008, and a Leonardo DiCaprio movie released the following month took the slogan one step further: �Trust no one. Deceive everyone.� The decline or absence of trust also figures prominently in more recent hit TV series like Mad Men, Survivor, and The Sopranos. In fact, �Trust no one� has essentially served as Americans� motto over the last two generations: For 40 years�the years of Vietnam, Watergate, junk bonds, Monica Lewinsky, Enron, the Catholic Church sex scandals, and the Iraq war�our trust in each other has been dropping steadily, while trust in many institutions has been seriously shaken in response to scandals.

This trend is documented in a variety of national surveys. The General Social Survey, a periodic assessment of Americans� moods and values, shows a 10-point decline from 1976 to 2006 in the number of Americans who believe that other people can generally be trusted. The General Social Survey also shows declines in trust in our institutions, although these declines are often closely linked to specific events. From the 1970s to today, trust has declined in the press (from 24 percent to 11 percent), education (from 36 percent to 28 percent), banks (from 35 percent to 31 percent), corporations (from 26 percent to 17 percent), and even organized religion (from 35 percent to 25 percent). And Gallup�s annual Governance survey shows that trust in the government is even lower today than it was during the Watergate era, when the Nixon administration had been caught engaging in criminal acts. It�s no wonder popular culture is so preoccupied with questions of trust.

But research on trust isn�t all doom and gloom; it also offers reason for hope. A growing body of research hints that humans are hardwired to trust. Indeed, a closer examination of surveys shows that trust is resilient: major events can stoke our trust in institutions, just as other events can inhibit them. The science of trust suggests that humans want to trust, even need to trust, but they won�t trust blindly or foolishly. They need solid evidence that their trust is warranted. Using this research as a guide, we can begin to understand why trust has been declining, and how we might rebuild it.

Dacher Keltner

IT IS MUCH SAFER to be feared than loved, wrote Niccol� Machiavelli in The Prince, his classic sixteenth-century treatise advocating manipulation and occasional cruelty as the best means to power. Almost 500 years later, Robert Greene�s national best seller, The 48 Laws of Power, would have made Machiavelli�s chest swell with pride. Greene�s book, bedside reading of foreign policy analysts and hip-hop stars alike, is pure Machiavelli.

Here are a few of his 48 laws:

Jason Marsh

IT�S NOT UNCOMMON these days to find yourself stranded in a supermarket aisle, paralyzed by the choices before you. How do you decide between the organic eggs laid by cage-free hens and the eggs laid by free-range hens fed on omega-3 fatty acids? Should you really buy that tomato, even though it�s well out of season? Is it worth paying an extra $5 for the sustainably farmed, antibiotic-free chicken breast?

Before trying to answer any of these questions, it would help to read Michael Pollan�s books. For years, eaters have turned to Pollan, a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, for some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and practical contemporary writing on food.

In his 2007 bestseller The Omnivore�s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Pollan attempts to navigate the seemingly endless food choices available to Americans today. Getting past marketing slogans, dietary fads, and cryptic ingredients�what exactly are sodium aluminum sulfate and xanthan gum, and why are they in our food?�he traces our food�s journey from farms and factories, through the marketplace, and onto our plates.

The Omnivore�s Dilemma was a logical successor to Pollan�s previous book, The Botany of Desire, which chronicled the history of humans� relationship with four common plants. But it might be more appropriately grouped with other books, such as Eric Schlosser�s Fast Food Nation and Marion Nestle�s Food Politics, which try to explain the social and political forces that shape our food�s production, and shed light on the impact our food choices have on our health, our communities, and our planet.

What makes many of these choices so hard is that they�re personal, everyday decisions fraught with vast ethical implications. As Pollan makes clear in his book, every food purchase we make, whether it�s at a McDonald�s or a Whole Foods supermarket, supports a certain set of environmental and economic values. But we can�t be sure of which values we�re supporting when the labels on our food make it hard to understand where this food actually came from�and that�s where Pollan comes in.

Lisa Bennett

THREE YEARS AGO, I became obsessed with global warming. Practically overnight, my worries about its potential effects outstripped my worries about so many other national and global issues, even personal ones.

Indeed, as the mother of two young boys, I began to think it a bit crazy that I attended to every bump and scrape of my children�s little bodies and budding egos, but largely ignored the threat likely to put sizable areas of the world, including parts of the coastal city where we live, underwater within their lifetime.

That year, 2005, marked a turning point for many people. After decades of observation, speculation, and analysis, the world�s climate scientists had reached a consensus, and increasingly the general public was accepting it. As USA Today reported, �The Debate Is Over: Globe Is Warming.�

The next step, scientists advised, was action. We needed to take significant and urgent steps to cut our dependence on fossil fuels by 25 percent or more, something NASA�s top climate scientist, James Hansen, said we had only a decade to do if we were to avoid the great global warming tipping point�that level at which increased temperatures would unleash unprecedented global disasters.

So how are we doing?

Surely, some things have changed. Sales of the Toyota Prius and other hybrids have skyrocketed. Many of us have converted to the new energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs. A flood of books are hitting the market offering tips about how to save the earth. And there is a frenzy of advertising about everything from �eco-friendly� houses to �green� hair salons, showing just how widespread Americans� desire is to do the right thing for the environment.

Yet none of this adds up to the significant and urgent action scientists have called for. The question is why: Why don�t more of us respond more seriously to the most serious threat to the planet in human history?

�Many climate scientists find the response to global warming completely baffling,� says Elke Weber, a Columbia University psychologist and the chair of the Global Roundtable on Climate Change�s Public Attitudes/Ethical Issues Working Group. According to Weber, climate scientists just can�t understand why government and the public have been so slow to act on the extraordinary information these scientists have provided.

But now a growing number of social scientists are offering their expertise in behavioral decision making, risk analysis, and evolutionary influences on human behavior to explain our limited responses to global warming. Among the most significant factors they point to: the way we�re psychologically wired and socially conditioned to respond to crises makes us ill suited to react passionately to the abstract and seemingly remote threat posed by global warming. Their insights are also leading to some intriguing recommendations about how to get people to take action�including the potentially dangerous prospect of playing on people�s fears.

Jason Marsh

IN THE SUMMER OF 2000, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) asked Harvard University researchers Nancy Briton and Jennifer Leaning to analyze some of the most comprehensive data ever collected about human suffering in war. Over the previous year, the ICRC had held thousands of hours of interviews with residents of 12 of the most war-torn areas on earth. The interviews were part of its People on War project, an attempt to document the varied human experiences of war in order to build greater support for international humanitarian principles. From Afghanistan to Colombia, combatants, refugees, doctors, housewives, and many others discussed the impact war had made on their lives. Briton and Leaning found the interviews almost unbearably powerful.

But they also found something else. Amid heart-wrenching accounts of humiliation and loss were unsolicited expressions of compassion and memories of altruistic acts. This surprised Briton and Leaning, particularly because interviewers for the People on War project didn�t ask about experiences of compassion. For the most part, says Briton, the interviewers asked the subjects �about terrible things that happened to them in war,� yet some subjects �spontaneously gave examples of people who had helped them.� There was the Abkhazian farmer who remembered how his Georgian neighbors had interceded on his behalf, even lying before tanks that approached his village; a Nigerian community leader who recalled how Nigerian and Biafran enemy combatants shared food at the war front.

After months of being immersed in stories of �unending woe,� says Leaning, these �little instances of resistance� stood out. By no means did Briton and Leaning think these cases negated the horrors of warfare, but they did see them as evidence that war doesn�t always wipe out moral consciousness.

�There was a cumulative sense of how horrible these events had been for people, how completely their lives had been destroyed and their physical circumstances upended,� says Leaning. �We�re dealing with populations that are enmeshed in a terribly ugly social setting for months or for years, and they all are aware of feeling degraded as they continue to be degraded. They�re ashamed of what they�re doing, but they�re still doing it.� When people can break free of this violence and degradation, their behavior provides �an indication of what might be called up in greater number, in greater consistency, if we understood its origins,� she says.

After completing an initial analysis of the ICRC�s data, Briton and Leaning obtained funding for a new analysis from the Fetzer Institute, a private foundation that supports scientific research. They sorted by hand through hundreds of pages of interview transcriptions, looking for mentions of compassion or altruism.

By finding and categorizing these behaviors, Briton and Leaning write in their report on their project, they hoped to suggest �possible ways of encouraging the expression of positive other-centered behavior in wartime conditions.� In other words, if their research could indicate why some people exhibit the better qualities of human nature, especially in brutal circumstances, perhaps it could help societies deliberately promote altruism and compassion in the future�during war and potentially in everyday life as well.

Briton and Leaning were not the first to examine such questions about altruistic and compassionate behavior; indeed, their project is the latest in a series of research on the topic. Perhaps the most notable work on the subject is Samuel and Pearl Oliner�s 1988 book The Altruistic Personality, a study of people who rescued Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. Occasionally, Briton and Leaning�s report highlights similarly heroic deeds that meant the difference between life and death. But for the most part, their project has focused on the significance of everyday acts of altruism in the context of war, not necessarily the heroism of moral exemplars. To them, when one�s sense of morality is embedded in a world of hate and murder, some of the simplest acts�sharing a glass of water or temporary shelter with the enemy, for instance�take on extraordinary significance. These altruistic acts enable people on the giving and the receiving ends to reclaim their humanity and moral dignity at a time when both are usually obscured by the fog of war. Sometimes, even doing nothing�simply not committing violent acts�can be compassionate, according to Briton and Leaning, who call such (non) actions �compassionate restraint.�

What could motivate such acts? Briton and Leaning say it will take much more research on the topic before we know for sure. But they have identified four main factors: feelings of self-efficacy, a desire for reciprocity, a sense of group affiliation, and a wish to reclaim one�s moral identity.

Examples of self-efficacy can take different forms. The report quotes a Palestinian ambulance driver who said that because of his profession, he would rescue a wounded Israeli soldier, even if that soldier had killed a relative of his. It also cites a Christian Lebanese journalist who used his press ID to rescue Muslims from danger. These stories echo a point made often in psychological literature: people are more likely to try to help someone if they think they�re capable of succeeding. A sense of personal usefulness can trigger altruistic impulses that might otherwise remain dormant.

According to Leaning, this is key to why the ICRC trains soldiers in the principles of international humanitarian law. She thinks it is extremely important that governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like the ICRC �drill into soldiers that there is a moral decision process that they are responsible for.� These tools of moral reasoning usually don�t come instinctively, she says. Instead, soldiers must be made to feel that ethical decision making is a part of their job, and they must receive thorough instruction in making these decisions�something most governments haven�t been proactive about, she says.

Those combatants who performed altruistic acts often attributed their behavior to reciprocity�the idea being that they treated their enemies the same way they wanted to be treated in return. Briton admits that this idea might not sound too �touchy feely� But she theorizes that combatants may have cited reciprocity as their motive as a �face-saving device�: rather than seeming soft, they could present themselves as tough-minded, pragmatic soldiers, even when their actions were motivated largely by compassion. Other interview subjects explained reciprocity not as a calculated means to be rewarded for positive behavior, but as a way to stop violence by treating others with the kindness they would want to experience themselves. For instance, an Afghani housewife remembered how her father spared the life of a man who had killed her brother, saying that revenge only causes more bloodshed; a tribal elder in Somalia said he would �treat civilians of my enemies just as I am treating my own civilians. I will be kind to them.�

Subjects� tendency to exhibit altruism toward members of their own group might not seem surprising. But, as Briton points out, �we�re all members of lots of different groups at any given time.� Some people, she and Leaning found, were able to find common ground with people they could have easily dismissed as enemies. They seemed capable of transcending the ethnic or political divisions usually imposed by war: a Somali man said he rejected tribalism, choosing instead to identify with �the party of peace maintenance� a Bosnian journalist remembered how she could not hold hostilities against her Serbian neighbor because their children had grown up together.

Briton says she believes that the implications of this finding go far beyond the arena of war. �I think they extend to everyday behavior,� she said. �I think that if anyone can find that thread of similarity with another person, for whatever reason, they�re going to treat them as an in-group member rather than an out-group member. They�re little threads, but there are so many that are available to us.�

Finally, there were some people, Briton and Leaning report, who simply seemed sick and tired of war and sought to regain their moral identity that war had eclipsed. The authors found this group especially inspiring. �It�s nice when people can reach back into their psyches, into their pasts, and believe that they are moral beings, and be happier with that than being violent,� said Briton. For instance, one Christian ex-combatant from Lebanon said she never forgot her core values, because she had come from a decent family. When she once encountered a Muslim at a checkpoint, she helped him escape rather than hand him over to certain execution. After a former military official in Cambodia had given a displaced woman half his ration bag of rice, he was struck by her claim that she had never met a �good soldier� like him. He said he never forgot this statement, and he started to understand the tragedy of what he and other combatants in Cambodia were perpetuating.

But how can people be consistently reminded of their moral identities when they are stuck in the moral vacuum of war? Briton and Leaning say they noticed that the People on War interviews actually served an important function to this end. This is an observation echoed by Gilbert Holleufer, a communication advisor with the ICRC who was instrumental in launching the People on War project and later worked with Briton and Leaning analyzing the data.

To Holleufer, one anecdote sums up the effect of the People on War project. In South Africa, the ICRC conducted an interview with about a dozen members of a paramilitary group��really dangerous people, violent men,� he said. They trusted the Red Cross enough to do the interview, but kept their weapons at their sides. After a while, they opened up and discussed how they had been swept up in combat, how they had killed women and children. At the end of the discussion, the group�s leader approached the ICRC delegate, patted him on the back, and told him, �You know, the outside world considers us as wild animals. My hands are stained with blood. But your discussion here has given me back part of my dignity.�

This story resonates deeply with Jennifer Leaning. From reading the People on War interviews, and through her own previous work in war zones, she learned to recognize that �people in these places are grateful for contact with the outside world. It makes them feel like human beings.� She says she feels strongly that one of the greatest services the ICRC and other NGOs can provide is �the external eye of the moral observer.� The mere presence of these groups can remind people of their own humanity, spurring them to recapture their moral identity through acts of compassion and altruism. If people in warfare have lost touch with their own moral voice, she says, �perhaps they�ll have a shock of recognition when they see someone coming out of a Land Rover and holding a white flag.�

This is one of several hypotheses that Briton and Leaning want to test in a follow-up study. They said their work so far provides a solid platform from which to launch further investigations, but they stressed that they have yet to prove definite connections between any of these factors and altruistic behavior. They�re currently seeking more funding to revisit many of the questions spawned by the People on War project, but want to conduct interviews that ask subjects explicitly about altruistic or compassionate motivations. Down the line, they hope that some of their research will inform intervention efforts.

Though they have no illusions that such research can ever stop wars, they think it could at least make conflicts less ugly. The key, says Leaning, lies in finding ways to strengthen people�s �moral musculature� before they ever find themselves in the midst of conflict, an objective she thinks �should be part of a common educational agenda across the world.�

After undertaking this initial project, Nancy Briton says she is optimistic that such a goal can be achieved: �To know that there is just a little glimmer of humanity and of hope even in the most demoralizing, traumatic, horrible situations in the world�it really does give me a bit of hope for the future.�

Aaron Lazare

IN APRIL OF 2004, televised photographs revealed to the world the abuse of Iraqi prisoners held by the United States military in the Abu Ghraib prison. These photos, and many other images that followed, showed soldiers taking pleasure in torturing and mocking naked Iraqi prisoners. The prisoners� treatment drew criticism from around the world; it was described as cruel, humiliating, appalling, and unacceptable. Iraqis, understandably, were enraged. As details unfolded, Americans, including government and military officials, expressed shame that their country�s democratic and humanitarian values were being undermined.

The U.S. government, as the responsible party, sought forgiveness�not only from the Iraqis, but also from the American public. Toward this end, President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice offered public comments, including what some might call apologies. President Bush told the American public how he had apologized to King Abdullah II of Jordan. �I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families,� he said. �I told him I was as equally sorry that people seeing those pictures didn�t understand the true nature and heart of America�. I am sickened that people got the wrong impression.� In an appeal on an Arabic-language television station, the president said that Iraqis �must understand that I view these practices as abhorrent. They must also understand that what took place�does not represent the America that I know�. Mistakes will be investigated.� Speaking on the same television channel, Condoleezza Rice said, �We are deeply sorry for what has happened to these people and what the families must be feeling. It�s just not right. And we will get to the bottom of what happened.� Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee, �These events occurred on my watch. As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them and I take full responsibility.�

These attempted apologies and expressions of consolation failed to elicit forgiveness from the Iraqi people or the Arab world in general. In fact, the words may have aggravated feelings of hostility and resentment. What was missing from these so-called apologies? Why were they flawed?

Desmond Tutu

MALUSI MPUMLWANA was a young enthusiastic antiapartheid activist and a close associate of Steve Biko in South Africa�s crucial Black Consciousness Movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was involved in vital community development and health projects with impoverished and often demoralized rural communities. As a result, he and his wife were under strict surveillance, constantly harassed by the ubiquitous security police. They were frequently held in detention without trial.

I remember well a day Malusi gave the security police the slip and came to my office in Johannesburg, where I was serving as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. He told me that during his frequent stints in detention, when the security police routinely tortured him, he used to think, �These are God�s children and yet they are behaving like animals. They need us to help them recover the humanity they have lost.� For our struggle against apartheid to be successful, it required remarkable young people like Malusi.

All South Africans were less than whole because of apartheid. Blacks suffered years of cruelty and oppression, while many privileged whites became more uncaring, less compassionate, less humane, and therefore less human. Yet during these years of suffering and inequality, each South African�s humanity was still tied to that of all others, white or black, friend or enemy. For our own dignity can only be measured in the way we treat others. This was Malusi�s extraordinary insight.

I saw the power of this idea when I was serving as chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. This was the commission that the postapartheid government, headed by our president, Nelson Mandela, had established to move us beyond the cycles of retribution and violence that had plagued so many other countries during their transitions from oppression to democracy. The commission granted perpetrators of political crimes the opportunity to appeal for amnesty by giving a full and truthful account of their actions and, if they so chose, an opportunity to ask for forgiveness�opportunities that some took and others did not. The commission also gave victims of political crimes a chance to tell their stories, hear confessions, and thus unburden themselves from the pain and suffering they had experienced.

For our nation to heal and become a more humane place, we had to embrace our enemies as well as our friends. The same is true the world over. True enduring peace�between countries, within a country, within a community, within a family�requires real reconciliation between former enemies and even between loved ones who have struggled with one another.

How could anyone really think that true reconciliation could avoid a proper confrontation? After a husband and wife or two friends have quarreled, if they merely seek to gloss over their differences or metaphorically paper over the cracks, they must not be surprised when they are soon at it again, perhaps more violently than before, because they have tried to heal their ailment lightly.

True reconciliation is based on forgiveness, and forgiveness is based on true confession, and confession is based on penitence, on contrition, on sorrow for what you have done. We know that when a husband and wife have quarreled, one of them must be ready to say the most difficult words in any language, �I�m sorry,� and the other must be ready to forgive for there to be a future for their relationship. This is true between parents and children, between siblings, between neighbors, and between friends. Equally, confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation in the lives of nations are not just airy-fairy religious and spiritual things, nebulous and unrealistic. They are the stuff of practical politics.

Those who forget the past, as many have pointed out, are doomed to repeat it. Just in terms of human psychology, we in South Africa knew that to have blanket amnesty where no disclosure was made would not deal with our past. It is not dealing with the past to say glibly, �Let bygones be bygones,� for then they will never be bygones. How can you forgive if you do not know what or whom to forgive? In our commission hearings, we required full disclosure for us to grant amnesty. Only then, we thought, would the process of requesting and receiving forgiveness be healing and transformative for all involved. The commission�s record shows that its standards for disclosure and amnesty were high indeed: of the more than 7,000 applications submitted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it granted amnesty to only 849 of them.

Unearthing the truth was necessary not only for the victims to heal, but for the perpetrators as well. Guilt, even unacknowledged guilt, has a negative effect on the guilty. One day it will come out in some form or another. We must be radical. We must go to the root, remove that which is festering, cleanse and cauterize, and then a new beginning is possible.

Forgiveness gives us the capacity to make a new start. That is the power, the rationale, of confession and forgiveness. It is to say, �I have fallen but I am not going to remain there. Please forgive me.� And forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew. Not to forgive leads to bitterness and hatred, which, just like self-hatred and self-contempt, gnaw away at the vitals of one�s being. Whether hatred is projected out or projected in, it is always corrosive of the human spirit.

We have all experienced how much better we feel after apologies are made and accepted, but even still it is so hard for us to say that we are sorry. I often find it difficult to say these words to my wife in the intimacy and love of our bedroom. How much more difficult it is to say these words to our friends, our neighbors, and our coworkers. Asking for forgiveness requires that we take responsibility for our part in the rupture that has occurred in the relationship. We can always make excuses for ourselves and find justifications for our actions, however contorted, but we know that these keep us locked in the prison of blame and shame.

In the story of Adam and Eve, the Bible reminds us of how easy it is to blame others. When God confronted Adam about eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam was less than forthcoming in accepting responsibility. Instead he shifted the blame to Eve, and when God turned to Eve, she, too, tried to pass the buck to the serpent. (The poor serpent had no one left to blame.) So we should not be surprised at how reluctant most people are to acknowledge their responsibility and to say they are sorry. We are behaving true to our ancestors when we blame everyone and everything except ourselves. It is the everyday heroic act that says, �It�s my fault. I�m sorry.� But without these simple words, forgiveness is much more difficult.

Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking, but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.

If the wrongdoer has come to the point of realizing his wrong, then one hopes there will be contrition, or at least some remorse or sorrow. This should lead him to confess the wrong he has done and ask for forgiveness. It obviously requires a fair measure of humility. But what happens when such contrition or confession is lacking? Must the victim be dependent on these before she can forgive? There is no question that such a confession is a very great help to the one who wants to forgive, but it is not absolutely indispensable. If the victim could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would be locked into the culprit�s whim, locked into victimhood, no matter her own attitude or intention. That would be palpably unjust.

In the act of forgiveness, we are declaring our faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to change. We are welcoming a chance to make a new beginning. Because we are not infallible, because we will hurt especially the ones we love by some wrong, we will always need a process of forgiveness and reconciliation to deal with those unfortunate yet all too human breaches in relationships. They are an inescapable characteristic of the human condition.

We have had a jurisprudence, a penology in Africa that was not retributive but restorative. Traditionally, when people quarreled, the main intention was not to punish the miscreant but to restore good relations. This was the animating principle of our Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For Africa is concerned, or has traditionally been concerned, about the wholeness of relationships. That is something we need in this world�a world that is polarized, a world that is fragmented, a world that destroys people. It is also something we need in our families and friendships. For retribution wounds and divides us from one another. Only restoration can heal us and make us whole. And only forgiveness enables us to restore trust and compassion to our relationships. If peace is our goal, there can be no future without forgiveness.

Steven Pinker

OVER THE PAST CENTURY, violent images from World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common understanding that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence.

Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage�the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions�pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher Jos� Ortega y Gasset, who argued that �war is not an instinct but an invention.�

But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species� time on earth.

Jason Marsh

BEFORE DECEMBER 2004, few Americans had heard of Jan Egeland. But after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami killed more than 225,000 people in 11 countries, all eyes were on the humanitarian response to the disaster, and this was Egeland�s job. As the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, he had to coordinate the international aid for the tsunami�s victims.

But what launched Egeland�s name into international headlines wasn�t just his work for the U.N., but an offhand comment he made the day after the tsunami struck.

�It is beyond me why we are so stingy, really,� Egeland told reporters. �Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least how rich we have become. And if�actually, the foreign assistance of many countries is now 0.1 or 0.2 percent of their gross national income. I think that is stingy, really. I don�t think that is very generous.�

At the time, the United States had pledged just $15 million in tsunami relief; later, it upped its pledge to $950 million. But Egeland later said he was criticizing levels of foreign aid from developed nations in general, not the international response to the tsunami or the response from the United States in particular.

It was too late. American officials interpreted Egeland�s comments as a jab at American generosity and shot back that the U.S. government leads the world in foreign aid donations. President Bush charged that Egeland was �very misguided and ill informed.�

Except Egeland wasn�t misinformed. While the United States does lead the world in the total amount of money it gives to developing countries, it ranks last among developed nations in the percentage of its national income�the total value of all the goods and services it produces�that it devotes to foreign aid. That figure is 0.18 of 1 percent in the United States, and the median among developed nations is about 0.4 of 1 percent. The country that gives the highest share of its national income, Sweden still gives less than 1 percent.

Some critics responded to Egeland by saying that private donations from U.S. citizens and corporations make up for its shortcomings in public aid. �We open our wallets for private groups that are better at targeting money where it�s needed,� said an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. �When it comes to this sort of giving, nobody beats Americans.�

In fact, at the time the United States ranked second in the percentage of its national income that went toward private charitable donations, and the combined amount of public and private donations from the United States still placed it in the middle of the international pack.

But no matter how much individuals and corporations give each year, do these types of donations have the same practical effect or symbolic significance as the aid that comes from governments?

Indeed, Egeland�s comments may have put a lot of people on the defensive, but they also raised some challenging questions. We might be giving billions of dollars each year in foreign development aid, but is that adequate? And why should we give more? Do we really have such a great collective moral obligation to strangers who live halfway around the world, especially when there are so many people in need in our own country?

Social scientists have continually found that people are more likely to demonstrate altruism toward members of their own social group, with whom they share a sense of identity. While there might be some fluctuations in the amount we give as a nation or as individuals, perhaps there�s a limit to how much empathy we should be expected to feel and how much money we should be expected to give to other nations.

These aren�t questions we usually like to confront, partly because their answers seem so elusive. It�s hard to say what would constitute enough foreign aid. No leader or nation is capable of fixing the world�s inequities, so talking about them may seem only to induce guilt and resentment.

But Egeland at least succeeded in instigating an international conversation that was long overdue. (He also arguably incited governments to do more for the tsunami victims: donations shot up shortly after he made his controversial remarks, in what Egeland dubbed a display of �competitive compassion.�)

In 2005, Egeland revisited some of these issues with Greater Good, discussing the morality, and the possible limits, of global altruism.

Paul Ekman

EMOTIONS UNITE AND DIVIDE the worlds, both personal and global, in which we live, motivating the best and the worst of our actions. Without emotions there would be no heroism, empathy, or compassion, but neither would there be cruelty, selfishness, or spite.

Bringing different perspectives to bear�Eastern and Western, spirituality and science, Buddhism and psychology�the Dalai Lama and I came together in conversation and sought to clarify these contradictions, in hopes of illuminating paths to a balanced emotional life and a feeling of compassion that can reach across the globe.

As the leader of a millennia-old spiritual tradition as well as a nation in exile, the Dalai Lama holds something resembling divine status among his fellow Tibetans. He is the world�s principal living advocate of nonviolence and the winner, in 1989, of the Nobel Peace Prize and, in 2007, of the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award given to a civilian by the U.S. government. He is denounced and at times publicly despised by the leaders of the People�s Republic of China, which has occupied Tibet since 1950.

Yet he is also more than a religious and political leader: In the Western world his celebrity approaches that of a rock star. He has authored several best-selling books and is nearly always traveling, speaking, and inspiring audiences that number in the thousands. He is also strongly interested in integrating the findings of modern science into the Buddhist worldview.

I first met the Dalai Lama in 2000, when I attended a small conference on destructive emotions organized by the Mind and Life Institute, in Boulder, Colorado. Whether through a shared sense of playful and probing curiosity, our commitment to reducing human suffering, or a conviction that we were likely to learn from each other, the Dalai Lama and I immediately found an unexpectedly strong rapport across the wide gulf of the intellectual heritages we each represent.

During the weekend of April 22�23, 2006, the Dalai Lama and I sat down for the first of three dialogues, which were to total 39 hours of intimate exchange over a period of 15 months. In the following dialogue, adapted from our book Emotional Awareness, the Dalai Lama and I explore the nature and prospects of global compassion. To the Dalai Lama�s right sat my ally in this endeavor, Thupten Jinpa, who served as the translator for the meeting.

Lisa Bennett

MY SONS WERE BOUNCING on their beds before bedtime when I pulled out a new hand-me-down pair of pajamas for my youngest son, Julian. The top was covered with a bright blue-and-pink image of Kim Possible, Disney�s teenage superhero.

Julian was thrilled. Aidan, my oldest, smiled indulgently: How could his little brother embrace a girl superhero? Then I reminded him that the pj�s were once his, ones he had pleaded for. He reddened and stopped bouncing. �They were?� he said. It�s true: Kim Possible, cheerleader and crime fighter, was once his hero.

But somewhere between the age of 3 and 8, all that changed, and the only form of hero for him now was a male one: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Han Solo, almost anyone of Star Wars fame�save, well, Princess Leia. When he and his best friend recently played a Star Wars computer game that required players to take on the role of Princess Leia, they laughed uncomfortably, as if partaking in something they�d best keep secret.

Not too long ago, female superheroes were scarce, mainly limited to Wonder Woman. But in recent years we�ve seen a rise in female heroes and superheroes�for both children and adults�on television, in comics, and in film. Among the more famous: Xena the Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jean Grey of the X-Men, and, for the younger set, Powerpuff Girls. Yet the very idea of a female hero remains complex. Challenge yourself right now to think about a real-life hero. Who comes to mind? Chances are it is a man in a dramatic situation, running into a burning building to save someone or fighting in a war. Women do the same things, of course. But our common archetype of modern-day heroes seems to revolve around acts of dramatic male physical prowess and risk taking.

Recent research, however, has started to challenge that narrow conception of heroism. Alice H. Eagly, of Northwestern University, and Selwyn W. Becker, of the University of Chicago, studied the extent to which men and women participated in a variety of risky and heroic situations, such as rescuing Jews during the Holocaust. They also compared the number of men and women who had been awarded a Carnegie Medal, which is given to people who risk their lives trying to save someone else, and examined less dramatic actions that still involved risk, such as donating a kidney or joining the Peace Corps.

Their findings: Among those awarded a Carnegie Medal, men vastly outnumbered women, comprising 92 percent of medalists. Yet in every other case Eagly and Becker studied, women were more likely to engage in heroic acts than men. For example, among those classified as �Righteous among the Nations��non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust�women outnumbered men in France, Poland, and the Netherlands. In the situations that demanded less risky forms of heroism, women also outnumbered men. For example, women comprised 57 percent of kidney donors between 1988 and 2004, and 60 percent of Peace Corps volunteers in 2003.

Moreover, there are other, quieter�but still arguably heroic�kinds of risks that women assume for the good of others. In numerous surveys, for example, when people are asked to identify a female hero, they list their mother or some other female relative or neighbor who made great long-term sacrifices to help another in need.

�There is a cultural association of heroism with the military and emergency situations, but we really don�t know the extent to which the public has a broader perception of heroism,� says Eagly. �It may be that the public is broader than the scholars in their understanding of heroism.�

So what would happen if the media image makers were to recognize and amplify that broader notion of heroism�if, for example, they were to honor the real-life stories of young women who give up their privileged circumstances to help people in the Middle East or in New Orleans? Or if they recognized the sacrifices of midlife and older women who quietly care for a family member? Would the girl next door grow up perceiving herself as more heroic than she now does? Would her brother do the same? More importantly, once beyond the rigid gender-defined years of childhood, would men and women respect each other for the diverse forms of heroism of which both are capable�and as a result, would they act more heroically in all the public and private ways Eagley studied?

Until more research is done, one can only speculate. But this much at least seems reasonable: recognizing broader notions of heroism would likely attune us to our own personal power, a vital step toward facing up to and tackling our many collective challenges. At a time of super-sized and urgent issues�from global warming to the decline in America�s reputation around the globe�that can�t be a bad thing.

Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, one of us (Philip Zimbardo) launched what is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Twenty-four young men, who had responded to a newspaper ad calling for participants in a study, were randomly assigned roles as �prisoners� or �guards� in a simulated jail in Stanford University�s psychology department. The �prisoners� were arrested at their homes by real police officers, booked, and brought to the jail. Everything from the deliberately humiliating prison uniforms to the cell numbers on the laboratory doors to the mandatory strip searches and delousing were designed to replicate the depersonalizing experience of being in a real prison. The men who were assigned to be guards were given khaki uniforms, mirrored glasses, and billy clubs.

The idea was to study the psychology of imprisonment to see what happens when you put good people in a dehumanizing place. But within a matter of hours, what had been intended as a controlled experiment in human behavior took on a disturbing life of its own. After a prisoner rebellion on the second day of the experiment, the guards began using increasingly degrading forms of punishment, and the prisoners became more and more passive. Each group rapidly took on the behaviors associated with their role, not because of any particular internal predisposition or instructions from the experimenters, but rather because the situation itself so powerfully called for the two groups to assume their new identities. Interestingly, even the experimenters were so caught up in the drama that they lost objectivity, only terminating the out-of-control study when an objective outsider stepped in, reminding them of their duty to treat the participants humanely and ethically. The experiment, scheduled to last two weeks, ended abruptly after six days.

As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the �banality of evil� that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable.

In addition to the Stanford Prison Experiment, studies conducted in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram at Yale University also revealed the banality of evil. The Milgram experiments asked participants to play the role of a �teacher� who was responsible for administering electric shocks to a �learner� when the learner failed to answer test questions correctly. The participants were not aware that the learner was working with the experimenters and did not actually receive any shocks. As the learners failed more and more, the teachers were instructed to increase the voltage intensity of the shocks�even when the learners started screaming, pleading to have the shocks stop, and eventually stopped responding altogether. Pressed by the experimenters�serious-looking men in lab coats who said they�d assume responsibility for the consequences�most participants did not stop administering shocks until they reached 300 volts or above�already in the lethal range. The majority of teachers delivered the maximum shock of 450 volts.

We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable�that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

This is true not only for perpetrators of torture and other horrible acts, but for people who commit a more common kind of wrong�the wrong of taking no action when action is called for. Whether we consider Nazi Germany or Abu Ghraib prison, there were many people who observed what was happening and said nothing. At Abu Ghraib, one photo shows two soldiers smiling before a pyramid of naked prisoners while a dozen other soldiers stand around watching passively. If you observe such abuses and don�t say, �This is wrong! Stop it!� you give tacit approval to continue. You are part of the silent majority that makes evil deeds more acceptable.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, for instance, there were the �good guards� who maintained the prison. Good guards, on the shifts when the worst abuses occurred, never did anything bad to the prisoners, but not once over the whole week did they confront the other guards and say, �What are you doing? We get paid the same money without knocking ourselves out.� Or, �Hey, remember those are college students, not prisoners.� No good guard ever intervened to stop the activities of the bad guards. No good guard ever arrived a minute late, left a minute early, or publicly complained. In a sense, then, it�s the good guard who allowed such abuses to happen. The situation dictated their inaction, and their inaction facilitated evil.

But because evil is so fascinating, we have been obsessed with focusing on and analyzing evildoers. Perhaps because of the tragic experiences of the Second World War, we have neglected to consider the flip side of the banality of evil: Is it also possible that heroic acts are something that anyone can perform, given the right mind-set and conditions? Could there also be a �banality of heroism�?

The banality of heroism concept suggests that we are all potential heroes waiting for a moment in life to perform a heroic deed. The decision to act heroically is a choice that many of us will be called upon to make at some point in time. By conceiving of heroism as a universal attribute of human nature, not as a rare feature of the few �heroic elect,� heroism becomes something that seems in the range of possibilities for every person, perhaps inspiring more of us to answer that call.

Even people who have led less than exemplary lives can be heroic in a particular moment. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, a young man named Jabar Gibson, who had a history of felony arrests, did something many people in Louisiana considered heroic: he commandeered a bus, loaded it with residents of his poor New Orleans neighborhood, and drove them to safety in Houston. Gibson�s �renegade bus� arrived at a relief site in Houston before any government-sanctioned evacuation efforts.

The idea of the banality of heroism debunks the myth of the �heroic elect,� a myth that reinforces two basic human tendencies. The first is to ascribe very rare personal characteristics to people who do something special�to see them as superhuman, practically beyond comparison to the rest of us. The second is the trap of inaction�sometimes known as the �bystander effect.� Research has shown that the bystander effect is often motivated by diffusion of responsibility, when different people witnessing an emergency all assume someone else will help. Like the �good guards,� we fall into the trap of inaction when we assume it�s someone else�s responsibility to act the hero.

In search of an alternative to this inaction and complicity with evil, we have been investigating the banality of heroism. Our initial research has allowed us to review example after example of people who have done something truly heroic, from individuals who enjoy international fame to those whose names have never even graced the headlines in a local newspaper. This has led us to think more critically about the definition of heroism and to consider the situational and personal characteristics that encourage or facilitate heroic behavior.

Heroism is an idea as old as humanity itself, and some of its subtleties are becoming lost or transmuted by popular culture. Being a hero is not simply being a good role model or a popular sports figure. We believe it has become necessary to revisit the historical meanings of the word and to make it come alive in modern terms. By concentrating more on this high watermark of human behavior, it is possible to foster what we term �heroic imagination,� or the development of a personal heroic ideal. This heroic ideal can help guide a person�s behavior in times of trouble or moral uncertainty.