The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - The Kindness of Strangers

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

When Kitty Genovese was murdered, her family and the wider world was told that bystanders watched, but did nothing to intervene. Psychologists tried to explain this callous inaction with a popular theory - the "bystander effect".Dr Laurie Santos was taught this theory - that most people won't in step help - but talking to Kitty's brother and Lady Gaga's mother she reveals that the "bystander effect" is wrong. People do like helping out, and we get a happiness boost from being kind. So how do we encourage more bystanders to intervene? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. On the morning of March 13th, 1964, a murder took place in Queens, New York, that shook the entire country. The crime itself was awful, but the behavior of bystanders who witnessed the event caused widespread revulsion and years of national soul-searching. The incident became the impetus for setting up the 911 emergency call system that we have today, and transformed the path of psychological research for decades to come. I first heard the story when I took intro psych as a college freshman back in the 90s. I dug out my old textbook to see how it was described. Here it is on page 544 of Peter Gray's Psychology, 2nd edition. In a normally quiet neighborhood in New York City,

a young woman named Kitty Genovese was brutally attacked for a period of 30 minutes outside her apartment building. Her screams drew the attention of at least 38 people who watched through their apartment windows while she was repeatedly stabbed and finally murdered. Not one of the bystanders came to her aid or even called the police. The incident stirred a national outcry.

Have we become so inured to horror that we simply watch it without lifting a finger? More than 25 years on, I still remember how shocked I was by that paragraph. Several dozen people stood there and watched Kitty scream. How could so many people witness something so awful and just do nothing? At the time, psychologists were still trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, and they began to think that awful incidents weren't just the result of a small number of uncaring people, but might instead reflect a wider and more sinister aspect of human nature. Social psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané

decided to test that out. In a now-famous 1968 study, they created an experimental emergency. They brought college students into the lab, put them inside a room all by themselves, and hooked them up to a headphone intercom system. An experimenter explained that the subject would be taking part in a conversation about college life with either one, two, or five other anonymous subjects, all of whom were in different rooms. The experimenter then took off, and the discussion began.

But soon into the conversation, one of the participants began having a very real-sounding emergency. Somebody, would you give me a little help? He started convulsing and screaming incoherently, saying things like, I'm having a real problem right now. I'm going to die. Help. Seizure. Somebody, help. Even though the emergency was staged, the subjects believed that the stranger was in real trouble. The scientists reported that many of the participants gasped into the microphone. My God, what should I do?

But Laenne and Darley wanted to see if the subjects responded by actively trying to help, specifically leaving the room to alert the experimenter or to look for the stranger who was in distress. When subjects thought that they were the only ones to hear the stranger's fit, 85% of them took action, and they tended to do so quickly, often in less than a minute. That's the good news. But the bad news is that this helping behavior dropped significantly when the subjects were told that other people were also on the call. In fact, less than a third of subjects made any move to help when they thought that more than one other person was listening in. I've known about these findings since I was an undergrad, but I still

find them so shocking. Nearly 70% of subjects in that condition heard someone crying out for help while having a potentially deadly seizure, and they did nothing. This study and others like it demonstrated just how easy it is to be apathetic in the face of other people's pain, which is pretty bad for our collective happiness. There are lots of situations in which others need our help. A colleague who's struggling at work, or a neighbor who's feeling a little lonely, or a child who's getting bullied. Like Kitty Genovese's neighbors and Latine and Darlie's subjects, there are times when we see this and just don't intervene. Maybe we feel it's not our place, or that someone else will probably do it.

But our inaction means that lots of people around us are left hurt and unhappy, because even though we all know someone should probably do something, nobody does. But our inaction also poses a second problem for our collective happiness. The science shows that you and I would personally be happier if we did something to help people in need. Study after study shows that when we do nice stuff for other people, we get a happiness boost. Give directions to a lost stranger? You feel happier. Comfort someone who's upset? You feel happier. Take care of an injured person? You feel happier. But Latane and Darley's work shows that there are lots of situations in which we just don't step in, especially when it seems

like the people around us aren't doing anything to help either. Kitty Genovese's story and the research that followed has always made me really disappointed in human nature. But new research suggests that her notorious story of collective apathy may not be as clear-cut as the textbooks claim. Which raises an important question. Have we been given an incorrect picture of human nature? One that's making us less happy since we don't help whenever the opportunity arises? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong?

What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. We had a snow day the day of Kennedy's inauguration, so we're all sitting at home watching that. This is Bill Genovese. I remember sitting in front of it and being mesmerized because, you know, as a kid growing up, all these old guys were presidents. Now, all of a sudden, we had this young, healthy guy making this statement,

ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. That speech resonated with Bill. He's always had a deep sense of duty towards his fellow man. He didn't ever want to be the sort of person who stands by and doesn't help. When Bill graduated from high school, his classmates were busy finding ways to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War.

But not Bill. People who know me go, well, you got drafted, right? No, no, I volunteered. You did? I mean, how could you be so stupid? As a Marine in combat, Bill quickly developed a reputation for helping anyone in need, no matter who it was or what the risk level. Like the time he heard of an elderly Vietnamese man who was hurt inside a dirty cave. I said, well, how's he doing? I don't know. We're afraid to go in there because it's probably booby trap. So me, of course, I'm going to go in there. Another time he rescued a woman who'd been impaled on a spiked booby trap and helped carry her to a chopper in order to get her to a hospital,

despite heavy enemy fire. The helicopters always drew fire. And as we were putting her on the helicopter, you could see the holes forming in the helicopter. You might be wondering, why didn't Bill think twice before repeatedly putting his own life in danger to come to the aid of perfect strangers?

I've grown up with this whole philosophy, this whole thing, when it's your time, you step up. And then with my sister's experience, it was like visceral. It's like people didn't step up, and look what that did. As you might have guessed from the last name, Kitty Genovese, the young woman murdered in Queens, was related to Bill. Kitty was Bill's older sister. Bill was only 16 years old when she was murdered. It's 6 o'clock in the morning. I'm in bed and I hear something going on at the front door.

A policeman came to the Genovese house. It took a while for Bill to fully comprehend why the cop was there. When he heard his mother getting upset, he assumed Kitty had just gotten sick. Oh, appendix. Maybe she broke a leg or fractured her finger. You know, so it was a while before it registered. Like, what? It was just shocking. It wasn't the world I came from. Learning that his sister had been stabbed to death was crushing. But Bill experienced another devastating blow when he read about the attack in the New York Times. The article read, For more than an hour, 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.

Not one person telephoned the police during the assault. I was always like, 38 people eyewitnessing this thing? I mean, I can't believe it. What is it to pick up the phone? The pain of Kitty's death, plus the fact that 38 otherwise good people allegedly allowed it to happen, was too much for Bill's family. We all tried to just sort of forget it and put it away, partially because our job was to defend Mom, because Mom was in a total meltdown state. She literally, as they're lowering the coffin, was trying to climb

on top. Soon after the funeral, Bill's mother had a debilitating stroke. In order to help her heal, the entire Genovese family agreed to avoid talking about Kitty's tragedy. But in spite of decades of silence, Bill's anger at the apathy of those 38 witnesses burned on. What could be worse? I mean, it just, what could be worse than you're thinking, wow, I'm in trouble, maybe dying, I'm calling out, I know people are aware, light's going on. Nobody's doing anything. My fellow man has deserted me. What Bill didn't know was that he himself would soon experience the terror that comes from desperately needing a savior and not knowing if someone will actually step up to help.

One day on patrol in Vietnam, Bill spotted a strange bamboo stake stuck in the mud. He decided to ask a friend what it was. Does this look right to you? Boom. It was a bomb, and Bill was standing right beside it. You actually do get thrown into the air, and you're flying in the air thinking, oh, this is high. When Bill landed, he tried to move, but couldn't. Both of his legs were badly injured and would later need to be amputated.

But at the time, he wasn't even sure he'd get the help needed to make it out with his life. A huge firefight broke out between his platoon and the enemy who'd just blown him up. Amidst the chaos, it didn't look like anyone was coming to Bill's aid. Okay, am I just going to be left here? I mean, I really had a flashback to what I imagined the scene was like with Kitty. No one's coming to help me. God, I'm feeling the way she must have felt back then. And then I'm sort of in this imagined street scene lying next to my sister.

We're like just looking at each other. lying next to my sister were like just looking at each other. And then, of course, I was bleeding so much that then I started to lose consciousness. But Bill's story had a different ending than Kitty's. In spite of the danger, his fellow Marines didn't leave him to die. They put their lives on the line and rushed in to save him. Bill looks back on his time in Vietnam as painting a very different picture of human nature. I mean, I was there long enough to see plenty of brave moves by our guys and the enemy, you know, to help their compatriots.

It made me forget I was in a war zone. It was like, this is human to human. When we get back from the break, we'll hear how these experiences caused Bill to question whether Kitty's neighbors could really have been so callous and apathetic that night, and whether the textbook story of her murder was really true. And we'll see that what he learned has big consequences for the happiness that all of us could be getting by doing more to help others. The Happiness Lab will be right back. to help others. The Happiness Lab will be right back. 38 eyewitnesses for a half an hour are watching this. How could that be? After his sister's murder, Bill Genovese couldn't stop going over the details,

despite the fact that Kitty's name wasn't even to be said in the family home. Bill initially believed what the papers reported, the same story that I and so many other students learn in Psych 101, that 38 people stood by and watched as Kitty was stabbed, and that no one lifted a finger. But that story simply didn't jive with what Bill saw firsthand in Vietnam, that people are willing to help those around them, and that they often take great joy from doing so. The mismatch between Kitty's story and what Bill knew to be true about human kindness bothered him for decades.

And my natural instinct of question, question, question, question, I've got to get to the bottom of this as best I can. After Bill's parents passed away, he decided to get to the bottom of things. He teamed up with a film crew to reopen Kitty's case. Their movie, called The Witness, follows Bill tracking down the bystanders who allegedly saw Kitty get murdered and asking for their version of the events. It was curious to me how there were all these discrepancies. It wasn't 38 witnesses watching for 30 minutes. Many of the people told Bill a very different version of what happened that night.

Some alleged bystanders said that they told police they saw and heard nothing, and yet they were still listed in the Times article as one of those 38 eyewitnesses. Others disputed having watched the attack at all. They recalled hearing some screams, but said they couldn't actually see anything when they looked out their apartment windows. Another big claim from my psych textbook was that none of the neighbors called the police during the attack. Many told Bill that actually, they did. Yes, I got on the phone and called the police. You got on the phone and you called the police?

Yes, of course. And they said, oh, we already got that call. Even though the police logs from that night didn't reflect it, Bill thinks his interviewees were telling the truth. The best I can make out was some people did pick up the phone and the police weren't being responsive. But the final error in the New York Times report is one that could have saved Bill and his family a lot of grief over the years. The idea that Kitty bled to death, all alone. Bill interviewed one of Kitty's closest friends, Sophia Farrar, who lived nearby. Sophia told him that she'd woken up when she heard someone screaming, but couldn't see anything when she looked out the window.

So she went back to bed. Twenty minutes later, a neighbor rang to say that Kitty was downstairs in the hallway hurt. So Sophia rushed to check on her friend. When Sophia saw Kitty bleeding and badly injured, she stayed with her and even held her until the ambulances arrived. It would have been hugely helpful to my parents to know that a close friend of Kitty's was there, rather than she was completely alone from first stab to last breath.

I wasn't the only budding psychologist who was deeply disturbed to learn about Kitty's story. Boy, that's just heartbreaking. I mean, surely somebody could have done something to step in and help her. And I think it contributes to a real unease and a sense of frustration and dissatisfaction with the human race. This is Ken Brown of the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. Ken's Psych 101 course taught him the very same story of bystander apathy as mine did. And the story never sat well with him. It just didn't seem to match his real-life experience.

Helping behavior happens every day. On every street corner in the world. Somebody is doing something else small and positive to help other people. So when Ken was asked to do a TEDx talk, he decided to revisit Kitty's awful tale. As he dug into new academic research, he discovered that Bill wasn't the only one to find discrepancies in the textbook version of Kitty's story. The psychologist Rachel Manning and her colleagues published an article in 2008, which did a deep dive into the archival research on her murder, looking back at the original legal documents,

and even conversations with local historians. And their formal investigation found exactly what Bill did. Most people who were listed as witnesses didn't see anything, and those that did hear something found ways to try to help. The paper concluded that there's simply no evidence for the claim that 38 eyewitnesses watched Kitty get murdered and did nothing. There's certainly a lot more that says that there were good people trying to help that night, as opposed to a whole cruel city that stood silently as Kitty Genovese was murdered.

But that paper got Ken wondering, if Kitty's story didn't play out like the textbook suggests, then what about the scientific findings that followed after her death? The original studies were really only studying one particular type of situation, and that's a very strong situation in which an individual has been instructed to be passive. Let's think back to that Latine and Darley study I told you about earlier. Unlike the witnesses in Kitty's case, Latine and Darley subjects weren't just passively doing their own thing when a random emergency happened. The subjects in their study knew they were taking part in an experiment, and a scary-looking experimenter had just told them to do something very specific. Sit in this room and put your headphones on. Listen, do these things. I'll be back in 15 minutes. Don't leave. Participants may have really wanted to help

that stranger in distress, but the instructions they were given by the experimenter could have dissuaded them. They told me not to do anything. They told me to sit here and do my job. That pressure was bad enough for subjects who thought they were the only person hearing the emergency. But subjects who thought they were listening in with a larger group got an extra signal that stepping in was the wrong move. They could hear that none of the other subjects seemed to be taking action either. Darley and Latine's 1968 study is the one that appears in all the textbooks. But it wasn't the only experiment to explore the conditions under which people decide to help.

There were a bunch of less famous studies that tended to give subjects a bit more independence on how to react. Hey, pay attention. And if there's a problem, let me know. That's an active instruction. That's an active instruction. And what they found is when you've been instructed to be active, you're actually more likely to help the more people that are present. It turns out that simply telling subjects it's okay to help completely reverses Latane and Darley's original findings. Diffusion of responsibility completely goes out the window as soon as people think it's okay to do something kind for another person.

But these results raise a different question. What's the thing that sometimes does stop good people from helping out? The real operating mechanism here is uncertainty. What's the right thing for me to do? What does society expect of me? What will happen if I step forward? Ken has seen study after study in which participants were totally willing to help, even sometimes at real personal cost, as long as it was crystal clear that helping was something they were supposed to do. And if you can reduce the uncertainty and make it clear that helping behavior is expected, it's normative, it is what good people would do and should do. Then you're going to see a whole lot more helping behavior.

Ken saw how uncertainty can affect our tendency to help firsthand while waiting at an airport departure gate. The guy beside me, he looked rough, unshaven, unkept, a big dude. And he was sleeping. When we started boarding, you know, I sat there and wondering, like, should I wake this guy up? Ken went back and forth on what to do. He didn't want the man to miss his flight, but he wasn't really sure the guy was even on his flight. Maybe he'd be pissed if Ken woke him up. I was uncertain if nudging him awake would be met with gratitude or anger, you know, that he might yell at me or throttle me. As Ken thought back to all the research he'd been reading,

he decided to take action and wake the guy up. I nudged him a couple times and he sort of mumbled awake and I said, you know, are you going to whatever our flight was? And he said, yeah. And I said, well, we're on last boarding. And I was still kind of nervous. I mean, he seemed nice at first, but then he told me his story. The man was a pastor. He'd spent the last week on a spiritual retreat and had gotten very little sleep. He was incredibly grateful. He just ended up being one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. If I'm uncertain about

whether somebody needs help, I just remember that situation and remember, you know, it may not always resolve itself positively, but I can always ask the question. I can always say, hey, I've noticed that you're struggling or you look hurt. Is there anything I can do to help you? After talking to Ken, I realized that people simply aren't as indifferent to the plight of strangers as my psych textbook claimed. And Ken's uncertainty interpretation suggests an exciting possibility. If we can find ways to reduce people's uncertainty about helping, if we can make it normative to do nice stuff for other people, then we may be able to increase the kindness we see in society. And more kindness in society means more happiness for everybody. The science shows that every time we take action to help another person,

whether with a huge act like saving someone's life, or with something tiny like donating five bucks to charity, that kindness winds up giving us a happiness boost. So finding ways to make kindness the norm would be a quick way to make us all feel better. And it would come with the added benefit of making society a little bit more compassionate. But that raises a question. Can we actually make kindness the norm? I'll tell you more when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. We were so frustrated as young people with the way that our school administration had handled it. When Hannah Manget was in 10th grade, a student at her high school died by suicide. She and her fellow students were devastated, not only by their peers' death, but also by the fact

that Hannah's school did little to acknowledge the tragedy or the impact it had on other students. Hannah felt like no one was doing anything to help. Hannah felt like no one was doing anything to help. So we created our own memorial. We created our own space to process. We rented out our childhood park. And we had just created a space for us to commemorate our peer who had lost their life. The experience had a profound impact on Hannah. She even got to speak about the importance of teens stepping up to help others at the White House. I saw that kindness was like necessary. It wasn't just this

soft, nice thing, but rather it was like this vital, life-saving power. After she spoke at the White House, Hannah was approached by the director of a foundation focused on teen mental health, whose goal is to promote kindness and the power of helping. She is one of the most influential forces of our time today. Born This Way Foundation is the passion project of one of my favorite pop stars. Ladies and gentlemen, Lady Gaga!

What I would like to say is that it's surprising how many people really want to bring humankind together to do great things. This might be one of the best days of my life. Gaga started Born This Way in collaboration with her co-founder, Cynthia Germanotta. started Born This Way in collaboration with her co-founder, Cynthia Germanotta. Of course, you know, I don't think she could breathe without her music, but this is her real purpose in life. In addition to being the foundation's co-founder, Cynthia is also Lady Gaga's mother. Or, in the words of my favorite Gaga song, her ma-ma-ma-ma.

People talk about their children being different, and I like to say that she was unique growing up. And, you know, those qualities weren't always really appreciated by her peers. Gaga's uniqueness prompted some of the other teens at her school to be incredibly cruel. Some of her peers started a Facebook page called Stephanie Germanotta Will Never Be Famous. And, you know, they did this because they could see how committed she was to her music. This is all she thought about. This is all that she did. And, you know, the bullying and the meanness just continued. She started to feel humiliated, isolated, excluded from her peers. And as a result, she started to really question her self-worth and her value. And it just shattered what was a very, very confident young woman. The stress caused Stephanie to develop anxiety and depression as a middle schooler,

two mental health issues that she's publicly struggled with ever since. But Stephanie's pain came not just from the bullying itself, but from the fact that so many other students saw what was going on and didn't step in to help. I think the most difficult thing for her there was just not having anybody to rely on. Now, over a decade later, Stephanie wants to make sure that kids today don't have to go through the callousness that she herself experienced. And that's where we come in, is we try to understand what young people need, fill those

gaps for them, and equip them with resources. And at the heart of that is kindness. We're doing many things to show that kindness is cool. The foundation's goal is to help teens step in when they see others in need. One campaign involves getting teens to intervene as a bystander when one of their peers is being bullied. Another has people pledging to do one random act of kindness every day for 21 days. Since its launch in, I guess, 2018 now,

we've recruited over 7 million participants with over 160 million pledged acts of kindness. With catchy programs and a charismatic star like Lady Gaga at the helm, the foundation is making helping go viral. They're getting bystanders all over the world to think of stepping in to help someone in need as not only cool, but also normative. And as we know from the science,

bystanders are way more willing to step in and help when they think that's the expected behavior. And that's where interns like Hannah Manget come in. Recruited at the White House, Hannah had been tasked with collecting stories of kindness and bystander intervention to publicly share on the foundation's website

with the goal of inspiring even more positive interventions in the future. One of her biggest assignments was due just after a family vacation to California. But the fun of that trip had come to an abrupt end when Hannah's brother became ill and had to stay behind in a hospital unexpectedly. Hannah's family was forced to take a red-eye flight home to regroup

and work out what to do next to help her brother. Like I was supposed to have found kindness in the world and written about it, but things were just so stressful that my plan was to text the Channel Kindness folks and say, sorry, like I'm not releasing kindness in the world right now. But we get off our flight and we're walking towards Baggage Claim, and it's like a completely barren airport. And we see a fellow passenger from our flight completely collapse and fall to the ground. Hannah's parents, who are both doctors, rushed over to help. They realized that the man had gone into a diabetic shock

and desperately needed to increase his blood sugar. But the thing was, nobody had anything to eat. Everything was closed. And then we hear this small but powerful voice behind us who says, I think I have a Snickers in my lunchable. That voice came from Mecca, a nine-year-old boy who'd taken the cross-country flight all by himself. But when he saw people rushing to help the collapsed man, he wanted to help too. So he shared the candy bar he'd been given by his grandma to get him through his first solo trip. In the end, Mecca's generous action saved the man's life. It was just such a beautiful night, I think, for all of us.

And it was just such a symbol of like, Mecca was so anxious. My family was so anxious. But yet, like in this moment when we saw someone in need, everyone was able to put something aside and help this fellow passenger of ours. Hannah wrote up this story of successful bystander intervention, not just for the foundation's website, but also for a new book entitled Channel Kindness,

Stories of Kindness and Community, that she had a chance to co-author not only with other student reporters, but also with Lady Gaga herself. Something we often say at the foundation is that kindness is contagious. And I think that couldn't be more true. Even as someone who was there, when I sat down and reread that story for the first time in the book, I was more hopeful.

I felt, you know, an urge to be kinder. I think that there's so much power in just being reminded of kindness. Hannah's right here. There's real power in witnessing reminded of kindness. Hannah's right here. There's real power in witnessing acts of kindness. The urban legend that sprang up around Kitty Genovese's murder was built on the concept that indifference is part of human nature. And the scientific work that followed seemed to fit with this narrative of callousness.

But we now know that Kitty's urban legend was just that, an urban legend. The science shows that people do help, as long as they think it's the normal thing to do. And when we start hearing that helping is not just normal, but that hundreds of millions of people are doing it, that's likely to have a very, very large effect on our collective happiness. Which would be pretty awesome, because all of us need the happiness boost that comes from helping others. And it's likely we'll each find ourselves needing a little help every now and then too, even if we're as rich and famous as Lady Gaga. My daughter was at the bus one day, and this was at a time when she was in a lot of physical pain. I'm sure, you know, many of your listeners might

have read about the fact that she had an emergency hip surgery. And a young woman named Emma came to the bus. And Emma's been in a wheelchair her entire life. Emma has cerebral palsy. Emma has had more surgeries than you can count on your hands. And she came up to Stephanie and asked her if she was okay. And she said, you seem like you're in pain and you're not feeling well.

So they bonded over pain at the bus and they became lifelong friends. And it's just a beautiful, heartwarming story. Many of us won't ever be faced with some of the more extreme situations we've talked about in this episode. We won't be called upon to intervene in a violent crime or run through a hail of bullets to save a life. But all of us have opportunities to intervene to help other people in some way. Checking in on a friend, donating a few bucks to people in need, offering to give an ear to someone who's grieving,

or checking in on a fellow passenger at the departure gate. Our daily lives give us lots and lots of chances to be an active and caring bystander. All these acts of kindness can be a huge happiness booster. Doing nice things for others gives us a richer sense of social connection and community. It can promote a sense of purpose and meaning. And frankly, it just feels good. So let all that kindness rip. And if you do no other good deed today, at least do this.

Let people know that kindness is the norm. It's what's expected of you. And it's kind of cool. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Joseph Fridman checked our facts. Sophie Crane McKibben edited our scripts.

Emily Ann Vaughn offered additional production support. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lucarn, Maya Koenig, Nicole Morano, Eric Zandler, Royston Bizer, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.