essay on the kindness of strangers

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

Writers share their experiences of kindness while travelling.

By The Boar Travel

Credit: Pexels.

Image: Unsplash.

Zofia Swiatek

It is quite peculiar that when a stranger is kind to us while travelling, it’s immediately obvious to both parties that the favour cannot be returned — soon, we will be again physically distant, and lost to each other forever. We pass each other for only a moment in our lives, a chance encounter with no past and likely no future.

I think that the unique circumstances make even the smallest act of kindness so touching and memorable. I still remember how three years ago I was traveling through Georgia with my family and we left the car to visit a viewpoint outlooking a mountain pass. Several other people were there, taking pictures of the beautiful scenery, and I saw that one woman was posing with a large bouquet of beautiful purple wild flowers. I truly liked them, and went up to her to say how lovely they were.

It was all she needed to hear — immediately, she offered to give me the flowers, so that I could take a picture with them myself. Her gesture was extremely kind, and I smiled happily as my mom took our her camera. Yet this stranger’s kindness did not end there: the woman insisted that I keep the flowers with me, and refused to take them back. She saw that they brought me joy, and wanted to contribute to my happiness. People usually receive flowers from loved ones, and it’s so amazingly precious to receive them from a stranger!

The flowers withered away by the end of the day, but the memory will stay with me forever. This simple, ephemeral gift became a powerful reminder of the goodness people can show towards others.

I passed a lot of people on that trip years ago, but the fact that I still remember this woman and the flowers shows that a simple gesture can truly go a long way. Back then, the flowers made my day, and every time I think back to it, the world seems a bit more bright.

Rosie Williams

This week I was reminded of someone who played a very minor role in my year abroad in Germany, yet whose regular kindness and positive attitude never failed to put a smile on my face.

I took the train to work every day and I soon realised there was a ticket inspector, who also worked on this route regularly. He was the most friendly man, with dark curly hair and a thin moustache- which also curled outwards in a spiral at the sides just like in a cartoon. In fact, he did look rather Super Mario-esque, but that’s beside the point.

Every time he entered the carriage to check the tickets, he would announce his arrival with a jovial greeting. On one occasion, I overheard him talking to some people in front of me. He’d sat down beside them as he often did, telling them that he used to be an artist before realising that the real art in life was interacting with other people, which is why he became a train conductor.

You really couldn’t make this stuff up! He certainly used this opportunity, which the profession apparently afforded him, to its full extent! I liked to eavesdrop into the friendly conversations like this, which he had with passengers, (it was hard not to overhear because he was so animated), but one day it was my turn.

Getting out my ticket for him to check, he spotted the British driving license in my card wallet, which prompted him to sit next to me and tell me about the time when his sports team, (to my memory it was something like trampolining), went to competitions in the UK and then Japan. Listening to what he had to say always felt slightly surreal, as this man seemed to have such a rich life behind him. I embraced the opportunity, listening eagerly and feeling privileged to share in his storytelling.

Even though my journey was only eight minutes, his friendliness and mad adventures combined had the ability to put my little worries into perspective and send me off feeling inspired.

Lauren Nicholson

Last year I visited Paris with a few friends and we spent a day looking at art galleries. The last one on our list was ‘Musee De L’Orangerie', a dreaded 40 minute trek from the previous one. We weren’t too familiar with the public transport so we were travelling between everything on foot.

We ended up arriving about five minutes before the museum closed and the guard told us they actually stopped letting in people fifteen minutes before anyway. I was pretty gutted – the gallery features a beautiful set of waterlily paintings by Monet and the room is circular so the painting bends around. Sort of like a panorama view.

The security guard caught on to our mood and asked us “Brexit or no Brexit?” My friend replied “no Brexit” and the guard grinned and told us we could go in for the last few minutes.

They let us straight through the security checks and passport checks (if you’re an EU resident you get in free, otherwise you have to pay). I did feel like a bit of a celebrity.

Although we didn’t get to spend long inside, it was definitely worth it and certainly my favourite of all the museums. Pictures of the Monet paintings really don’t do it justice: there’s just something really beautiful about being surrounded by the paintings in real life. It’s really immersive.

You can also get quite close to them too and the vast size means you can see so many details of his work – every brush stroke. I definitely recommend visiting, but maybe before its closing time at 6pm, because I doubt the guard is always that nice!

Hannah Drew

My fondest memory of a kind stranger comes from my year abroad. I was travelling back to the UK for the Christmas holidays, a journey which involved travelling a couple of hours from my small town to Paris, where I would catch the Eurostar to London.

The day had already been made extremely difficult, due to the transport strikes and my trains to Paris being cancelled, followed by a Flixbus that turned up over an hour late. In Paris, I needed to catch RER B to Gare du Nord, a service which was significantly reduced due to the strikes.

The station was completely rammed with people and I knew that if I missed the next metro, I would miss my Eurostar due to my late Flixbus earlier in the day. Enter my kind stranger. Seeing that I was visibly upset after my stressful morning and the panic of the crowd, he helped me onto the train with my huge suitcase as we were pushed and shoved by other passengers. He then proceeded to form a human barricade around me, so nobody was shoving into me and I was able to calm myself down.

As I arrived at Gare du Nord, he yet again helped me lug my suitcase off and pointed me in the direction of my Eurostar train. Although he did not know of my difficult day and desire to get back to the UK, for the first time in three months, a stranger took the time to help someone who was visibly struggling and get me on my way.

It’s a shame he wasn’t there to help me when my phone was stolen about ten minutes later in Gare du Nord. Thanks, Paris.

Reece Goodall

Way back in my first year, I decided to take part in one of the many ‘travel abroad’ opportunities you’re bombarded with.

The idea of the journey was to hitchhike from London to Morocco. In all honesty, I had little faith that the trip would be a success– although hitchhiking seems an adventure in films, I simply didn’t believe that it would in real life. The charity trip involved groups of three, and who would have the space and the patience for three random kids they’d found on the road?

It transpired that Europe was full of wonderful people, and they went above and beyond giving us lifts. One French lady found us wandering and, when she learned we’d scarcely eaten for two days, she took us back to her house and invited us to share a stuffed chicken meal with her family.

When it poured with rain and we attempted to rest under some trees, a lady took us to a nearby hostel and paid for our board. Sitting in a train station, again because of weather, one of our party was sad and struggling with homesickness – an old French man saw her crying, asked what music she liked and then started playing it on the station piano.

In the most exciting moment of the trip, the American member of our party left her passport in a service station toilet. A Spanish man picked up there and, when she realised, he took her back several miles to look. It wasn’t there, so he called the local police and then he took us to the US embassy in Spain. It was out of his way by a magnitude of several hours, but he said that he couldn’t abandon someone in need.

I wasn’t expecting the trip to be a success and, for me, it wasn’t – I bailed out before Morocco. But the journey was wonderful, in no small part because of the kindness of the people we encountered on the way.

Have you benefitted from the kindness of strangers?

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This I Believe

The kindness of strangers.

Daniel Ferri

I believe in the kindness of strangers. I learned to believe this from a hurricane and a newborn baby boy.

Our son Owen was born just as Hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast. Two days later, as Katrina neared landfall, Owen began suffering seizures; he'd had a stroke.

Daniel Ferri says his work as a grave-digger, fork lift driver, assembly line worker and potter helped him mature enough to be a teacher. The most important thing he hopes to bring to his sixth-grade students is kindness. The doctors caring for Ferri's son, Owen, are encouraged by his progress.

I didn't follow the catastrophe on the Gulf Coast as closely as I might have, but those weeks taught me some things about catastrophe and about the kindness of strangers.

All catastrophes are personal. Some in the Gulf Coast sought survival; some sought to help others. Some prayed; some preyed upon others.

At the hospital, we watched our son Owen sleep. Despite the tubes dripping and the monitors beeping, he still slept his baby sleep. My wife asked for the pastor; I asked for the doctor. She prayed for him. I held the CAT scan up to the light and searched for answers.

No one can know what you will feel or fear in a time of need, but I learned that in this, the most difficult time of my life, the people our family depended upon most were people we had never met, people who we would likely never see again -- strangers. We depended upon strangers, strangers who knew their duty was to help others. We depended upon the nurses who cared so well for our son, who cooed to him and caressed him, who watched me hold him through the night and never seemed to notice how ugly a man is when he cries. We depended upon the hostel that gave us a place to stay near the hospital, upon the members of my union who believe caring for our child's health should not ruin us, upon the doctors and clerks and ambulance drivers. We depended upon a commitment made to helping others. This commitment is a web that holds us together in times of need.

By the time we took Owen home, the worst effects of Katrina were evident. I watched the images from the Gulf Coast, images of communities, lives and families whose fabric had been torn apart. I thought of that web of strangers that had embraced my family in our time of need, and that it is the most fortunate among us who are served best by it.

I can only hope this web will be strong enough, that it will be spun wide, that it will hold and care for many, that we can all depend upon the kindness of strangers.

More 'This I Believe' Essays

Norman corwin: good can be as communicable as evil, azar nafisi: mysterious connections that link us together, studs terkel: community in action.

Michael McCullough joins the podcast to discuss the difficult questions around the evolution and development of human kindness and morality.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Kindness of Strangers with Michael McCullough

Overview & Shownotes

How did humans turn from animals who were only inclined to help their offspring to the creatures we are today–who regularly send precious resources to total strangers? With me on the show today is Michael McCullough , who explores this difficult question in his book, The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code .

For the episode transcript,  download a copy  or read it below.

Contact us at [email protected]

Links to people and ideas mentioned in the show

• Michael McCullough,   The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code
• W.D. Hamilton  and the gene for altruism
• Robert Trivers and  reciprocal altruism
• Ancient  Mesopotamia
• Humanity’s turn to agriculture (the  Neolithic Revolution )
• The  Code of Hammurabi
• The  Axial Age
• The  Golden Rule
• Peter Singer

Thanks to Evelyn Brosius for our logo. Music featured in the show:

“ The Zeppelin ” by Blue Dot Sessions from sessions.blue (CC BY-NC 4.0)

“ Silk and Silver ” by Blue Dot Sessions from sessions.blue (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Christiane Wisehart, host and producer: I’m Christiane Wisehart. And this is Examining Ethics, brought to you by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University.

[music: Blue Dot Sessions, The Zeppelin]

Christiane: How did humans turn from animals who were only inclined to help their offspring and mates to the creatures we are today–who regularly send precious resources to total strangers? With me on the show today is Michael McCullough, who explores this difficult question in his book, The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code.

Michael McCullough: I was really trying to understand how we got from a world in which we limited our concern for others’ welfare to family, friends, and members of our own small societies, to the world we’re in now, which is a world in which we don’t really think anything is strange, about wondering what we can do to help people in the developing world or the concern we should have ethically about future generations and their wellbeing, or even people on the other side of our countries or the other side of our cities that we’ll never meet, but we nevertheless have some impulse to try to take an interest in them to help them to ease their suffering.}

Christiane: Stay tuned for my interview with Michael McCullough on today’s episode of Examining Ethics.

[music fades out]

Christiane: I went to a religious private high school, which meant that evolution was not a big part of any of my biology classes. It was there in a kind of negative sense–we were taught that Darwin’s theory of evolution did not mesh with the Biblical account of human history, which was the “true” account of human history. In spite of that, and thanks to my scientist father, from a pretty young age I’ve appreciated the beauty of Darwin’s theory and developed an interest in the ways in which human bodies have changed over the course of millions of years.

I was fascinated, then, by Michael McCullough’s account of our psychological evolution and how our minds–not just our bodies–have morphed over hundreds of thousands of years. His book, The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code stretches from hunters and gatherers who wandered across the earth in nomadic bands to the present day. He focuses on the question of how humans went from a fairly limited sense of morality to developing sophisticated moral codes that help us answer the complicated ethical questions we’ve faced as societies get bigger and more complex.

I spoke with Michael in December of 2020. [interview begins] Christiane: Most of the listeners will understand that we’re a social animal, that we’re biologically programmed to be social, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re biologically programmed to be kind to one another, right? Michael McCullough: We most surely are programmed for certain kinds of altruism toward others, but I actually don’t think the mechanisms that those evolutionary dynamics give rise to can really explain the thing I want to explain, which is, you know, why is there an effective altruism movement? Why is there a UNICEF? Um, and I don’t think the evolutionary explanations that evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists trade in, I don’t think those theoretical tools are up to the job of explaining that kind of cool stuff.

Going back to Darwin actually, evolutionary biologists have been interested in what they call the problem of cooperation. And the problem of cooperation is that it shouldn’t exist and yet it does. And the reason it shouldn’t exist is because when I render help to some other individual, it comes at a cost to me, and it comes as a benefit to the other individual. And those are the currencies that natural selection operates on. It operates on costs and benefits. So we do a sort of short- uh, sort of a shorthand thing and we talk about sort of costs and benefits as a matter of economics, but natural selection is an economist too. So anything that I’m doing, any energy I’m expending, any resources I’m expending to your benefit, are resources I couldn’t convert into reproductive success. So the question is why, why do we invest in others?

And so this problem sat around actually in, in evolutionary biology for a hundred years, um, with people kind of knowing sort of what an answer was, which is, well, we take care of our family, you know, um, that’s sort of how we get our interests into the future. So there was a recognition that our genetic interests live on through our offspring, but no one really knew how to formalize that. But in the 1960s, uh, an evolutionary biologist named William Hamilton worked out the math on this.

Suppose you have an adaptation that causes you to do something nice for other individuals, and this is beneficial to them. What Hamilton showed was, that’s a gene that could evolve by natural selection.

So if you think about this, it’s like, uh, let’s say I’m doing something that’s harmful to me, but it creates three times that amount of benefit to another individual and the class of individuals I’m helping are 50% likely to share that gene as well. Who is the class of individuals in my world who are 50% likely to have a gene that I possess? Well, my offspring will have a 50% likelihood. So I can reach out into that class of individuals called my offspring. And if I’m doing something that costs me a unit, but it makes them three units better off, and we multiply that cost benefit ratio by the likelihood that they have that gene, that satisfies the requirements for that gene to evolve. You get three times the benefit I do, and there’s a 50% likelihood you’ve got that gene.

So in a sense, um, I produce one fewer copy of that gene, but you’re producing another copy and a half of it on average, that gene is going to increase in frequency. So the population will become more altruistic because of relatedness and because we’ve got this cost benefit ratio that is favorable given, given the degree of relatedness. So what does this all mean? It means we evolve to take an interest in the welfare of our families, and that’s a kind of altruism. Um, so that’s the first way we explain the evolution of altruism. There’s other models we can get to, uh, if you feel like it, but a lot of them have to do with reciprocity and friendship.

Christiane: I actually, yeah, I do want you to talk about reciprocity just a little bit. I’d like you to explain why humans have this idea of reciprocity and how that works in our bodies? Michael McCullough: So another mechanism in addition to kin altruism, as we often call it is a dynamic called reciprocal altruism. And here, we’re just trying to explain how it could come to be that you end up helping individuals who are not close genetic relatives. For what reason might we have a motivation to help individuals who are non-relatives? Um, so who don’t share that gene for helping in common. An evolutionary biologist named Robert Trivers, uh, in 1971 figured this one out. And, and what he was able to show is that if you have a gene that causes you to provide a benefit, uh, at a suitable cost benefit ratio, again, like, like with Hamilton, it’s cheap, cheap for you to give, but really beneficial to receive. And in that giving process, you create some kind of motivation in the recipient that then motivates that recipient to repay you in the future to provide that same kind of benefit to you in the future. Then that’s a gene that’s also on the move.

And, you know, you can think about this as buying low and selling high. I’m going to buy your friendship in a sense, I’m going to buy it low, you know, by providing a benefit to you that’s, you know, it’s cheap for me to provide, but it’s really valuable to you. So what have I bought? I’ve sort of bought your gratitude and as a result of how I’ve helped you, if that, if that kind of caused you to make a memory that I helped you, and that it also motivates you in the future to help me, then even though I’m sort of in the immediate term, I’ve paid a cost in order to provide a benefit to you, which makes it look like I’m disadvantaged in the eyes of natural selection.

If that favor I’ve given you repays itself over the life course, then over the life course I’m better off for having paid that small initial cost. It’s really like investing in a stock, actually, reciprocal altruism works very much that way. I’m going to sort of buy your friendship or your faithfulness so that when I need three units of benefit, you’re willing to pay that one unit cost in order to make me better off. And so through the course of a lifetime, we establish this sort of partnership. And each, each, at each, with each exchange of benefits and costs, we’re better off, you know, on average, we end up better off over the lifetime. Christiane: I think this is where the problem of your book comes in, right? Because then how do you explain a one time $500 donation to Live Aid or me sending bottled water down to New Orleans during hurricane Katrina? Right? I don’t know anybody in New Orleans, I’m from Indiana. When does that shift start? Or, or have we always been programmed to want to help even people that we’ll never ever see? Michael McCullough: We have to do a little bit of projection backwards and work with, uh, you know, a fairly sparse anthropological record, archeological record to try to figure out how we did think about complete strangers prior to moving into cities and chiefdoms and stuff like that. Before we got into big collectives. My read of the existing data is that we lived in small societies. Uh, you know, if you think about the organizational units that we evolve to live in, there’s the nuclear family. Then there’s this kind of band of, you know, a couple of family groups, maybe three or four family groups that lived together for a season. And you can think of them as sort of a temporary neighborhood or something like that. So it’s this sort of temporary nomadic band.

And then above that, you’ve got the cultural group, you know, you can think of, this as people who speak your language. And that could be a thousand people. Maybe several thousands of people. That is your social universe. That is the entire world of people that you could in principle care about. And the reason you could in principle care about them is because the whole Kevin Bacon thing, the whole six degrees of separation thing. I know your brother’s wife, who you also know or something like that. So we have just a couple of degrees of separation.

Then I have some incentive to be nice to you, even if we’ve never met. And, you know, perhaps we’ll, we never will see each other again, but we exist in this dense network of friends, of friends, of friends. So you can think of that as the mating pool, the marriage pool, you know, this is the class of people you couldn’t in practice interact with. So what do we know about how people interact with people from other ethnolinguistic groups? This is where the data are contested. But my read is that we tend to, uh, regard those people with suspicion and hostility. We don’t speak together. We don’t eat together. Our customs are different. Uh, and in general, um, our relationships are either regulated by just keeping apart, uh, and avoiding conflict, or when we come in to, if we bump up against each other too closely, to engage in conflict.

So I think we evolved not only to not treat that distant other kindly, but in fact, to regard them with suspicion and possibly hostility. So I think that’s the psychology we come into the modern world with where we are, we’re really indifferent to people whom we can only imagine are out there. And that’s the psychology we bring with us to the first city-states, to the first chiefdoms, to, uh, Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, where societies start to get really big. And that’s where we start to have, I think, the first tangible problems of suffering strangers and us not being equipped with kind of evolved psychological hardware that would motivate us to care for, for their wellbeing. Christiane: We come into the modern age with this psychology, but you’re talking about what era? BCE?

Michael McCullough: We’re probably talking about 13,000 years ago, when that transition started, then we’re in the first cities, you know, maybe 8,000 BCE. People move from a really communal way of life to when they start farming and cultivating grains, primarily. You see that they start to privatize their resources. We’re starting to move from a communal understanding of how to make a living out of the world, to one that’s really more organized around immediate family or extended family. The way you make a living as a farmer is you can do it all yourself. You can do it with you and your family, so you don’t need to coordinate the sharing.

So life begins, begins to get private and lineage based. Then you project that forward into these first, these big city States, and that whole thing just explodes. It becomes about home and hearth and your immediate trading partners, and maybe your neighbors. You don’t know the people, you know, in your city of 10,000 people. You’re not going to interact with the people on, you know, clear on the other side of the city. This is the first, I think, the first real challenge for our evolved mechanisms for caring that they’re just not built for worlds of 10,000 strangers. Christiane: And maybe even worse than that, this is when, this is when you start to see what we would call poverty. Michael McCullough: Yeah. Christiane: So then how do you explain what you call the age of compassion? Michael McCullough: The solution in those early societies of the ancient near East is legal codes. It becomes offensive enough to see the amount of inequality in society that these God Kings of Sumeria and Mesopotamia began to issue these grand legal codes. Code of Hammurabi, of course, is, is, is the example that, that we, you know, that comes to mind, you know, immediately, but it wasn’t the first, there were others. What they all seem to include are regulations against exploiting the very, very poor. Life in those ancient city-states–as is increasingly the case in the United States, for example–success and failure becomes so much a matter of luck, good luck and bad luck that is heritable.

So the first land, your, your family is able to acquire and enclose and privatized, it’s going vary in quality from, and, location, from irrigation and so forth from, um, your neighbors. This is just random luck. Some land will be more productive than other lands. We’re privatizing this stuff, so it’s no longer communal, so we’re not pooling risk among large collectives, that’s a kind of bad luck just as a starting initial condition. But then there’s just sort of random bad luck that, I mean, this is all about the small numbers, right? The breadwinner of a family dies, a son dies, who was, you know, critical for helping the farm to run and so on and so forth.

This, this kind of bad luck just in, you know, or good luck multiplies across society. So you have, you have widows and orphans who have no one to take care of them out of bonds of friendship or family: easy to exploit. And, uh, it becomes so outrageous, and I think so demoralizing that these ancient despots realize like we have to do something to limit how they’re being exploited. So you get these legal codes that say, we can’t charge exorbitant interest rates. If somebody becomes your indentured servant, it can’t be for a lifetime. If you take someone’s property as sort of, if you pawn it, you have to give them the chance to buy it back in the future.

So you see all of these sort of tender mercies developing that are designed to limit the ability of the very fortunate and wealthy for, to just grinding the very unfortunate poor into the dirt. So from this age of these first large cities, we move into an era that, um, social scientists and many philosophers and historians called the axial age. And this is a period probably, you know, between 800 and 200 BC. When you see this flowering of the world’s religions, the religions that are still practiced today, you know, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and then classical Greek thought. In each of these societies, you see the development of a golden rule for the first time, a notion that everyone around you, no matter their identity is entitled to the same kind of consideration that you would claim that they give to you.

You become morally obligated during this so-called axial age to practice what’s, you know, what we now recognize as the golden rule. So what you see is that in each of these societies, spirituality becomes really deeply tied up with sympathy, with compassion, in some sense to be spiritually right, or right with God means you have to extend your compassion to the entire world. So we get the golden rule and we get all kinds of institutions during this era that are responses to this new ethical insight. So you see in ancient classical Greece, you see kind of the first, um, veterans affairs, the department of veterans affairs. You see the first large work programs, the first disability insurance programs in Israel at the time after the Israelites returned from the Babylonian captivity. You see them bringing with them and innovating ideas like the need for institutions within the society that helped to meet the needs of the poor, of the orphans and the widows. Christiane: The golden rule, these, these ideas around compassion, helping, helping others, it is new, right? Um, in terms of humans as animals, it’s a thing that we have created, right? No matter, it might be 2000 years ago, but it’s, it’s never the last something that might not necessarily have been with us since the beginning of our evolutionary journey. Right? Michael McCullough: That’s right.

You could have a rule that works in your small scale society that’s like, you better pay those people back because you know you’re going to need help from them in the future. Like if you are lazy today and you decide to not go out and work, well, you’re setting yourself up for being abandoned or being, being shunned, not getting their help in the future. So in this society where there’s, you know, what comes around, goes around, it’s really easy to see the logic of helping other people. But when you get to this world where you just, you just know you’re never going to see these people again, but you know they’re out there, you know they’re hurting, that takes a different kind of psychological raw materials to get the conviction that you ought to be caring about complete nameless, faceless strangers. Christiane: The golden rule is, is, is one of the most revolutionary insights into ethics that we have as humans, right? Michael McCullough: Right. Christiane: And we’re just fine tuning it and making it better and fixing the problems that, that come up with this. By the last half of the, the 20th century, we’ve evolved pretty far from those, those early years in the age of compassion, right? Those early years in, in our big, in our first big cities. And we get, we get a guy named Peter Singer, right? Who, who, as you say writes one of the most important works in terms of kindness of the 20th century. So, so what are his ideas and what kind of new, what kind of new era does he spark? Michael McCullough: Right. Uh, so Singer, uh, is an ethicist and, uh, has spent his life trying to, his, his career trying to trace out what the implications of utilitarianism are for the world of ethics. One of his major contributions was an essay in which he made a very, very subversive, but very simple argument. And, uh, in this essay, he basically just presents the idea that if, you know, you passed by a child who was drowning in a little pond, you know, a little city pond, and you were on your way to work and you were busy and you had your best clothes on, you would think nothing about going into that pond to save this little drowning child, even if it meant you had to send your clothes to the dry cleaners and maybe replace your leather shoes or something like that.

You, you would, you know, most people would say it would be monstrous to, you know, to prioritize your, you know, your work schedule, uh, and you need to punch, your need to punch the clock and your dry cleaning bill, um, to prioritize that over saving a life. You see this child, um, flailing around and all of the cues there are to tell you that there’s this, uh, helpless, blameless little creature with a real problem. It’s completely uncontroversial to imagine we run into that pond to save the drowning kid. What Singer does in this essay, uh, Poverty, Affluence and Morality is to say fine, okay, if that’s your intuition, then what’s your intuition with regard to sending money to an organization and a cost-effective organization, that’s going to make meals available in Sub-Saharan Africa?

It’s the identical ethical structure as the, the, the kid in the pond, um, except at this point, you don’t know anybody involved, you don’t, you don’t know the people who would be helped by your $50 a month. So when I teach this in, in my classes with my undergraduates, they start to come up with reasons why they’re not blameworthy if they were to do that. You know, they all say they would be morally blameworthy if they don’t pull the drowning kid out of the pond. But I ask, would you be morally blameworthy if you didn’t, you know, write that check once a month or, um, you know, set up that recurring credit card payment once a month? They come up with all sorts of reasons why they would not be morally blameworthy.

They say things like, I’m not sure the organization is going to be cost-effective. And then you can say, well, assume, assume it is, assume it’s really cost-effective. Or there’s so many other positive things I could be doing with it here at home, you know, in the United States, or I, I’ve, you know, I’m all budgeted out. I’m, I’m using, I’m taking care of my grandmother, you know, or something like that. They can come up with a lot of reasons where suddenly, even though it’s ethically equivalent, for some reason, there are these outside considerations that make them, make excuses seem defensible.

If you follow this argument out, though, what Singer concludes and it’s kind of Singer’s principle, I guess, is if you can create a good in the world that reduces suffering without inordinately increasing suffering for yourself, then morally you ought to do it. So, because he’s this, he is a utilitarian, for him the ethical coin of the realm is suffering. So I don’t know how many times this essay has been cited among scholars. I mean, I would assume it’s like 10,000 times or something like that. I mean, it’s just, it’s so influential. Uh, and this is really just one of several essays and books that are coming out at this point, um, that are about global poverty.

So in the 1970s, we see kind of culture-wide, and in fact, through most of the developed world, an intensification of interest in global poverty. The developed world starts to get very serious about global poverty, in part through arguments like Singer’s, in part, um, through simply the recognition that it’s, it’s good realpolitik to be concerned about making the world a more stable place. Um, we strengthen the United Nations with all kinds of capacities for stimulating development and, um, making more effective humanitarian interventions in the developed world. I think this is the beginning of a real renaissance or a real kind of new high watermark in our concern for strangers. We’re getting, we begin to get really good at helping the nameless, faceless others in, you know, literally on the other side of the planet.

Christiane: So then how do you explain the kindness of strangers? Michael McCullough: You know, I’m an evolutionary psychologist, so I’m always trying to figure out, well, we thought it through somehow, you know, everything we do is generated by cognitive mechanisms, so like what’s the nature of the cognition that we’ve brought to bear on these problems? And I actually think this is a set of general-purpose kind of cognitive tools that we use. One is simply that we have a capacity for reasoning. And the second is we have a capacity for tracing our incentives and figuring out what’s good for us. I actually think the long arc of the history of human generosity is one about us encountering problems, large-scale, society-wide problems that involve mass suffering, looking at these as things that need to be explained, they need explanations. They kind of are offensive to how, to our worldviews.

So then we say, well, what are the, what are the problems? Why is this a problem? And then we can identify, well, it’s bad for business. It’s demoralizing, it’s offensive to God. So then people, what do people do? Well, they do the same kinds of argumentation and reasoning that they’ve always brought to solving corporate problems. And I think we do have evolved psychological mechanisms to promote argument.

So we argue about, you know, why do we not want vast swaths of humanity showing up sick and starving at the city gates? Well, we have all of these reasons why it’s, you know, it’s, it’s a bad idea. And then we say, well, what can we do? You know, what are the best approaches? So we get more and more sophisticated through history. Um, we can know more about what works. We can know more about the problems, we can know more about what works.

We get ethically smarter. We get ethically cleverer, I think smarter, I would say. Um, we have ethical tools that we didn’t have, um, 2,500 years ago. We have trade, technology, science, social science, the kind of science that can give us vaccines and pesticides and, um, high yield, um, cereals. We have wonderful intellectual and material resources at our disposal to make people better off in a way that we just couldn’t have done 2000 years ago, because we didn’t know how to do it. We didn’t necessarily have the ethical apparatus that convinced us that we should do it. And, um, we didn’t have the material resources that made it possible to do it.

Christiane: Um, so why do you care about this? Michael McCullough: Um, I, I … (laughs) Why do I care about it? Um, I began caring about it merely as a sort of, um, insider social science matter because I thought we were not doing ourselves any favors as a, as a science by sort of very neatly saying like, oh, this is about reciprocal altruism, or this is about, you know, uh, kin altruism. Those were kind of some of the tools that evolutionary scientists wanted to use to explain this. And this just to me, did not look right. It did not seem to fit the facts of history. So as a kind of insider, inside baseball shop talk kind of thing, I wanted to present a different view, but the more I read and the more I wrote and the more I thought about it, the more I realized like this is, this is good news.

You know, it’s, uh, you know, I wanted to be, uh, a cheerleader for ethical progress in a time when we tend to be quite gloomy about progress and science, and we’re sort of disaffected and seemed to be going through some kind of malaise about, you know, whether we are better off as a society than we used to be. The more I read, the more convinced I became that we are doing better. You know, we are a better civilization, morally, technologically, et cetera. We are better than we were 2000 years ago. So I think I wanted to kind of tell a story of good news that I’d hoped would not only give people some hope, but also show them what are the raw materials at our disposal for pushing this forward into the future.

[music: Blue Dot Sessions, Silk and Silver]

Christiane: If you want to know more about The Kindness of Strangers or Michael McCullough’s other work, check out our show notes page at examiningethics.org.

The Prindle Institute for Ethics also produces a podcast called Getting Ethics to Work. You can find it at prindleinstitute.org/getethicstowork or wherever you find your podcasts.

Examining Ethics is hosted by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University. Christiane Wisehart wrote and produced the show, with editorial assistance from Hilary Koch. Our logo was created by Evie Brosius. Our music is by Blue Dot Sessions and can be found online at sessions.blue. Examining Ethics is made possible by the generous support of DePauw Alumni, friends of the Prindle Institute, and you the listeners. Thank you for your support.

The views expressed here are the opinions of the individual speakers alone. They do not represent the position of DePauw University or the Prindle Institute for Ethics.

[music fades]

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The story of Charles Strohmer’s experience the morning of 9/11 and the days immediately following.

Heaven on earth – at an Air Force base

by Charles Strohmer

Three hours out of London and flying uneventfully through florescent blue sky six miles above the Atlantic, the passengers aboard Delta Flight 59 were digesting their lunches, quietly absorbed in laptops or reading novels. Others fell drowsily captive to that vespertine atmosphere created on planes when the movies are running. Other than departing Gatwick 30 minutes late, at Noon (7 a.m. EDT), so far the only bother could now be heard in hushed buzz of passengers asking why all the video screens had suddenly gone blank. “The movies should be back on in a few minutes,” an air hostess said over the intercom. “A computer needs re-booting. It happens. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Yawn. Passengers stretched, ordered drinks, queued for toilets. Someone across the aisle from me lifted his porthole shade and broke the spell of counterfeit evening. I was overwhelmed. The bright blue evanescence, which I once heard a pilot call “severe clear,” stretched out into forever. It hurt your eyes to gaze at the boundless brightness. I turned away. Twenty more minutes passed. Still no movies. People fidgeted. The Boeing 777 droned on. Five hours to go before touchdown in Atlanta.

Suddenly everyone’s attention locked on to the Texas drawl coming from the intercom. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. May I have your attention. Your serious attention.” The dreaded words. Worst nightmares sprung from the fuselage, the overhead compartment, the unconscious — wherever you had stowed them before boarding. A kind of holy moment spread through cabin. No one spoke. No one dared. We’re going down.

It seemed much longer than the millisecond it took before Captain William’s steady but troubled Texas drawl continued: “There’s been a major incident in the United States and all air space throughout the nation has been closed. All planes in the air in the United States are being directed to land at the nearest airports, and all international flights into the U.S. are being diverted. We are okay. I repeat. We are okay. But we cannot land in the U.S. We will be landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia in about two hours. We can’t give you any more information at this time. Please be patient and bear with us. We will have more details for you when we get on the ground in Halifax. Thank you for your cooperation.”

Like synchronized swimmers on cue, passengers turned to face their seat-neighbors. Whispers arose. What do you think it is? Who knows? Maybe that announcement was just a ploy and we’re really going down? Must have been a huge earthquake? What would they close all the airports for that? A nuclear bomb, then? Maybe the air traffic control system has failed? Does the captain even know what’s going on?

Nothing made any sense to me. Why had the FAA closed all the airports? I had to know. Knowing would help me beat back worst-case-scenario self-talk. I quickly calculated to Eastern Time and realized that my wife would be in class with her first-graders. But how could I even be sure of that? Was she safe? What had happened? And where? Who had been effected? Was I even going to get home?

Someone must know. Ahh. Coming down the aisle toward me was a hostess whom I had spoken with earlier and had made a connection. I was traveling alone and there were no passengers near me. I decided to take advantage of that privacy. Our eyes met but I deliberately remained seated, hoping she would stop when I sought inconspicuously to flag her down. She stopped and crouched to listen. “I know you can’t tell me what happened, even if you know,” I whispered, “and I’m not asking you to. But can you at least tell me, does the crew know what’s happened?” She nodded discreetly, stood, and then continued on her errand. Well, it was something. A kindness. The first of many to come during the next four days.

Delta Flight 59 became the penultimate of 42 planeloads of international air travelers permitted safe harbor at Halifax International before the tarmac ran out of wing space. As we circled before landing, I was surprised to see the asphalt service road filled with on-lookers in cars, vans, and pickups; like bystanders congregating to stare at a blazing house fire, they had queued to watch the emergency landings. Well, more than that. It wasn’t just the striking sight of landing these huge commercial jets that had brought them out of their homes and businesses that sunny day. They knew what had happened. We still did not.

Taxiing to our place at the end of the long queue of planes, far from the terminal, we eased past the staring congregation of on-lookers until Captain Williams brought the 777 to a gentle halt. We heard the mic cue. Williams immediately thanked us for our patient cooperation and then provided what details he had of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. “Hopefully,” he concluded, “they’ll re-open U.S. airspace to get these international flights to their destinations. So maybe we’ll get out of here in a few hours.”

We now asked a thousand questions of the crew, but they only knew Captain Williams knew. Cell phone service had been turned off as we flew to Halifax, and there were no televisions. The details available to us upon landing were still very sketchy and rumors still ran wild in the media about “more possible attacks.” There was a rumor about “a plane crashing in Pennsylvania.”

It would be nearly 24 hours after the attack before our imaginations would be seared by television images of flying machines, twisted I-beams, and charred bodies crashing, falling, and billowing in the explosive chemistry of terror, dust, and loss.

Two long, perfectly executed lines of 747s, 767s, 777s, Air Buses, and L1011s were now parked side-by-side on the tarmac. None would be flying anything for the foreseeable future except their carriers’ logos on their tails. Ten thousand stranded passengers — a small town, and all the problems that come with it. The scene had been repeated across Canada, from Newfoundland to Vancouver. Many trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights had been ordered back to their departure cities. Across America, that the extreme sudden workout demanded of thousands of air traffic controllers went without incident is astonishing. The FAA had ordered some 5,000 civilian planes to be landed immediately so that the military could isolate any rogue planes still in the air. Within four minutes, 700 planes had been landed. Nearly 3,000 within the next hour. All 5,000 had been safely guided to the ground in under two hours. An impressive impromptu performance, never once rehearsed in aviation history. The FAA had safely landed 5,000 civilian planes across the US in two hours, a truly impressive impromptu performance, never once rehearsed in aviation history.

Now free to mill about the entire plane – a gracious gesture itself – I found a spot to stand unobtrusively near the open cockpit door to listen to the scratchy, AM radio signal coming out of Halifax, a source of constant news about the attacks, ninety percent of it still rumor. But there were stories in this cockpit, and I decided to chat up the pilots when they were free. “Why did you make the kind of announcement over the Atlantic?” I asked Captain Williams. “Why not just tell us what had happened?” He didn’t hedge. While the videos were off (there had been no computer hiccup), he and his co-pilot had discussed what language to use. “We’ve got almost sixty years’ experience between us,” he told me. “Personally, we’ve never been in this kind of a situation, but colleagues who have been have told us that, in the air, some passengers may panic when they hear the words ‘terrorist attack’ or ‘hijacking’, so we talked for a long time about the right words to describe the urgency but not panic anyone.”

We had now been on the ground a couple hours and flight attendants had been arriving at the cockpit with reports from the cabin. Snacks and water were running low, it was getting stuffy, a couple infants needed baby formula, some passengers wanted a smoke, others needed fresh air. Still squeezed into my spot near the cockpit, I listened to nearly sixty years of experience quickly process each problem as it arose come to wise decisions. The Halifax ground crew was notified about snacks, bottled water, and infant formula. The rear starboard door would be opened for smokers. “But for those of you who need to smoke,” Captain Williams announced, “please take turns and don’t crowd the area. And try to keep the smoke from filtering into the cabin.” The want of fresh air was solved when the front starboard door was opened to admit supplies. “Let’s leave that door open for a while after the ground crew leaves,” Williams told a hostess. Such gestures, especially access to the pilots, made a world of difference in our social microcosm. They defused building tensions and made the confines bearable. I later learned that crews on some of the other carriers had not been as wise.

There was still the matter of reaching my wife. I gave up my post near the cockpit and looked for someone who might lend me a phone. But it was still pointless. Those with phones were wearing down their fingerprints punching numbers robotically every few minutes gambling against a busy signal. Very few won, those hours. But there were countless other stories, and near my seat I began talking with a friendly couple who, apparently, had no phone. They introduced themselves as Robert and Georgia Matthews, from Memphis. A Christian minister, he explained that he had been in London for the opening ceremonies of a colleague’s church. As I began to explain that I’d been traveling in England on a speaking trip, we heard the mike suddenly cue – everyone had become acute to that sound. Captain Williams announced that the FAA had decided not to reopen U.S. airspace today. “We might be here for another day,” he said.

The Matthews and I were digesting this development when Robert’s trouser pocket suddenly began beeping. His daughter in Memphis had been playing phone robotics herself and had finally beat  the odds. Voilà! A connection. Passengers around us were astounded. After he finished talking to his daughter, she took my wife’s number and promised to get hold of her with news that I was okay and where I was. An hour later she got through to us on the plane to say she had been able to reach my wife.

Blessedly, our flight was half full, which made the seventeen hours we spent on board more tolerable. Well past midnight I copped three empty seats side-by-side at the very rear and tried to sleep. Around 3am, we were quickly deplaned on to the runway, shuttled to the terminal, hustled through customs, and immediately driven ten miles in yellow school buses to Shearwater, a Canadian Air Force Base, where we wo0uld be “guests” of Canada. It was a word used by the animated politician who met the group I was with at the school bus outside the terminal. He didn’t seem like he wished he were home in a warm bed. He gave a warm Canadian welcome to “our good neighbors from the south” and promised with many promises that we would be well-looked-after. We were. But questions about how long we’d be your guests were met with we’re taking it a day at a time.

Legends in their own time, forty-two winged ghost towns now waited on the tarmac, the topic of talk radio, press coverage, and conversations in every Halifax-Dartmouth home. The Shearwater encampment numbered about 750 stranded passengers – two Delta flights besides ours, two British Air, and one partying Air Tours group from Scotland filled with vacationers to Florida. The remaining ten thousand had been housed across the area in schools and homes and in what remained of hotel rooms not occupied by tourists. The families that had queued in their cars and vans along the access road were not there just to gawk. Our time as guests of Canada would become the subject of the PBS documentary “Stranded Yanks,” which aired during the one-year anniversary of 9/11.

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The Kindness of Strangers...

The story of my days as a guest of Canada, which began the morning of 9/11, when I was flying from London to Atlanta. It was originally published in the U.S. and the U.K. on the first anniversary of the attacks.

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The Kindness of Strangers: How a simple greeting can brighten someone’s day

• Post date January 30, 2023

After I drop off my daughter at school in the morning, I make my way out of the car line to the stop sign, and am waved on by the school’s crossing guard.

Every morning, without fail, the crossing guard smiles, waves, and says, “Have a good morning.” As simple a gesture as this is, I have found it to be one of the highlights of my day. Her smile is genuine as is her greeting. And it’s how I start each morning, Monday through Friday.

I don’t know her name and she doesn’t know mine. The only thing I know about her is she is the school crossing guard. She doesn’t know anything about me other than I’m a parent of a student at the school.

But it got me thinking about the kindness of strangers. When I go for a run each day, one of the best parts — apart from the natural stress reduction and physical health benefits running provides — is the non-verbal connection with other runners via the “runner wave,” as I like to call it. The runner wave isn’t a full on hand wave but a quick hello with the hand as you pass a runner headed in the opposite direction. If we’re within 15-20 feet of each other, I add in a “morning” or “afternoon” depending on the time of day.

For me, it’s almost a tethered connection, albeit invisible, taking place between two beings out there on the trail — an unspoken bond, a mutual indication of “hey, I see you out here doing your thing, keep it up.”

Not everyone waves back and that’s okay. It used to bug me a little, but then I read this article which gave me a different perspective. 1

A stranger can become a friend

There’s a retired Fire Marshall a few houses up from me. He’s a good guy. He was once more or less a stranger for the first year we lived in our house and has since become a friend. We speak every time we see each other. Growing up where I did in rural Virginia, saying hello to your neighbors was just something you did. It becomes instinctual from a young age.

Every time I saw the Fire Marshall in his old Tahoe driving down the street, I’d wave. For the longest time, he didn’t wave back. Then one day he did. From there came a few words. Now whenever we see each other, we strike up a conversation. It wasn’t until April 2021 that I knew his first name. I had always referred to him as the Fire Marshall or Mr. W–.

My cousin Gary had died a few days before . I was returning from a run and Mr. W– was in his driveway washing his car. I jokingly said, “Hit me with that water hose.” I was drenched in sweat, red faced, and tired. He obliged. We ended up talking for about five minutes. At the end of the conversation, he said:

“I’m Gary by the way.”

“Jeff,” I replied.

We’d lived near each other for more than ten years and it was only then we learned each other’s first names.

“His name’s Gary,” I said to my wife when I returned home.

Back when I was a student at the University of Virginia, there were two girls that lived in the apartment next to me on campus. They were my neighbors and being neighborly I’d always speak. If I saw them on grounds, I’d say hello. One of the girls — who used to look at me like I had my head screwed on backwards the first month or so when I did this — asked me one day, as we were both putting the keys in our apartment doors at the same time, why I waved and spoke to her.

The question caught me off guard.

“Just something I’ve always done I guess. It’s what you do back where I grew up,” I said. “How come you don’t wave back?”

“Where I’m from, if you don’t know the person, no eye contact. No speaking. You go about your business and keep it moving.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Baltimore. Inner city.”

“The Wire, I love that show” was the first thought that popped into my head. She laughed. “How inaccurate is it portrayed?” I asked.

“Not too far from reality, actually. Everything you see is Baltimore. I’ve never seen Omar whistling down the street but there are people like Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell.”

From that point on, whenever we crossed paths, I’d wave or speak and she’d return the gesture. One day about three months into the semester, I went down to the dining hall to grab dinner. I held the door open for her as she went in.

“They hold doors where you’re from too?” she asked.

“Yes,” I laughed. “But I’ve come to realize that no one here, and I mean no one, says, ‘thank you.’ They just walk on in.”

“Girls think you’re hitting on them is why,” she said.

“Trust me, I am definitely not hitting on some of these people. It just seems rude to let the door shut in their face.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Don’t let negativity push out kindness

At the end of a long day, it’s commonplace for us all to revisit a negative moment or interaction that took place over the preceding 8-12 hours. There’s a phrase for this: negativity bias . Negativity bias means that our negative interactions outweigh our positive experiences. There’s an evolutionary purpose for this feeling and if we still lived in a land filled with saber toothed tigers, it would make a lot more sense. We don’t have saber toothed tigers to worry about so we harp on erratic drivers who almost ran us off the road, gossipy neighbors who denigrate our children (for what, who knows), overbearing or rude co-workers, and the like.

And even if we didn’t have a negative moment in our day, when we talk about or reflect on our highlights, it’s easy to forget those small acts of kindness sprinkled throughout our waking hours.

The kindness of strangers can have a profound impact on our daily lives. It’s often the small, seemingly insignificant gestures that can make a big difference in our mood, attitude, and overall well-being.

Just like the example of the school crossing guard, a simple smile or greeting can set the tone for the rest of the day . It reminds us that there is good in the world all around us and that we are not alone in our struggles in this vast universe we call home. We are sometimes the lion and sometimes the mouse. 2 We are all interconnected, regardless of whether we know each other’s names or backgrounds — and because of this we all have the capacity to be kind and compassionate to one another.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

• I’m a bearded 6’4″, 200 lb. male, and even though I’m a fellow runner, I don’t have the faintest idea of what it’s like to feel scared much less be sexually harassed while running. I can’t say I’ve never felt scared while running because I have — dangerously angry drivers, random weirdos in far out of the way places, etc. — but, outside of someone flashing a gun at me, I don’t feel as if someone could possibly overpower me in a physical altercation. Women, at least 60% of women in the survey at the link above, have that shared experience while running.
• In Aesop’s fable “ The Lion and the Mouse ,” the moral of the story is that kindness is never wasted, no matter how big or small you may feel in the world, no matter how big or small your act of kindness may be.
• Tags aesop , essay , happiness , kindness , life , personal growth

7 replies on “The Kindness of Strangers: How a simple greeting can brighten someone’s day”

So good Jeff! Always behind the scenes here reading your works.

Appreciate the kind words Colleen. Glad you’re still reading. My goal is to up my consistency in 2023. I didn’t write too terribly much last year.

This is a great post. I have wondered why people don’t respond when I wave at them. One thing I have discovered is when cars have tinted windows, you cannot see who is in it nor can you see if they wave at you! Whatever happened to friendly interaction!?

Ha. I don’t know. It’s so odd to me. Wave. Say hello. Smile, not scowl. We can all use a little of all three each day.

Wonderful story and commentary on kindness. It really is the small things in life.

It is for sure. Nothing beats a little bit of kindness each day.

This reminds me of the hiking trails near me, and while I don’t get a lot of greetings while running in the city, I sure do get a lot of good mornings when on the trail. There’s just something about having woken up in the morning and being in nature that probably gets people greeting each other. Of course, there will be one or two who’ll just huff on by, but I choose to believe it’s because they’re tired rather than grumpy, lol.

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The kindness of strangers

Creating connections with a vanished past, featured in.

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FOR ALL HER long life, Baba Schwartz baked two yeast cakes every Friday: one laced with chocolate and nuts, the other with poppyseeds and apricot jam. She was a stellar baker. Home – in Hungary, rural Victoria or Melbourne – was the smell of her Sabbath cakes baking.

In Sydney, Eva Grinston baked her grandmother’s favourite, a flourless chocolate, walnut and sour cherry cake, for the birthday of every child and, later, grandchild. This Slovakian specialty sat on the table along with fairy bread and chocolate crackles and now no family celebration is complete without it.

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Schneier on Security

The kindness of strangers.

When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.” Strangers might be bad, we were told, so it’s prudent to steer clear of them.

And yet most people are honest, kind, and generous, especially when someone asks them for help. If a small child is in trouble, the smartest thing he can do is find a nice-looking stranger and talk to him.

These two pieces of advice may seem to contradict each other, but they don’t. The difference is that in the second instance, the child is choosing which stranger to talk to. Given that the overwhelming majority of people will help, the child is likely to get help if he chooses a random stranger. But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it’s not a random choice. It’s more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.

As a species, we tend help each other, and a surprising amount of our security and safety comes from the kindness of strangers. During disasters: floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, bridge collapses. In times of personal tragedy. And even in normal times.

If you’re sitting in a café working on your laptop and need to get up for a minute, ask the person sitting next to you to watch your stuff. He’s very unlikely to steal anything. Or, if you’re nervous about that, ask the three people sitting around you. Those three people don’t know each other, and will not only watch your stuff, but they’ll also watch each other to make sure no one steals anything.

Again, this works because you’re selecting the people. If three people walk up to you in the café and offer to watch your computer while you go to the bathroom, don’t take them up on that offer. Your odds of getting three honest people are much lower.

Some computer systems rely on the kindness of strangers, too. The Internet works because nodes benevolently forward packets to each other without any recompense from either the sender or receiver of those packets. Wikipedia works because strangers are willing to write for, and edit, an encyclopedia—with no recompense.

Collaborative spam filtering is another example. Basically, once someone notices a particular e-mail is spam, he marks it, and everyone else in the network is alerted that it’s spam. Marking the e-mail is a completely altruistic task; the person doing it gets no benefit from the action. But he receives benefit from everyone else doing it for other e-mails.

Tor is a system for anonymous Web browsing. The details are complicated, but basically, a network of Tor servers passes Web traffic among each other in such a way as to anonymize where it came from. Think of it as a giant shell game. As a Web surfer, I put my Web query inside a shell and send it to a random Tor server. That server knows who I am but not what I am doing. It passes that shell to another Tor server, which passes it to a third. That third server—which knows what I am doing but not who I am—processes the Web query. When the Web page comes back to that third server, the process reverses itself and I get my Web page. Assuming enough Web surfers are sending enough shells through the system, even someone eavesdropping on the entire network can’t figure out what I’m doing.

It’s a very clever system, and it protects a lot of people , including journalists, human rights activists, whistleblowers, and ordinary people living in repressive regimes around the world. But it only works because of the kindness of strangers. No one gets any benefit from being a Tor server; it uses up bandwidth to forward other people’s packets around. It’s more efficient to be a Tor client and use the forwarding capabilities of others. But if there are no Tor servers, then there’s no Tor. Tor works because people are willing to set themselves up as servers, at no benefit to them.

Alibi clubs work along similar lines. You can find them on the Internet, and they’re loose collections of people willing to help each other out with alibis. Sign up, and you’re in. You can ask someone to pretend to be your doctor and call your boss. Or someone to pretend to be your boss and call your spouse. Or maybe someone to pretend to be your spouse and call your boss. Whatever you want, just ask and some anonymous stranger will come to your rescue. And because your accomplice is an anonymous stranger, it’s safer than asking a friend to participate in your ruse.

There are risks in these sorts of systems. Regularly, marketers and other people with agendas try to manipulate Wikipedia entries to suit their interests. Intelligence agencies can, and almost certainly have, set themselves up as Tor servers to better eavesdrop on traffic. And a do-gooder could join an alibi club just to expose other members. But for the most part, strangers are willing to help each other, and systems that harvest this kindness work very well on the Internet.

This essay originally appeared on the Wall Street Journal website.

Tags: alibis , children , cooperation , essays , social engineering , Tor , trust

Posted on March 13, 2009 at 7:41 AM • 38 Comments

mat • March 13, 2009 8:00 AM

“Wikipedia works because strangers are willing to write for, and edit, an encyclopedia — with no recompense.”

The benefit for writing a Wikipedia article is related to the same benefit of “winning” an argument, which tends to be an ego boost and a sense of self-gratification.

josephdietrich • March 13, 2009 8:10 AM

From Germany at least, tor.org redirects me to Yahoo Deutschland (de.yahoo.com). torproject.org, however, seems to work.

Karin Kosina • March 13, 2009 8:19 AM

Dear Bruce,

You wrote, “No one gets any benefit from being a Tor server”. This is not entirely true. As I’m sure you know, running an exit node might give you better anonymity against some kinds of attacks – see also https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#RelayAnonymity

Otherwise, I entirely agree with what you are saying. Thank you for the excellent article!

Clive Robinson • March 13, 2009 8:23 AM

“But if a stranger comes up to a child and talks to him or her, it’s not a random choice. It’s more likely, although still unlikely, that the stranger is up to no good.”

This rule like many other good ones has an exception.

If the child is obviously in distress (fallen of pushbike etc) then the chances are the majority of adults who aproach are simply responding to a primeval imprinting system to help the young / protect the tribe.

The sad thing about “Beast Grabs Child” type headlines is it causes adults who would in previous generations have helped a child who had fallen over etc to think “uh oh I’m going to be treated with suscpicion because it’s a child”.

The ills of the press like the roots of a poisonous plant spread deep within the fertile soil of society rendering it a baren waste.

Not Tor Christensen • March 13, 2009 8:26 AM

Tor.org is controlled by someone named Tor Christensen and doesn’t seem to be related to the TOR project. Lucky guy is seeing huge traffic from WSJ.com. May be that’s why it redirects to Yahoo.

kangaroo • March 13, 2009 8:34 AM

There have been papers studying altruism — specifically whether people in games will act as “rational economic machines”, or do the “right thing”. As long as the cost isn’t too high — humans tend to do what they think is the right thing, even if it has an unrecompensed cost. They do good; they punish evil doers.

This is even in artificial situations where any possibility of payback is eliminated.

Tom Welsh • March 13, 2009 9:04 AM

And this is why the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth is revolutionary and brilliant, even for atheists. Just forget the religious background for a moment, and assume for the purposes of argument that Jesus was just an ordinary man. His advice that we love everyone just as much as ourselves, forgive everyone, and give up all personal pretensions and possessions, can be interpreted as a radical answer to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. When everyone is absolutely, irreversibly committed to unselfishness, the prisoner no longer has a dilemma. And the Tragedy of the Commons evaporates at the same time.

Pity most human beings do not have enough intelligence and imagination to catch on. The science fiction writer A E Van Vogt captured a hint of what a paradise we could have in his novel “The World of Null-A”. In his Venusian society, people automatically do whatever is needed without special regard to their own personal advantage. (But that was an artificially selected society; only those who had passed the test of the Games Machine could emigrate to Venus).

Nick • March 13, 2009 9:44 AM

As an atheist, I almost completely agree with you. I think the ideas and teachings of Jesus are lessons that are good for everyone and actually wish that more of Jesus’s “followers” lived by what he taught. I think we can agree that “treat other people as you wish to be treated” is universally applicable regardless of faith.

The only disagreement I have with you is a minor one, in that I believe Jesus is no more real than Harry Potter or Santa Claus.

HJohn • March 13, 2009 9:50 AM

@: “No one gets any benefit from being a Tor server; it uses up bandwidth to forward other people’s packets around.”

Should say no one honest gets any benefit from being a server. Dishonest people have used their position as a server to sniff/intercept sensitive information that is not encrypted. Tor may have fixed this, but since I’m not a user I never followed up (I guess you can say it was an externality to me).

Julian Gall • March 13, 2009 10:01 AM

Am I the only one who finds it strange to see “alibi clubs” alongside “the kindness of strangers”? Most of this article is about trusting people. How can you trust someone who agrees to lie for you? How can someone who does the lying trust the person they’re lying for? It seems fundamentally inconsistent to trust someone to do something untrustworthy.

Ward S. Denker • March 13, 2009 10:05 AM

You seem rather convinced of your position. Can I have all of your stuff?

Paradise is a nonsense concept. If you want to pretend that humans aren’t animals with the same primal drives, suit yourself, but stop trying to convince others to live in your ridiculous fantasy with you.

The best you can hope for is that it becomes the norm that you can pursue your own goals while others pursue theirs and everyone minds their own business, so long as no crimes are being committed.

In my opinion, that’s the real tragedy of humanity: we all think we know what is best for each other and work to force others to come around to our way of thinking.

Predatory Level-3 Sex Offender • March 13, 2009 10:19 AM

Yeah, us strangers are cool as can be.

HJohn • March 13, 2009 10:28 AM

In regards to some of the skeptical comments…

I think Bruce’s point is not that there aren’t dangerous people who can’t be trusted, I believe the point is that most people can be. Basically, if you ask someone to safeguard something, your odds of them being honest are excellent. The article says if someone offers, be skeptical.

If someone approaches a child and offers them candy to get in a car, the child should be careful. On the other hand, if a child is lost and picks a house or a stranger to ask for help or to call their parents, their odds of the person being safe are very, very good.

No one is saying there aren’t dangerous people, they are simply stating that, provided the person is selected by you and you are not selected by them, the odds of kindness are much greater.

ac • March 13, 2009 11:32 AM

@Tom – “And this is why the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth is revolutionary and brilliant, even for atheists.”

This is off-topic, but perhaps you should look up the teachings of the Buddha, say, not to mention the implications of the Hindu concept of karma. Then there was some chap called Confucius.. all predating J of N

old guy • March 13, 2009 11:39 AM

I’m not a mathematics expert. Is there any math backing up the odds discussed here?

Rick Auricchio • March 13, 2009 12:11 PM

“Whatever you want, just ask and some anonymous stranger will come to your rescue. And because your accomplice is an anonymous stranger, it’s safer than asking a friend to participate in your ruse.”

See Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers On A Train.”

sbr • March 13, 2009 1:01 PM

And it shows, unfortunately. Because it’s not, at heart, a mathematical problem….

HJohn • March 13, 2009 1:36 PM

@old guy: “I’m not a mathematics expert. Is there any math backing up the odds discussed here?”

I don’t see how it could really be measured. We’ll never know how many people ask a random favor of a stranger, the only ones we hear about are the ones who get burned by one.

A Tor Relay Op • March 13, 2009 1:38 PM

There is a benefit to the operator of a Tor relay, at least hypothetically (there are differing opinions on how much it helps):

Since Tor cells – in their encrypted form – are indistinguishable from one another, a Tor relay op who also uses the network may gain a higher degree of anonymity, since an attacker cannot determine whether cells originated at the relay’s network, or are simply being routed through it.

partdavid • March 13, 2009 1:49 PM

The implications of the alibi club are interesting, as is the larger question of “When should lying be illegal?”

It’s pretty well-established that lying in order to induce someone to give you money (fraud) should be illegal. The alibi club members will set you up with a fake receptionist and sources for other fake office establishments. If you get someone to thus invest in a scheme and then disappear, that’s clearly a crime.

On the other hand, it would be pretty repugnant to make illegal lies of convenience like telling your girlfriend you were at a movie when you went to a strip club instead (and getting the fake ticket stub to “prove” it, or the “buddy” leaving the message on the answering machine).

And then there’s covering up for excused absences at work. Calling in “sick” when you really just want a day off is pretty common. So when you get fake justification from a “doctor” for a long absence–is that illegal? Fireable? What if you told your work that you were spending three days at a fake conference when you were really taking a vacation? How about if you charged the company for it–that’s clearly embezzlement, of course.

I don’t know, it’s interesting and I wonder if it’s really “kindness” we’re talking about here. I don’t have definitive answers to these questions but I find them interesting.

CorkyAgain • March 13, 2009 1:52 PM

Wikipedia and Tor are more like the case where some stranger is volunteering to help you with something. As several commenters have pointed out, they might be doing this for nefarious reasons.

Let me add another reason the bad guys might “volunteer” to write/edit Wikipedia articles: to spin them in ways that are favorable to themselves or their companies. That this already occurs is well known.

HippyChick • March 13, 2009 2:06 PM

If you are an honest, good person, why would you need an alibi club ? If someone is willing to lie for you, then they aren’t kind, they are devious and not doing you a favor at all. The kind person would tell you that you shouldn’t lie.

Lasko Fransitz • March 13, 2009 3:04 PM

The first 6 paragraphs make sense. The rest of it isn’t consistent with those paragraphs.

You say that if you pick someone to watch your laptop, you’re OK. If someone volunteers then it’s less safe. Agreed.

Then you talk about wikipedia where authors volunteer, alibi clubs (which are inherently dishonest) where you ask and someone else volunteers, tor where people volunteer to run nodes, etc.

Trusting people who respond to a general broadcast advertisement for help is more like the child talking to someone who walks up to them.

dragonfrog • March 13, 2009 4:42 PM

It’s entirely possible that’s true, but I’m not sure it’s an assertion that can be let stand.

Let’s assume for the moment that a child approaching a stranger will select a truly random one, i.e. someone who exactly the average chance of meaning them harm. But, do we have any reliable information about the typical motivations of a child-approacher?

Phillip • March 13, 2009 6:14 PM

Indeed, I’m using Tor to post this comment (no one cares).

Jonadab the Unsightly One • March 13, 2009 9:22 PM

When I was growing up, children were commonly taught: “don’t talk to strangers.”

That’s a gross oversimplification of what we were taught. In a nutshell, we weren’t supposed to accept gifts from or get into cars with or cetera… strangers who approached us out of the blue when there were no adults around. OTOH, we were consistently encouraged to be friendly to strangers whom we approached, or who were introduced to us, or who approached when our parents were around.

Karl Lembke • March 14, 2009 12:15 PM

Jonadab: That may be a gross oversimplification of what you were taught. Some people taught me what you were taught — others taught me “don’t talk to strangers”, apparently thinking that by building in that extra layer of proscription, I’d be even less likely to accept gifts or rides from strangers. And those who were taught that shortcut have tended to pass it on to their children without thought.

Dennis Prager has an essay on his page, saying children should talk to stragers. (They should not go with them, or accept gifts from them.) But children who never talk to strangers never learn how to “break the ice” with all the strangers they’re going to meet during their adult lives.

(Indeed, children who have been trained never to talk to strangers may be at greater risk of coming to harm, since they’ll never approach anyone asking for help if they get into a bad situation.)

Clive Robinson • March 14, 2009 5:57 PM

@ dragonfrog,

“But, do we have any reliable information about the typical motivations of a child-approacher?”

The answer is no as we don’t have any real idea why people would approach a child any more than they would any other person.

The simple answers are,

1, To use/harm them. 2, To help them. 3, To tell them off. 4, Due to misidentification. 5, Because they are attracted to them for some reason.

There are a whole host of things covered by 1 some of which are not harmfull such as a LEO asking questions after an accident others people simply asking simple questions such as “Is this west 54th street?” or “do you know which house is 157?” etc. Through to quite rare occurances such as abduction.

Likewise 2 covers such things as other parents sensing that a child needs help or is about to do something dangerous like step into a road etc and most adults used to help a child who had injured themselves (less so these days).

And as “children will be children” they quite often earn the ire of adults who will naturaly want to tell them to stop 3 above covers those times when “the little angels” doing things such as kicking balls into gardens or other minor anoyances like making lots of noise etc. How many reading this have not felt like telling a neighbours kid to “shut up” or “stop kicking that ball against the fence” or stop any one of a 101 other irritating things kids do.

Surprisingly adults sometimes have trouble telling children apart especialy at a distance or if they are facing away. It is not uncommon for a non parental guardian to aproach the wrong child in a play area simply because they are dressed similarly to one of their “charges”.

Finaly there is 5 this looks odd to people from WASP nations but less so to those from other societies. For instance in many asian cultures children are almost venerated and it is not uncommon for adults to talk to children simply because they are children. Often parents of babies will experiance strangers come up to them and say how atractive etc their baby is, I’m told this is due to it being hard wired into our brains.

My son used to make me very jealous he just had to look at an attractive young woman and invariably she would visably melt and talk to him with a goofy eyed expression. Often the more atractive the woman the more she would be attracted to him it got to the point where I used to have a stock thing to say,

“My son suffers from a terrorable affliction” they would then look concerned and I would say “Cuteness, you know you’ve been infected when you smile” which immediatly did make them smile.

When I was a toweringly tall spotty teenager I would have killed to get that amount of attention from women. And even at my advanced age I would still give a lot to get the attention my son does 8(

Gweihir • March 14, 2009 9:56 PM

Don’t know abouy the US, but here if you do not help somebody in physical distress that needs help, you become criminally liable. So if you see a lost/hurt child that is alone, you are legally obliged (and of course morally) to walk over an offer help.

Incidenially, given the number of strangers that hurt children (very, very low) and the number of family members that do the same (relatively high), there are quite a few children around that would fare much better with a random stranger than with their own parents. People tend to forget that with all the “holy family” blindness.

Harry • March 14, 2009 10:00 PM

@dragonfrog:

Think of it this way. People who approach children will include those who intend harm and those who don’t. People who don’t approach include those who don’t intend harm. So, yeah, the approachers are more likely to mean harm.

FWIW I put my money where my mouth is, instructing my own child to approach someone if he’s in trouble or need help. But not just anyone. First choice is someone in uniform (really, someone with a badge on his/her chest). Second choice is a woman with children with her. Third choice is a man with children with him.

Statistically, though, even these instructions won’t make my child much safer: most harm done to children is done by someone known to that child.

I don’t think alibi clubs belong in this list for two reasons. One, being a member confers a concrete benefit – you lie for someone, someone else will lie for you. Two, the group does not have a benign goal.

Tom Welsh • March 15, 2009 4:32 PM

Nick and Ward, I was amused (though slightly disappointed) by your reactions to my comment. As it happens, I am a sceptical agnostic. I don’t believe Jesus was divine, and I am by no means sure that he existed in the form reported by the Bible. The point I was making was that Jesus’ advice, as reported in the Bible, is very good advice purely in game-theoretical terms. If only we could be sure that other human beings would not let us down in the crunch… which, sadly, we can never be.

Chris Walsh • March 15, 2009 5:38 PM

Obviously, love thy neighbor as thyself is an unstable equilibrium or we’d all be in Nirvana. :^)

As to why — other than Original Sin — we’ve found ourselves where we are, I would suggest Ken Binmore’s “ Natural Justice ” ( http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Justice-Ken-Binmore/dp/0195178114 ).

Gary “Nobel prize-winning economist” Becker summarizes Binmore’s thesis thusly:

“Ken Binmore has written a truly exciting book that derives moral principles of fairness, equity, and other behavior from evolutionary theory. In his theory, societies that hit on more efficient and ‘fairer’ equilibrium are more likely to survive through a combination of genetic and cultural selection. He is in my judgment appropriately highly critical of the rather arbitrary solutions to morality offered by Kant and some other philosophers.”

To the extent Kant’s categorical imperative is a rehash of the sermon on the mount, Binmore provides an intellectually satisfying explanation of what see as our fall from grace — much more so than Becker would have one believe, actually.

csrster • March 16, 2009 3:10 AM

Tom – arguably brilliant, but certainly not original. He was, after all, only quoting the Old Testament (or The Torah, as he would have said).

I was thinking about this general point only this morning apropos of a radio report of a campaign by a children’s charity to educate parents in spotting the signs of “grooming” – ie how to tell if an apparently trusted adult is actually trying to get themselves in a position to molest your children. I must be well-trained by the likes of Bruce and Ben Goldacre because my immediate reaction was to scream “What about the false positives?” at the radio. Give that i) as Bruce is reminding us here, there are many more non-paedofiles than paedofiles around and ii) grooming behaviour is, I imagine, very similar to everyday being-friendly behaviour it must follow that the overwhelming majority of grooming-like behaviours are just innocent everyday interactions.

Savik • March 16, 2009 4:54 PM

@Julian Gall

You can trust untrustworthy people to do untrustworthy things because that is what they do. It does sound like a logic circle though.

sooth sayer • March 17, 2009 6:54 PM

There is a negative aspect associated with telling children not to trust strangers – it’s even more insidious, strangers are also afraid that they might be accused of bad motives if they do try to help.

Sinefeld used to have a episodes that played on this issue obliquely.

You really don’t want to be “watching” someone’s package at the cafe — even a lop top — depending where the cafe is.

Suzanne • March 30, 2009 10:23 AM

Harry- I’d advise against advising your kids to seek out someone in a uniform first. In the days of beat cops who knew all the neighbors that was a good idea. In the days of security guards who are sometimes hired with very little background check, not so much. Especially since people who flunk out of the exams for becoming a police officer (for emotional as well as other reasons) often fall back on security work.

Statistically you’re probably better off to go with the mom with kids first and the dad with kids second. Skip the uniform. Not saying they’re all bad. The majority are fine, I’m sure. But looking official isn’t the greatest physical cue for thinking someone will be nice.

andrew morton • April 14, 2009 7:54 PM

My uncle was at a ballgame one time and the guy next to him asked if my uncle would watch his stuff while he was in the bathroom. My uncle did and when the guy came back he asked if the guy would watch his stuff. When my uncle got back he found both his binoculars and the guy missing.

JD Bertron • June 5, 2009 8:04 AM

Interesting. Did anyone notice the implication that if I need help and I ask a ‘stranger’ to help me, to him I am definitely untrustworthy because I approached him. Clearly, a 1-1 situation like this improves nothing about the security of trusting someone else, especially if the two parties aren’t deemed equal (adult-child, liar-honest). However, the principle that one can prompt multiple strangers to cooperate in helping them builds upon the security of a social (game) contract, not of an individual’s level of trustworthiness. This is why you could ask multiple thieves to watch your laptop in a cafe without risking theft. That social contract is complex and explains why people quiet down in crowded elevators or copy each other’s behavior in new situations. The contract breaks down if the group isn’t as unacquainted as it seems. A beautiful example of a social engineering scam based on faking this contract was recently presented by Michael Shermer in his Scientific American column.

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51 Kindness Essay Topics & Examples

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The Kindness of Strangers

• Review Essay
• Published: 31 July 2007
• Volume 44 , pages 164–170, ( 2007 )

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Fox, R. The Kindness of Strangers. Soc 44 , 164–170 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-007-9025-9

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Published : 31 July 2007

Issue Date : October 2007

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-007-9025-9

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Kindness Starts With One ®

One smile. One hug. One cup of coffee. One person...

Do you have someone in your life who inspired you to be a better person? Did you witness an act of kindness that left an impression? Share your kindness story with the world.

The Kindness of a Stranger

Earlier this week I was at an eye doctor appointment for a second opinion about several diagnoses expected to result in my blindness. I just turned 30. In the waiting room a gentleman began to talk with me. I’m a very private person and was somewhat reluctant to engage in the conversation, but ended up telling him why I was there. This complete stranger expressed more sympathy than nearly every person that I am close to. After a minute he got up and walked over to hand me something. Expecting a prayer card or religious token of some kind, I reached out. Cash. And not exactly a small amount. I was shocked and tried to decline his generous offer, to which he replied “If you get some good news today go celebrate with a nice dinner, if it’s bad news go get yourself a drink”. At this point I was speechless and am afraid I didn’t make a very gracious act of accepting his generosity. I’m still waiting to hear back from the doctor, but the prognosis is not good. I would have needed that drink, but a good meal and the kindness of a stranger has gotten me through. Thank you sir, you really are too kind. What you gave me that day was so much more than money. I not only appreciate it greatly, but promise to pay it forward. Best wishes to anyone out there who is struggling, and a big thank you to all those who engage in random acts of kindness. Amber Springfield, MO

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The Kindness of Strangers

Why human beings do good things.

Posted June 6, 2015

Last week, on a main road in London, a 55 year-old cyclist was trapped under the wheel of a double decker bus. A crowd of around 100 people gathered together, and in an amazing act of co-ordinated altruism , lifted the bus so that the man could be freed. According to a paramedic who treated the man, this was a "miracle" which may have saved his life. The cyclist was in critical condition in hospital but is now out of danger. He is conscious and feels 'lucky to be alive.'

Altruism and self-sacrifice seem to be typical human responses to crisis situations or tragic events (at least for some people). Another example took place in Scotland in November 2013, when ten people died after a helicopter crashed into a pub. Soon after the crash, residents and passers-by rushed towards the scene. Together with some of the pub's clientelle, they formed a 'human chain', passing wounded and unconscious victims inch by inch, out of the danger area and into the hands of the emergency services.

From an evolutionary point of view, such cases of altruism are slightly problematic. As Neo-Darwinists would have it, human beings are motivated by self-interest. After all, we're the "carriers" of thousands of genes , whose only aim is to survive and replicate themselves. We shouldn't really be interested in sacrificing ourselves for others, or even in helping others. It's true that, in genetic terms, it's beneficial for us to help people close to us, our relatives or distant cousins—they carry many of the same genes as us, and so helping them may help our genes to survive. But what about when we help people who have no relation to us, or even animals?

One possible explanation is that there is really no such thing as "pure" altruism. When we help strangers (or animals), there must always be some benefit to us, even if we're not aware of it. Good deeds makes us feel good about ourselves. They make other people respect us more too, or might (so far as we believe) increase our chances of getting into heaven. Or perhaps altruism is an investment strategy—we do good deeds to others in the hope that they will return the favour some day, when we are in need. (This is known as reciprocal altruism.) It could even be a way of demonstrating our resources, showing how wealthy or able we are, so that we become more attractive to the opposite sex , and have enhanced reproductive possibilities.

What these explanations have in common is that they are really attempts to explain away altruism. They remind me of my attempts to excuse my indolence when my wife comes home and finds that I haven't done the DIY jobs I promised to. They're attempts to make excuses for altruism: "Please excuse my kindness, but I was really just trying to look good in the eyes of other people." "Sorry for helping you, but it's a trait I picked up from my ancestors thousands of years ago, and I just can't seem to get rid of it."

Many acts of kindness may be motivated by self-interest. But is it naive to suggest that "pure" altruism can exist as well? An act of pure altruism may make someone feel better about themselves afterwards, and it may increase other people's respect for them, or increase their chances of being helped in return at a later point. But it's possible that, at the very moment when the act takes place, their only motivation is an impulsive unselfish desire to alleviate another person's suffering.

True altruism stems from empathy, our ability to emotionally connect with other people. This ability to empathise means that we are part of a shared network of consciousness. We feel the impulse to alleviate other people's suffering because we can sense it as if it were our own (to a greater or lesser degree, since levels of empathy obviously vary from person to person). In the words of the philosopher Schopenhauer, "My own true inner being actually exists in every living creature, as truly and immediately known as my own consciousness in myself...This is the ground of compassion upon which all true, that is to say unselfish, virtue rests, and whose expression is in every good deed."

In other words, there is no need to make excuses for altruism. Instead, we should celebrate it as a one of the highest—and at the same time most fundamental—aspects of human nature.

Steve Taylor, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, UK. His new book The Calm Center has just been published.

http://www.stevenmtaylor.com

Steve Taylor, Ph.D., is senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. He is the author of several best-selling books, including The Leap and Spiritual Science.

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"The Kindness of Strangers" Essay Explanation Essay | Essay

"The Kindness of Strangers" Essay Explanation

As children we are taught "stranger danger." We are instructed not socialize with anyone that we did not know. Therefore, we are more likely to help someone if they come into as little contact with the person as they can, such as the dropped pen test. On the other hand, some individuals do not seek any help from others. They will turn help away when it is offered to them so many people do not offer the help even though they would like to assist them. In...

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