A Secret Source of Connection

We all have moments in our lives when we see someone who could use a helping hand. It could be a friend who recently went through a breakup, or an older person trying to load groceries into their car. We tell ourselves we should help, but then something stops us. This week, psychologist Amit Kumar helps us understand what keeps us from taking a moment to be kind, and how to overcome these barriers to create stronger, happier connections. Then, on Your Questions Answered, psychologist Gordon Flett returns to respond to listener comments about the importance of feeling that we matter.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 0:06Shankar Vedantam?

  Early one morning in March 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was on her way home from the bar where she worked. She parked her car and was walking toward her apartment building when a man attacked and killed her.

• 0:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Over the years, Kitty Genovese's murder has been the focus of countless books, movies, and psychology research papers. It drew attention not only because it was a grisly crime, but because it supposedly explained a deep flaw in human nature.

• 0:42Shankar Vedantam?

  The New York Times published an article that said dozens of people saw the murder or heard Kitty Genovese screaming for help, but no one intervened. When someone did call the police, it was too late.

• 1:02Shankar Vedantam?

  In the decades that followed, the case came to symbolize a psychological phenomenon known as the bystander effect. When lots of people see something is wrong, the theory goes, each person wrongly assumes someone else will step up to help. The net effect is that as the number of potential helpers increases, the number of people who actually help decreases.

• 1:28Shankar Vedantam?

  In recent years, psychologists and journalists have reexamined the facts of the Kitty Genovese story and walked back some of the claims. The Times has said that its initial reporting was flawed and exaggerated.

• 1:44Shankar Vedantam?

  I think the power of the Kitty Genovese story lies in the fact that in everyday life, we all notice that we are not as helpful and brave as we would like to be. We look away from people who are suffering. We cross the street to avoid an altercation. Even when the stakes are low for personal safety, we don't extend a hand to others who need help.

• 2:10Shankar Vedantam?

  This week on Hidden Brain, the curious psychology behind a phenomenon that is all around us, and how understanding a quirk inside our minds can help us become the kind of people we admire.

• 2:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Support for Hidden Brain comes from Mazda. Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It helps make you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit MazdaUSA.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries,

• 3:14Shankar Vedantam?

  a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season six, Alex brings together extraordinary change makers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Pacific Life Insurance. You make promises throughout your life. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has been helping you keep them by protecting those who matter most. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you create a more confident financial

• 3:59Shankar Vedantam?

  future. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  My name's Gary Knight. I'm the CEO of the Seven Foundation, which is a media nonprofit. I'm also a very keen amateur cyclist.

• 4:22Shankar Vedantam?

  I first met Gary in 2009 at a journalism fellowship program. A big man with a gregarious personality, he filled every room he entered.

• 4:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Gary was a photographer and had covered conflicts around the world, including in the Balkans, the Arab world, and Southeast Asia. He was a member of the iconic photo agency called Seven. I hadn't been in touch with Gary for some years, but recently met up with him. He seemed to be moving his shoulder gingerly, and I asked him what happened. The story he told me made me think about some surprising research into the nature of kindness. We'll get to that in a moment. Gary told me that each year, he plans a biking adventure with friends.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  The thing that we're looking for the most are really steep climbs, incredible views, and sort of mythological rides.

• 5:19Shankar Vedantam?

  On his most recent trip before our meeting, Gary and his friends decided to go biking in the west of Scotland.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  We got up very early, drove for an hour to this climb called Black Nabar, which is an old cattle road that goes over a mountain. It's one of the steepest roads in the British Isles, reaches about 20% on a bike, and it's a single-track road. So that means that there's really only room for one car and a bicycle, or perhaps a motorcycle. My friends usually climb on their bikes a lot faster than I do, because I'm a lot heavier than they are. But I descend much faster, because I'm a lot heavier than they are, and I have a lot of confidence on the bike. So on this, after this tortuous climb, which I think took about an hour and a half,

• 6:07Speaker 01

  we descended down into this little town where we had a coffee and something to eat. And I remember passing this sort of group of motorcyclists on the way down this road. They waved at us, we waved at them. They were pretty much doing the same trip we were, except on bikes.

• 6:27Shankar Vedantam?

  Soon, it was time for the next section.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  We set off again, up a gentle climb, and then another really steep descent.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And I was quite far ahead of my friends. I remember I was doing 55 kilometers an hour, which I think is about 32, 34 miles per hour going down this road. And I could see quite far ahead, there was a bend in the road and a bridge on the bend. And there were two Volkswagen camper vans coming quite fast in the opposite direction.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  And as we got closer to each other, I lost sight of the white camper van. It was so close to the black one. But when I came around this corner, it appeared and it was on my side of the road. And travelling at that speed, I had, well, I had nowhere to go. There was no room on the road. I had to come off the road. I went over a concrete ledge and then went airborne and hit a huge lump of granite with my shoulder and my head. And I saw it coming towards me and it was inevitable what was going to happen.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  I had the impact and it was incredibly painful. And the bike sort of skidded off ahead of me and I came to a real halt. But the van, both vans, drove off up the mountain. But I have no doubt that both drivers would have seen me. It's impossible, unless they were on their phones, that they wouldn't.

• 7:54Shankar Vedantam?

  Gary landed at the bottom of a ditch. He didn't blackout, but he felt fuzzy headed. The one thing he was grateful for was that his friends were coming down the mountain behind him. They would come to the same bend and stop to help.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  But my friends, who were riding behind me, who'd lost sight of me, rode straight by. I could hear them riding by.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I was quite distraught. I called out, I think, to them a little bit feebly and they'd gone and they left. And so I picked up my phone to call them, to ask them to come back, but I had no reception. So I couldn't reach them.

• 8:32Shankar Vedantam?

  Gary knew he was in trouble. He guessed his friends would eventually figure out he was not in front of them and turn back. But how long would that be? Twenty minutes? An hour? And once they turned back, how would they know to come to this particular spot?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  I was in the, really, the middle of nowhere. I lifted up my bike, tried to get back on the bike, but realised I couldn't move my shoulder.

• 8:59Shankar Vedantam?

  Slowly, painfully, Gary pulled himself and his bike back to the edge of the road.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  At that point, I was standing on the side of the road, you know, with a ripped shirt and clearly not quite right. And a number of vehicles passed me and nobody stopped. People looked, but nobody, nobody stopped.

• 9:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Would you have stopped? You're driving on a remote mountain road in the west of Scotland, and you see a man with a ripped shirt by the side of the road.

• 9:35Shankar Vedantam?

  But after some time, someone did stop.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Three motorcycles came down the road, and these were the motorcyclists that I passed earlier in the day, and we'd been waving to each other. The first two sort of looked at me and went by and started to slow down, and the third one put his thumb up and down at me as if, and he was asking me the question, "Are you OK?"

• 10:00Shankar Vedantam?

  Gary indicated he needed help.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And so he stopped his motorbike, and he asked me what had happened,

• 10:08Speaker 01

  and then said, "Look, you know, sit down, and we're gonna, you know, check you out." And he explains, his name's Martin. He explained that he and his friends, Max and Anita, were all Poles. They're Polish. They lived and worked in the United Kingdom, and they were all trained paramedics, and they just, the week before, finished all of their training. And so they checked me out, checked my head, did all the tests to see if I had concussion. They then took out bandages, strapped me up, immobilized my arm. I mean, I couldn't have wished for more.

• 10:48Shankar Vedantam?

  One of them went and found Gary's friends, while another called emergency services. All three waited with him for almost an hour, until the medics arrived.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  They were so incredibly generous. They spent a lot of time with me whilst they were on vacation. And the only people who stopped for me in Scotland weren't people from Britain, my own, my own people. They were, in fact, foreigners, which is sort of ironic at a time of Brexit, when Britain is, you know, rejecting the idea of allowing foreigners in so easily. I'm hugely, hugely grateful for them, and, you know, just talking about it makes me very emotional.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  It's ironic because I've had a very

• 11:39Speaker 01

  dramatic and violent career.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  You know, I photographed wars for 20 years.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  And

• 11:56Speaker 01

  closest I ever came to dying was on my bike.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  And you know, I felt very alone when I came off the bike. And having three strangers, you know, stop at the side of the road and take care of me was a remarkable, it seemed.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  An incredible act of kindness.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  And I hope I have the opportunity to do the same thing for somebody else one day.

• 12:42Shankar Vedantam?

  I feel so grateful that those three Polish paramedics stopped to help my friend. But there is another way to look at this. Sure, it's no fun to take an hour out of your vacation to help a stranger. But really, it's just an hour. And surely, knowing you helped another person in desperate need has to make you feel great about yourself.

• 13:04Shankar Vedantam?

  So why are stories of good Samaritans so rare? In daily life, why don't we extend help to others more often? Are people just selfish?

• 13:15Shankar Vedantam?

  Actually, new psychological research reveals a quirk in our mental makeup that may be to blame.

• 13:23Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 13:41Shankar Vedantam?

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• 14:19Shankar Vedantam?

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• 15:01Shankar Vedantam?

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• 15:39Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When psychologist Amit Kumar was in graduate school, he became close friends with another student. We're going to call her Jen.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  We used to spend a lot of time together and, you know, those late night conversations, sometimes they're about work, sometimes they're about life. When you're a social psychologist, those conversations kind of blend together. I also knew her partner quite well. You know, the graduate school was at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, which is a pretty small college town. And so you end up running into the same people. When you go to restaurants there, you see each other a lot. And so at this stage in our lives, we were quite, quite close indeed.

• 16:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Toward the end of grad school, Jen and her partner got married. It was a small wedding, just close friends and family.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the thing that's amazing about weddings in particular is that you have all of these people from these different parts of your life come together. And it's just so nice to see how much everybody cares for each other and how happy they are that these two people found each other and decided to try to make this work. And so it is a thrilling experience, I think, to be a part of those festivities.

• 17:04Shankar Vedantam?

  Amit finished his dissertation. Grad school ended. The long, late night conversations between friends turned into busy careers and family demands. Amit began working as a professor in Texas. Over time, he and Jen lost touch.

• 17:21Shankar Vedantam?

  On and off, Amit would hear news about his friend via mutual acquaintances and via social media.

• 17:28Shankar Vedantam?

  The news he heard was not happy.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  I had learned that she had recently gotten separated from her partner. She was about to go through divorce. They'd actually recently had a child as well. So I didn't know that they were having any trouble with their relationship. I learned this through a mutual friend. And so it was one of those situations where I kind of was a third party that knew what was going on in her life, but hadn't heard it from her myself.

• 17:59Shankar Vedantam?

  And I guess at this point, you're someone who this is a friend you were close to in grad school. You obviously went to the wedding. You felt happy to be there. You felt happy for the couple. You've heard about this unfortunate news about the relationship not working out. But you've also sort of fallen out of touch. I'm imagining it must have been difficult to pick up the phone at that point and just call her, right? Because it's not like you were friends anymore.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Well, what I found out was actually particularly interesting, I think. This was actually during a period of the pandemic. You know, maybe other people have experienced this. I felt that it had been a little too long since I had seen my family. I wasn't yet comfortable getting on an airplane, though. And so I cautiously kind of decided that it would be worth it to drive from Texas to where I grew up, where my parents are in New Jersey, in order to see them. But this travel did have me passing through several cities that I might not otherwise visit. And in fact, I was aware of the fact that this old friend of mine from grad school, Jen, happened to be living in one such city that was near the route that I was on.

• 19:05Shankar Vedantam?

  A myth considered stopping to pay Jen a visit. But then he asked himself what he would say.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  I hadn't talked to her myself in years. She didn't know that I would be driving through. I didn't give her advance notice. I thought, maybe, you know, that's not very courteous to just show up and tell someone you're around. I also thought about, of course, you know, she might wonder how I knew what was going on in her life, even though we hadn't been in touch with each other. And so maybe she'd wonder how I even knew about her relationship troubles. How uncomfortable might that be?

• 19:40Shankar Vedantam?

  Amit did what many of us might do in such a situation. He drove through Jen's town and didn't reach out. As a psychologist, the incident got him thinking. Someone who didn't know him well might have concluded he was callous in not reaching out to a friend going through tough times. But Amit didn't feel callous. He wanted to reach out to Jen, but didn't know how she would react. Amit didn't lack for kindness. He lacked for confidence. "How often," he asked himself, now wearing his psychologist hat, "does this happen in everyday life? Where people fail to extend help, not because they are unable or unwilling to help, but

• 20:22Shankar Vedantam?

  because they feel they might not be able to do the right thing?" In time, the question bloomed into a full-blown research project. Amit quickly came by lots of examples of other people who found themselves in similar situations. The author George Saunders describes an incident that took place when he was in the seventh grade. A new kid had just arrived at a school.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Ellen was small, shy. She wore these blue cat's-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it, which didn't help her popularity at all.

• 21:03Shankar Vedantam?

  At a commencement address at Syracuse University, George Saunders described how most kids ignored Ellen. When they did pay attention to her, it was often to mock her.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  "Your hair tastes good," that sort of thing. I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she'd look after such an insult. Eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying as much as possible to disappear.

• 21:33Shankar Vedantam?

  George Saunders didn't bully Ellen himself. He also didn't try to stop the bullies.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  And then, they moved. One day she was there, next day she wasn't. End of story.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Now, why do I regret that? Why, 42 years later, am I still thinking about her? Relative to most of the kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even mildly defended her. But still, it bothers me. So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it. What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

• 22:20Shankar Vedantam?

  Failures of kindness. We often think that people who fail to act kindly are unkind people. But the more Amit studied the phenomenon, the more he saw the truth was much sadder than that. There is, in fact, a plentiful supply of kindness in the world, and there is lots of demand for that kindness. But there is a quirk in our minds that keeps us from closing the loop and actually showing kindness when it's needed.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  I think the language that economists use can actually be somewhat helpful here, even though we're talking about these everyday interactions where one could be kind to another person. And economists talk about things like expected utility, that they'll tell you that wise decisions are guided by an accurate assessment of the expected value of a given action. And so what we're often thinking about is our expectations, and we've got expectations of both costs and benefits. There's potential costs that come with any interaction. It could be awkward, it could be uncomfortable, it could seem weird, you could be rejected. That's a risk of any potential interaction with another person.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  But of course, there's potential benefits to interacting with other people as well, in terms of the support that you're providing, and in terms of both how you and they feel.

• 23:42Shankar Vedantam?

  Think about the thoughts that went through Amit's head as he drove through the town of his old friend. He worried that reaching out unexpectedly might seem rude. He worried that he wouldn't know exactly what to say. He worried that she would ask him how he had found out she was going through a divorce, and he wouldn't know how to respond. Notice that none of these motivators involve Amit not wanting to help his friend.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  One way that psychologists will sometimes talk about these costs is sort of an inordinate concern with how competent we seem. Are we doing just the right thing at just the right time? If it seems like we're not, then we might not act in the direction of kindness, as George Saunders put it, these other-oriented interactions.

• 24:31Shankar Vedantam?

  In a series of experiments, Amit has shown that givers and recipients of kindness use completely different lenses to evaluate a kind deed. Givers worry a lot about whether they are being competent. Recipients care much more about something else. In one experiment, Amit and his colleagues approached strangers at a skating rink and asked them to give away hot cocoa to someone nearby.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  We essentially had participants perform a random act of kindness for just a stranger who happened to be nearby. So we had these participants at a skating rink in a public park at Chicago. They were giving away hot chocolate on a cold winter's day to someone else in the area. You're giving to another person this delicious hot chocolate. You're expecting nothing in return. And after performing this act, what we did is we had these participants kind of report their own feelings and predict their recipient's experience. And we then got ratings. We asked the recipients of this act of kindness to tell us how they actually

• 25:38Speaker 02

  felt. And when we followed up with these recipients, what became clear is that performers tend to underestimate the value of their kindness. So as it turns out, both performers and recipients were in significantly better moods than normal after this exchange, after giving a hot chocolate to a stranger. And in fact, recipients of that act of kindness felt significantly better than performers of that act anticipated.

• 26:09Shankar Vedantam?

  The people who gave away the hot chocolate obviously expected that recipients would appreciate the beverage. But they underestimated just how much recipients would appreciate it. Givers focused mostly on the worth of a hot chocolate on a cold winter's day. Recipients loved not only the hot chocolate, but the idea that a stranger had suddenly done something nice for them. Of course, in this initial experiment, it was hard to disentangle people's enjoyment of the hot chocolate from their appreciation of an act of kindness. So Amit ran a follow-up study.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  We returned to the same public park. Contrary to popular belief, it eventually gets warm in Chicago. And so the skating rink had melted because the seasons had changed. So we had participants giving cupcakes away to a stranger. But we had these cupcakes given to participants in our study in a couple of different ways. So in one case, participants, again, sort of gave a cupcake away to somebody else as an act of kindness. But in another case, we had sort of, you know, what you might think of as a control condition in which no act of kindness was performed, but people still received a cupcake.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  So in this other case, recipients are simply getting a cupcake for participating in the experiment rather than from another person as a random act of kindness. So one of these cases includes the warmth associated with a kind exchange. The other also has somebody receiving a cupcake, but without getting it from somebody else. And so what we do, again, is we compare expected versus actual experiences in these two cases. And what we found was that people, again, underestimated how positive recipients would feel after this act of kindness when they had given the cupcake to somebody else.

• 28:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Givers tend to focus on the specific help they are giving, whether that's a phone call to someone in need or a cupcake to a stranger in a park. They evaluate the success of their acts of kindness using a lens of competence. This is why they ask themselves, "Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right thing?"

• 28:38Shankar Vedantam?

  Recipients focus less on whether the gift is perfect. They care more about the warmth that comes with an act of kindness. Think about what Gary Knight said about the three Polish travelers who stopped to help him. Yes, he was grateful they had some medical expertise. But in a moment when he felt all alone, the fact other human beings had stopped to help him meant the world to him.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  What we're kind of missing out on is this understanding of the additional warmth that comes from being on the receiving end of one of these acts. We get that people like cupcakes, but it turns out that getting a cupcake as a result of an act of kindness can be surprisingly good.

• 29:28Shankar Vedantam?

  Amit, it turns out that we make something of the same error when it comes to people in our own lives, not just as strangers. There was a study led by Zita Oravec and Chelsea Muth at Penn State some years ago that asked people what made them feel most loved. What did they find, Amit?

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, what they found was that these sort of daily acts of kindness, the expressions of appreciation, even simple compliments, those are the types of things that people say make them feel most loved by those that are closest to them in their lives. I think what's interesting about that research, though, is that it focuses on the recipient's perspective. So if you're asking people about what really matters to them, what makes them feel positive in these ways, they'll tell you that it's these expressions of warmth that happen on a day-to-day basis and the types of interactions we could have all the time. And yet, I think if you were to ask the people that love those participants,

• 30:32Speaker 02

  the potential compliment givers, or gratitude expressers, or performers of acts of kindness, they might think that they're doing something relatively inconsequential, as opposed to one of the most important things that they could do for another person.

• 30:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Amit says the different lenses employed by gift givers and gift recipients to evaluate the value of an act of kindness leads to what he calls the prosociality paradox.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  I think the paradox is really that these are actions that tend to feel good for both the people doing them and the people on the receiving end. And yet, even though it feels good, it's seen as good, it's perceived to be good, we are reluctant to behave in these ways that in everyday life will leave us feeling happier.

• 31:30Shankar Vedantam?

  The prosociality paradox doesn't just lead kind people to withhold their kindness. It also keeps people from asking for kindness. In a study by Nick Epley and Shu'an Zhao, visitors at a botanical garden were encouraged to ask others to take a photo of them. The visitors were then asked to guess whether the strangers being asked to take the photos would feel happy or inconvenienced by the request.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  So there's a beautiful scene in this conservatory, essentially, with these lush plants, this lush foliage around. And so when you ask people, how inconvenienced would somebody feel if you asked them to take a picture for you? How positive would they feel as a result of offering this help for you? They think that people are going to feel more inconvenienced than they actually feel. And in fact, they don't realize how positive the other person will feel as a result of sort of helping you out. People are generally, they tend to be delighted to offer a helping hand. It doesn't take very much effort. It's an easy opportunity to do something nice for somebody else. And people are happy to do this, but we don't always recognize that.

• 32:43Shankar Vedantam?

  And in some ways, isn't this partly connected to the idea that we find it really difficult to put ourselves in other people's shoes? So we're seeing the world so often through our own perspective that we fail to see that somebody else could see it quite differently?

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, we have these egocentric biases. This is sort of the scientific term for these perspective-based asymmetries, where we're thinking about things from our perspective. But in these contexts, these are interpersonal exchanges. They involve other people. And so it really matters what's going on in the minds of, the mind of another person, what their perspective is. I'm not the first person to suggest that being kind to other people improves well-being. And yet, we have tons of opportunities to be kind to other people that we don't take advantage of. And I think it's interesting to think about why we don't act in ways that are likely to make us feel better.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  And one of those, one of the explanations for why we sometimes choose not to do those things that are going to make both us and someone else feel better is that we don't, we don't fully understand sort of the magnitude of the impact that we're having on another person. Recipients feel, they say things like, "A little good goes a long way." And what we find in our research is that it actually goes even further than people expect that it will. We underestimate how much value these acts will have on the people that we're kind to.

• 34:11Shankar Vedantam?

  There is one last dimension to the prosociality paradox. It's not only the case that we underestimate how much people will appreciate our acts of kindness, it's not only that we underestimate how willing others are to help us, we fail to foresee the downstream effects of being kind.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Today in the Tampa Bay Times, both report a woman at the drive-thru paid for her coffee at the Starbucks on Tyrone Boulevard around 7:00 a.m. yesterday. She also paid for the driver behind her, who in turn paid for the next customer, and so on, and so on. In all, 378 people decided to pay it forward. Employees say the 379th person who broke the chain was confused about how it all worked.

• 34:53Shankar Vedantam?

  Amit and his team have run experiments to test if kindness is really contagious. They've brought people into a lab and given them a small gift, like a chocolate bar or a box of gourmet tea.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  We had recipients of that act of kindness kind of play one of these economic games that are used to explore what are sometimes called pay it forward effects. So participants are assigned the role, they're told that they're sort of the decider, they're asked to allocate some money between themselves and another person, this is someone that they'd never meet. And so, everybody that received an item, in this case, again, it was either from the experimenter for their participation, or as a result of their act of kindness, they're assigned to be this decider, there's real money on the line, these are consequential choices. And what we found was that those who had just been on the receiving end of an act

• 35:45Speaker 02

  of kindness gave substantially more to sort of this anonymous person in this subsequent game. So this other person was now being kind to someone else, basically because someone had been kind to them before.

• 36:02Shankar Vedantam?

  The downstream effects, in some ways, of being kind.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can think of this as a potential virtuous cycle of sort of giving to other people, but we don't always realize that we have the capacity to create cycles like that.

• 36:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Our actions can have surprising ripple effects on the world. But first, we have to work up the courage to overcome our own feelings of awkwardness. For his part, Amit eventually did reach out to Jen, his grad school friend. It was a lot less awkward than he had feared.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  I wish the story was I reflected on how I had behaved and I changed my behavior right away and called her up on the phone, but we ended up, you know, there was some shared memory, essentially, that led to us having a little bit of a text exchange. We ended up talking to each other as a result of that. And from that conversation, I knew that it would have been great if we had talked to each other. It's, you know, when you're close to someone, you can, those feelings of closeness come back pretty quickly in reality, but sometimes it's hard to realize that when you're thinking about sort of the prospect of reconnecting with somebody else.

• 37:22Shankar Vedantam?

  We all have moments in our lives when we see an opportunity to step in, but don't. Maybe an elderly stranger needs some help at the grocery store, or a friend in trouble could benefit from a phone call. Rather than doing something, even if it's small, many of us hold back. We worry we will be awkward or that our kindness will be misconstrued. Yet, when we are on the receiving end of small kindnesses, we are often moved to tears. This paradox plays out every day, robbing us of opportunities to offer kindness and opportunities to receive it. When we come back, how to fight the prosociality paradox. You're listening to Hidden Brain.

• 38:07Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 38:25Shankar Vedantam?

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• 38:59Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Like many people, psychologist Amit Kumar had trepidations about returning to the office after spending months away during the COVID pandemic.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  I think all of us can probably, that have had this experience, can remember how strange it is to go back to a place when you haven't been there in many months. And so there was already some anxiety around going back to the office. I was nervous about doing that. I basically didn't go to the office at all for many months during the height of the pandemic. And when I eventually did come back to campus, I was expecting to kind of find a half-eaten sandwich from a past life and a bunch of dead plants in my office. Much to my surprise, though, the plants in my office were not only alive, they were miraculously thriving, to the point of looking way healthier than they looked when I was coming in regularly and trying to tend to them.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  And it turned out, so there's a person on our administrative staff here who does all sorts of seemingly small things that kind of really loom large, I think, in the minds of those that are receiving her help. But of course, it turned out that it was her who had kind of made this miracle happen. She had been coming into the office, at least with a little bit of frequency. And this was, again, something she didn't have to do. Nobody asked her to do this. In fact, when I talked to her about, this is another kind of real-life experience of what we're measuring in these experiments, because when I talked to her about it, she basically framed it as this super-concrete, simple act.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  You know, it's just pouring water out of a container every once in a while is kind of how she described what she was doing. But to me, when you're already anxious about returning to the office, you think that your plants have died, this was somebody that was thinking about me, somebody that cared about me, somebody that was doing something nice for me. And so all of those positive feelings, I think, really came to mind in that instance, even though she, of course, thought of it as some small thing that she was doing to kind of pass the time.

• 41:10Shankar Vedantam?

  It's those different lenses again. Amit focused on the warmth of the act of kindness. His colleague focused on how much effort it took her to water the plants.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  So this goes back to sort of this asymmetry in terms of what are people focusing on? What are people paying attention to in these interactions? So when we're a potential performer of an act of kindness, our perspective just tends to focus less on warmth than targets do when we're considering our own behavior. It seems like a plant watering a plant to a performer, but it's actually somebody doing something nice for me when you're a recipient.

• 41:54Shankar Vedantam?

  In recent years, Amit and his colleagues have started to ask how they can help people overcome the prosociality paradox. One experiment conducted with Nick Epley at the University of Chicago points in a useful direction.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  So it turns out that these acts are pretty easy. They don't necessarily involve lots of effort. They're the types of things that you can do in just a matter of minutes. Folks have been making the case for about two decades now that expressing gratitude improves well-being. And yet again, we don't necessarily walk around in our daily lives giving thanks to people all that often. And that makes a scientist curious as to, well, why don't we? And so one of the ways that we investigated this was by having participants write a gratitude letter to somebody else who had impacted them in some way. And we again had those participants make predictions about how their recipient would feel as a result of their letter.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  And what we found when recipients told us how they really felt, and we kind of compare those responses to expectations, was that senders significantly underestimated how surprised recipients would be about why they were grateful. They overestimated how awkward or uncomfortable recipients would feel. And they didn't realize just how positive it would feel to be on the receiving end of one of these letters.

• 43:20Shankar Vedantam?

  I understand that you use a similar exercise when you teach. What do you ask your students to do?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's essentially participating in this experiment. So they write a letter to somebody else. They make a prediction about how that person will feel. We contact their recipients. We find out how they really feel. And I kind of show the data to the students in my class. I think what's powerful for the students is that they learn that they exhibit the same effects that have been found in published research. So we've replicated these results kind of time and time again. I suspect that it's useful, or this research might be more meaningful. It might potentially have a bigger impact on one's own life if you kind of participate directly, if you experience it yourself, rather than just kind of hearing about the results from experiments you didn't participate in.

• 44:12Shankar Vedantam?

  Professors at other universities have adopted Ahmed's letter-writing exercise. He sometimes hears stories about how it's impacted students. One story stands out to him. An international student studying at a Canadian university decided to write a letter to his mother.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Thanked her for everything that she had done for him. And at the end of his letter, he wrote the words, "I love you." And he realized that he had never said that to his mom before. And his mother's response started with four words back, "I love you too."

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Imagine sort of hearing that from your mom after the first time that you told her that. That's a particularly powerful example, of course, but it's actually not an unusual reaction. So we've done this with, you know, lots and lots of participants at this point. And I've had participants in our studies and in my class kind of write to me, telling me that they were ecstatic, that they were bubbling over with joy after receiving a letter of appreciation. That's not the usual type of comment that a researcher gets in the open-ended feedback when they're asking someone to complete a questionnaire.

• 45:28Shankar Vedantam?

  So after studying this phenomenon for many years, Amit, I understand that there are things that you have done in your own life to make it easier and more automatic for you to reach out a helping hand. Tell me about those things. What do you do?

• 45:42Speaker 02

  I'd say that I probably have started expressing gratitude more often in my day to day life as a result of sort of conducting this research. So, you know, all of this work is just an attempt to get a better understanding of our everyday lives and how they might be improved. And so what makes us more likely to express gratitude? Well, we know that people are more likely to do something if it's kind of top of mind, if we can think about a clear way to get it done. And so one thing that I do is I just have cards on hand. It's an easy reminder to me, more than like the stationary itself. It's just, oh yeah, I could express gratitude to somebody else. Why not go ahead and do it? The research, of course, suggests that people are more impacted by these expressions than we expect.

• 46:30Shankar Vedantam?

  Some time ago, Amit found himself at an airport with an opportunity to practice the ideas that he preaches.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  So I was waiting at the gate. I happened to be sitting next to a woman who was clearly getting frustrated with something on her phone. She tried asking a couple of folks nearby for help in Spanish without much luck. And so in doing so, I kind of learned that she didn't really speak English. I guess an aside, mind you, the last time I took a Spanish class was in 11th grade. So I'm probably always, you know, listeners can't see gray in my beard on a podcast, but that was a while ago. And so, you know, I'm probably always speaking in the present tense, not really communicating effectively.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  And so this is a case where I think concerns about competence really loomed large here. I have very little confidence in my ability to effectively communicate in Spanish. But nevertheless, in sort of knowing my own research, I thought I'd just try to help. As best I could. And so in my, in my broken Spanish, I kind of pieced together that she was traveling to the US for the first time. She was trying to get in touch with her brother to pick her up when she landed. And she needed to connect to the wifi in order to sort of talk to him on WhatsApp. She had an international phone. Connecting to the free airport wifi required, kind of filling out one of those, those standard forms with like your email address and your, your zip code, things that, that some people

• 48:05Speaker 02

  are very accustomed to doing, but others might not be. I guess I'll mention that I have no clue how to say zip code in any other language besides, besides English. And so after a few failed attempts at explaining sort of what she needed to do, she, she just kind of handed me her phone. I ended up filling out the form with my own sort of personal contact information to get her connected. And, you know, we, it was a, a kind of broken conversation, but I pieced together, she was kind of telling me how nervous she was traveling. She made it clear how appreciative she was of my help, kind of allowing her to interact with her brother. I don't know if I would have done that if I wasn't studying topics like these in my research. It's kind of easy to, to stay reserved. Maybe someone

• 48:50Speaker 02

  else will help. I don't want to get involved. That's, those are the thoughts that sometimes enter our minds. But this is something that obviously left her feeling positive and it actually made me feel really good, too. And so those, I think, are exactly the kinds of actions that perhaps all of us should be engaging in a bit more often.

• 49:18Shankar Vedantam?

  Think about the last time a stranger showed you a small kindness. Maybe someone brought you your wallet after you left it on a coffee shop counter. Or perhaps fellow travelers let you cut ahead of them in line when you were late for a flight.

• 49:35Shankar Vedantam?

  How do these gestures make you feel? As we've heard in today's episode, small acts of kindness often have an outsized impact on us. That's partly because they show that another person has seen us. A listener named Jessica recently called in with a story about one such act of kindness. About a decade ago, Jessica was struggling with loneliness and depression. She felt like she was lost in an abyss.

• 50:02Speaker 05

  I remember just thinking, the people who I am around, they're just constantly disappointed by me. They're constantly telling me all the things that I just can't get right. And it had been building up so much that the burden was much too heavy.

• 50:16Shankar Vedantam?

  One day, a group of coworkers gathered around her.

• 50:20Speaker 05

  I just remember them saying like, what's going on with you? What's going on with you? Like, something's really wrong now. And I just remember being like, nothing, everything's okay. What are you talking about? And then it was about six of them that stood around me and said, what's wrong with you? We see that something's going on, don't lie. And we see you. And I remember thinking like, what do you mean? You see me? And they're like, yeah, we see you. We know that you're lying. We know that something's wrong. We see you.

• 50:52Shankar Vedantam?

  Jessica had felt dismissed by her friends and family. But now, these coworkers were sending her a different message.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  And for that, I am very grateful. And because of them, I'm still alive today. And for the rest of my eternity here on earth, will be grateful to those individuals for doing that to me.

• 51:15Shankar Vedantam?

  There are some things we all need in life: food, water, shelter. We also have a need that's harder to define, but is vital to our survival. We need to feel like we matter.

• 51:31Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, stories about the importance of feeling seen and heard. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 51:54Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Humans are social creatures. We want to feel like we belong. But we also crave something even deeper. We want to feel like we matter. The psychologist Gordon Flett is the author of The Psychology of Mattering: Understanding the Human Need to Be Significant. He recently joined us for an episode titled, "Do You Feel Invisible?" Today, he responds to your questions and comments about the importance of feeling seen. Gordon Flett, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 52:30Speaker 06

  Well, thanks for having me, Shankar. I appreciate it.

• 52:34Shankar Vedantam?

  Gord, you study what you call "mattering." What do you mean by that term?

• 52:38Speaker 06

  Mattering is feeling valued by other people, so you feel that you are seen and heard and valued and really cared about, so that people would miss you if you were no longer around. And that is a feeling that can be one that really sticks with you and influences other positive feelings.

• 52:59Shankar Vedantam?

  What have you found about the effects of mattering on our physical and emotional health?

• 53:05Speaker 06

  The physical side is important to underscore, because there are now about 10 studies indicating that mattering is associated with better health, both in terms of subjective self-reports, but also in terms of some objective indicators, such as blood pressure, heart functioning, body chemicals, and so on. But also, it's related to our positive feelings. It predicts happiness and engagement and enjoyment, and at extreme levels, pure, unadulterated joy. But the flip side of that, of course, is when we don't feel that. Since then, we preponder to anxiety and depression, loneliness, and other negative mental health states.

• 53:46Shankar Vedantam?

  Huh. What do you think explains the physical effects of mattering? I mean, the emotional effects of mattering seem more straightforward and intuitive. Why do you think it's having an effect on our physical well-being?

• 53:58Speaker 06

  People who are health psychologists talk about things that get under the skin. I think that mattering gets under the skin in terms of just providing, first of all, a sense of calmness and a lack of stress, that people who are high in mattering are more able to cope and are resilient and adaptable. So I think that's part of it. But also, there's a sense of security and safety that comes from knowing that people care about you and would miss you if you're gone and are looking out for you. And at the bottom of that is the sense of identity, that you see yourself as someone who actually is cared about and is connected to other people. So I think there's multiple things that are going on beneath the skin. But also, there's just a basic feeling of calmness and the capacity of knowing that

• 54:42Speaker 06

  when trouble ensues and stress is coming your way, that you'll be able to get through it, perhaps by calling on some of the people who have given you that sense of mattering in the first place.

• 54:53Shankar Vedantam?

  A listener, Ian Bill, wrote in with a hypothesis about where the human need to matter comes from. He writes, "The need to matter is important because of the need for individuals to be a member of a group in good standing. Group membership was important for survival when humans lived in small tribal or family groups. It has become more of a problem in modern times since our groups have become much larger and more complex." What do you think of Bill's hypothesis, Gord? Could our drive to feel like we matter have an evolutionary origin?

• 55:22Speaker 06

  I believe there is some component to that in terms of our basic need to connect with others, and that we want to make sure that we're connecting with others in the way that gives us that sense of safety and security. I also think, though, that beyond the group connection is that one-to-one connection, mattering is tied into our sense of attachment. And when you look at what fosters good attachment, many of the same mechanisms are involved in terms of getting the attention and the care and the responsiveness of the caregivers early on in life. So there's a hard-wired component that's built in very early. Perhaps there's an evolutionary sense, as Bill has suggested, but also that that deep

• 56:02Speaker 06

  sense of security that comes from having those connections with caring providers who, you know... One's mother, one's father, grandfather, grandmother, whoever it is. And, you know, I've been looking at the work of John Bowlby recently, the famous attachment theorist. And he doesn't talk about mattering per se, but he talks about the care that comes with attachments because he warned us that attachments can also be bad attachments to people who are not optimal parents. And when you're a more optimal parent and responsive caregiver, you're focused on meeting the emotional needs in addition to the physical needs.

• 56:41Shankar Vedantam?

  Gord, we heard from many listeners with personal stories about mattering. David is 81 years old and has worked for a while as a hospice chaplain.

• 56:49Speaker 07

  Being there with patients and loved ones, walking with them during the end of life, I saw my impact. And I learned that at end of life, people are not so worried about dying, but are more worried of whether their life mattered and whether their life had meaning. I once told a paralyzed Parkinson patient who could not speak or swallow that he was giving a gift to his family. By his not being able to care for himself, his family had to stop their normal life and look at what was important to them and the importance of showing their love to him

• 57:34Speaker 07

  by caring for him. I thanked him for his gift that he was giving, and then tears rolled down his cheeks. He had seen that he did matter and that his life, even paralyzed, still had meaning.

• 57:53Shankar Vedantam?

  That's a remarkably moving story, Gord. I'm wondering, do you find that our need to matter is greatest in moments like these when we've received a serious health diagnosis and we feel very vulnerable?

• 58:05Speaker 06

  Yes, that certainly is the case, and I thank David for sharing that with us. It's so important to underscore these important concepts and needs when people are at that stage in life. I know in our original discussion, I talked about this in terms of my experiences in the hospital with a nurse who remarkably showed me the caring that I needed after a very close call. And I think that these are the things that people think about when they're worried about their longevity and the possibility of not being with us anymore. I've seen and heard some remarkable stories from nurses about people in such circumstances, very much in line with what David said. And I can share that my mother-in-law was in a home in terms of long-term care and

• 58:50Speaker 06

  had one of the best nurses in the world. And this person was so sensitive to the fact that people needed to know that they were cared about right to the end. And when my mother-in-law passed, unfortunately, this person was off that day, and she came in the next day because we were then tasked with having to immediately clear out my mother-in-law's room. And she was actually crying and saying, you know, "I wanted to be here for your day when you needed me the most." And it just meant so much to us. And I'm sure that my mother-in-law had a much better time in that facility because of having the experiences with this person who would just light up when she came into the room, when she saw her or the family members.

• 59:31Shankar Vedantam?

  Hmm. You know, listening to David's story, it seems clear that his work as a hospice chaplain also gives him a feeling that he matters. I think many of us assume that jobs like David's are impossibly difficult, but in fact, many people who do hospice work find it to be incredibly meaningful. Can you speak to the power of bearing witness as a source of mattering, Gord?

• 59:54Speaker 06

  Yes, I think that there's a power to the bearing witness, but there's also the power of directly impacting people and knowing that you have done something for them in one of their greatest times of need. The originator of the hospice concept said that essentially, "You matter to the end of your days," and it's the slogan that is embraced at hospices around the world. And you know, the the value is is clearly there in terms of people recognizing it, staff members. One thing that happened when when my mother-in-law had passed and they were taking her out in terms of the, you know, the hearse is is waiting there is that they staff lines up on both sides and they clap for the person and they they cheer as the final goodbye to their experience with that person.

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  And of course, we went around and we thanked everybody we could right there on the spot so that they would get that direct feeling of knowing that what they did for us really mattered and would continue to matter to us until, you know, the end of time, really.

• 1:00:53Shankar Vedantam?

  It can be very moving to hear stories of someone who feels seen by another person, but it can be equally painful to hear stories of people who've experienced the opposite. Here's a message we received from a listener who also happens to be named David.

• 1:01:08Speaker 07

  For nearly thirty years, I was a firefighter paramedic. Early on in my career, I was diagnosed with job-related PTSD. This diagnosis went unacknowledged and was completely ignored by my administration and chief officers within the agency. In 2019, I attempted suicide as a direct result of my job-related PTSD. I went away to residential treatment and came back, and upon my return to work, I was never acknowledged by any member of administration or by any chief officer.

• 1:01:49Speaker 07

  Oftentimes, many of the guys that I had worked with for decades would get up and leave the room when I came in. I lasted for about two weeks before I went off on permanent sick leave, where I stayed for about a year before retiring. During that time, nobody reached out to me, and I never felt more alone.

• 1:02:13Speaker 07

  And more invisible in my whole life. And I had become suicidal again during that time.

• 1:02:20Speaker 07

  It's been almost five years since I've retired. And in that time, I've been able to form strong connections with the first responder community.

• 1:02:31Speaker 07

  At least once a week over Zoom through the firefighters' union, I host recovery meetings. And I actively seek to help and connect with them wherever I can in hopes to prevent whatever happened to me to ever happening to another first responder if I can do anything to help it. Thank you.

• 1:02:54Shankar Vedantam?

  God, what strikes me about David's experience is that his feeling of not being seen when he came back to work, how powerfully this shaped his ability to stay in the workplace. It's also striking that David found significance in interacting with people who have gone through a similar life experience in his retirement. Are we more likely to find matring with others who we sense are like us?

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  Yes, definitely. There is something to be said for identifying people who seem to have been through the same thing that we have been through and then doing something to help them so that you get that sense of feeling through being valued in terms of, in the case of David, hosting recovery meetings and doing things for his colleagues and his peers who he could identify with. I just wanted to thank David for sharing that story in terms of getting a sense of openness of what kind of pain can be involved. And other people out there will know that they're not alone because they may have been through something very similar. I actually have just finished a paper that's about to come out where I talk about when that sense of not mattering becomes escalated to the point of experiencing what I've termed

• 1:04:01Speaker 06

  unbearable insignificance. And it's a sad story that, you know, when people aren't attuned to the fact that somebody might be feeling this way, some of it times, I think it's because people think, well, they're stoic, they've learned to handle these things, but everybody is human. And in that paper, I talk about there seems to be critical moments when people have got to the point. Point where they say, I really need somebody to respond and validate how I'm feeling and see how I'm feeling or checking in on me. But far too often, as we found out with David there, that that they don't. And then, you know, just a little bit of appreciation or thoughtfulness can go an incredibly long way. I heard another story recently of a family member who returned

• 1:04:42Speaker 06

  to a job after being off and leave for a bit of time. And the workplace had lost track of him and forgot that he actually was coming back that day. And he was there on two days online for it was online work. And it was like, he was a total ghost. And all it takes is a little bit of thoughtfulness where people are thinking at the top and, you know, management level, who's, who's where and who's coming back. And for those who are wondering, well, do we have time for this? Well, you have to think about the time that you would need to find somebody to replace these people, because inevitably, that hurt feeling can translate into health and mental health issues that result in needing to find someone else for these roles. So, you know, there's a

• 1:05:24Speaker 06

  lot to unpack there in terms of what David told us. But the key takeaway I'd like people to focus on is that he got back to a more hopeful approach by doing things that could make a difference for others, and from a perspective that others could relate to. And we do have to remember that people who are in these vital roles in society can find ways through not getting the kinds of interaction, the acknowledgement, or the recognition they deserve to end up feeling like they don't matter at all, and then thinking some very dark thoughts.

• 1:05:56Shankar Vedantam?

  You've said that we need to be especially sensitive to feelings of mattering when we or others are going through significant life transitions, such as retirement. Talk about this idea, Gord. Why is it these transitions affect us so deeply?

• 1:06:09Speaker 06

  When we have a transition, we get very uncertain about ourselves. Some of these transitions include being away from those people who we're close to, who usually provide us our daily sense of mattering. But I've found that if people are able to develop a sense of what I call the deep mattering, where it's not conditional on anything, it's just you being you and you matter to people, that that will carry forward and help you. You in these situations. Some of it is when you're in a new situation, you're faced with all kinds of different feelings and senses of arousal. And the people with a feeling of mattering have a capacity to manage their emotions and to calm down and to keep faith in themselves and in their surroundings and in their extended

• 1:06:52Speaker 06

  social network that they'll be able to get through and be able to deal with most of the transitions. Unfortunately, of course, there are the transitions where we actually have lost someone. So there's a loss of mattering and that, of course, is more of a challenge. But still, I find that once somebody has made you feel that you're important, you tend to carry that around. And once you get past the grief, you're more able to be able to remember that positive connection and why that person felt that way about you in the first place. And that will help carry you forward.

• 1:07:27Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to find ways to matter.

• 1:07:33Shankar Vedantam?

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:07:53Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Feeling seen is an important driver of human flourishing. Feeling lonely or insignificant, by contrast, can lead to depression, anxiety, even violence.

• 1:08:08Shankar Vedantam?

  Psychologist Gordon Flett studies the implications of what he calls mattering.

• 1:08:16Shankar Vedantam?

  Gord, let's talk about how mattering affects and is affected by our relationships. Here is listener Anne.

• 1:08:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Really good, happy, long-term relationships seem to depend on maintaining a sense of equal mattering in order to successfully continue. I've been married for more than 35 years, and I confess that after the glow of feeling in love wore off. It turns out that my husband and I have completely different ways of communicating how we matter to each other. But I'm wondering if it's possible that making another person feel that they matter to you is a skill that can be learned and that requires mindfulness and maybe some work in order to improve. So a two-part question here, Gord. How can we foster more mattering in our relationships?

• 1:09:08Shankar Vedantam?

  And how can we develop the ability to make other people feel like they matter? How can we develop this as a skill?

• 1:09:14Speaker 06

  Sure. I think the first important thing to say here is that we need to be mindful of mattering, and Anne referred to that in terms of mindfulness. But I think we need to be mindful of mattering and not take people for granted or let them feel like they're being taken for granted by not just telling them that they matter, but showing them in terms of, you know, unexpected considerations, thoughtful gestures. Because people, no matter how long they've been together, need a reminder that they're still cared about. And things might be different in many respects, but that core sense of being somebody who's cared about is still there. And I saw a recent analysis of long-term marital adjustment and showed that in divorced

• 1:09:56Speaker 06

  couples, the main thing that seemed to predict it was that they still said they were in love with their former partner, but they had developed a sense of dissatisfaction. And I think the dissatisfaction is something that comes from not getting daily reminders or weekly reminders through whatever means that there can be. Sometimes just showing appreciation for people. I know that things go better at home for us when I acknowledge the things, the many things that my wife does, because she tends to show her caring and mattering of me and her family members through the things that she does, rather than, you know, emotional expressions necessarily. But expressing appreciation and recognizing that what somebody is doing is making a difference

• 1:10:39Speaker 06

  is critical in this, because people will think, okay, well, I am now just being taken for granted. As for Anne's comment about, or question about, could you be trained to do this? There are certain things, I think, first of all. Just becoming aware of mattering and having it as a lens to look at relationships is a very positive thing. But you can just get into micro practices that you can do on a regular basis that will enhance somebody's sense of being seen and heard and respected. Learning how to listen to somebody as opposed to looking at your phone and something that's called fubbing, where you're not really engaged with somebody, you're sort of half-listening, because that will foster antimattering rather than a chance to give a deep listening and

• 1:11:23Speaker 06

  responsive listening that can give a sense of positive mattering. Another key thing in terms of relationships that go beyond couples and partners is to having some time for people. One of the things that consistently comes out in the research that's been done on this is that when somebody spends their time with you, they're giving up their time that they could be used for something else. And even doing something like composing a note to somebody or dropping them a quick call is showing that you've been thinking about them and you're taking the time to do it rather than, oh, I'll get around to it, or, you know, why haven't I heard from somebody when I thought I would hear from them? So there's things you can do. And then I think just fostering an environment where you make it a much more salient thing

• 1:12:08Speaker 06

  in terms of mattering is a good thing as well, not only for relationships, but for organizations.

• 1:12:17Shankar Vedantam?

  Now, the feeling of mattering would intuitively seem to be inherently relational. We experience a sense of significance by mattering to other people, but several listeners called in to make the point that this might not always be a positive. Here is Suzanne, who is a therapist and an ordained minister. Over the past three years, I've experienced what I would call a period of invisibility. After

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  dismantling a twenty year psychotherapy practice and leaving my home, clients and community to relocate and build a new ministry with my former husband. The partnership collapsed almost immediately. He left to serve elsewhere and I found myself in a new city professionally and socially unanchored, rebuilding from the ground up in midlife. What sustained me during that time was something I would call developing an internal witness. Even when there wasn't visible affirmation or external validation,

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  I consciously connected to the knowledge that I mattered to my son, to my granddaughter, even to my dog. That sense of being held in love, even if imagined at times, stabilized me. Over time, I realized that while it's essential to gather with others and to have people who believe in the value of our journey, there are seasons when that external witnessing isn't readily available. In those seasons, cultivating an internalized sense of being seen becomes a psychological lifeline.

• 1:14:09Shankar Vedantam?

  God, what do you make of Suzanne's strategy of creating an internal witness to her own life?

• 1:14:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's a brilliant strategy and a fabulous concept because that's exactly what people need to do, especially during those times when, you know, they've, you know, relied on external validation. They are in a spot where they're alone or isolated and they may not have these people, such as when people are in a transition, like moving to a new town or, you know, where they don't have the usual set of people in their environment to call on right away. The internal witness part is critical though, and I think it's related to the notion of eventually learning to matter to yourself as well. People do need to remind themselves of the ways That they have mattered and they continue to matter to various people.

• 1:14:57Speaker 06

  And this can be family members, other people in the community, but it can also be to to pets and to the community in general. When I talk about mindful mattering, this is what I mean in terms of reminding yourself at times and just reflecting on the ways that you still matter and have mattered and know that you still have the capacity to matter and that you can perhaps build up some more relationships so that you can have the external witnesses as well. At the end of the day, mattering is something that's very subjective. It's inside of us. People are often incorrect where they feel that they matter less than they actually do, or they have got an inflated sense of mattering that doesn't tap into how they're actually regarded

• 1:15:42Speaker 06

  by other people. But at the end of the day, people need to matter to themselves and to reflect on what makes them unique and how they have contributed. And when somebody is in a situation, maybe through illness or injury, where they're feeling that, you know, they've lost the opportunity to matter, it does have some comfort for them to remind themselves that they have made a difference. And I also believe that they will find a way to show that they matter going forward. And, you know, as an illustration of this, you can look at people in the disability community, including essentially the mother of the disability movement, Judy Hume in the United States, who was instrumental and fundamental in getting the rights for disabled community.

• 1:16:26Speaker 06

  You know, she started out and had polio as a kid and ended up actually being barred from going to school initially because she was told that her and her wheelchair were fire hazards, but she was able to convince herself through the support of her initial family that she still had a role to play. And I'm sure there were times when she was thinking, well, I'm up against this in terms of an anti-mattering society who treats people with disabilities as if they're invisible or discardable, but she was able to remind herself of the ways that she could indeed make a difference.

• 1:16:59Shankar Vedantam?

  We heard from a listener named Elizabeth, who wrote in to say that between being a woman, being disabled, and being gay, she feels invisible. And it makes me think, God, especially in light of what you just said, that while a sense of not mattering can affect any of us, people in some groups may be especially vulnerable.

• 1:17:17Speaker 06

  Yes. Although we talk about levels of mattering overall in terms of who matters and who doesn't, in terms of has the feeling of mattering. And I'd like to point out to listeners that about 70, 75% of people have some sense of a feeling of mattering. But when we talk about people from marginalized groups or stigmatized groups, the level of feeling of not mattering, the anti-mattering, escalates. And as one illustration of this, in terms of research done in the US in terms of community feeling of mattering among adolescents and young adults, it's about 50/50 in terms of the feeling of mattering in the community. That's a very sad number when you think about it. And a lot of well-being would come along from making more people have a chance

• 1:18:01Speaker 06

  to feel like they matter in the community. But when we look at people from the LGBTQ plus community, we find that the levels of mattering in the community plummet down to about 1 out of 3 in some of the studies that have been done. So when people are needing to be thoughtful about others and reaching out and sending the message that everybody counts, it's important to think about people who might feel like they're targets for not mattering and to be extra engaged in terms of trying to address their needs.

• 1:18:33Shankar Vedantam?

  When we come back, how to show another person that they matter while also maintaining healthy boundaries. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:19:01Shankar Vedantam?

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Gordon Flett is a psychologist at York University in Canada. He's the author of The Psychology of Mattering: Understanding the Human Need to Be Significant. As we've discussed, Gord, it's important for us as individuals to feel like we matter. But some listeners want to know how to place limits on another person's need to feel seen. Here's listener Allison.

• 1:19:27Speaker 04

  Last night, my daughter, nearly 16-year-old, came home and was complaining about a boy who kept sending her text messages. And she's learned that this boy has a crush on her. And she was nice to him at school. And he's trying to learn Italian, and she speaks Italian. And so he checks in with her on that and sends her his Duolingo results. But she's frustrated because he keeps texting and she's not responding. And she was frustrated in a way I remember being frustrated as a young woman, maybe until I was married.

• 1:20:06Speaker 04

  And that is that you really do want to respond to kindness. You want these young men to feel seen by you. But every time you respond in a way that is kind, that you make eye contact, that you say, "Great job on your Duolingo," it's read in a sexual way. And my daughter was struggling with how to make it clear to him that she wasn't interested in him, but also to be kind. She felt like she was going to be forced into either the sort of ghosting, right?

• 1:20:48Speaker 04

  Not responding, not making eye contact, or ultimately having to say, "I don't like you." The effects of that, of course, most boys take that well. But some boys don't take that well. And I think we have this sort of growth of this kind of, I guess, incel is a kind of sloppy way to describe this culture.

• 1:21:06Speaker 05

  Of of boys who feel entitled to women's attention and then very angry when they aren't seen by them.

• 1:21:15Shankar Vedantam?

  So Gord, Alison understands that everyone needs to feel seen, but she also wonders how we can balance the needs of the seer with those of the seen. What do you think?

• 1:21:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a very difficult situation because it is the case that some people have an excessive need to matter and the more they get, the more they need, it seems, and that seems to be the case here and, you know, hits home as well for me because my daughter's name is Alison and I know that she had an experience that was not very different from this one when she started high school. I think the only thing you can do is you just have to be straight with someone and tell them that, you know, you like them as a person, but you're not necessarily interested in them in the way that they might like. But, you know, this is not going to necessarily land well, no matter how politely you you put it, but at least you're being upfront with someone and showing that you care enough

• 1:22:09Speaker 06

  about them to be straight with them rather than, you know, telling them something that could be too extreme in terms of harshness, but or too encouraging. It's it's very unfortunate when people are at odds with this type of situation. I once was coming home from San Francisco Airport and the fellow who dropped me off at the airport said to me, I just picked you up. Are you coming from a psychology conference and are you a psychologist? I said, well, I'm not a clinical psychologist, but, you know, I am in psychology. And he says, so then he proceeds to tell me that, you know, he's he's got a partner who's an older woman and she wants to get married, but he has told her repeatedly he's

• 1:22:49Speaker 06

  not interested in this and what can he do to try and make her realize that it's not a long term situation that that they're in. And and I told him that you just have to be, you know, right upfront with her and hope that she'll understand, but try to do it in a way that will leave some people some psychological cushions to say that, you know, it's not that they're not a nice person or they're not attractive to other people. It's just that that's not how you you see them and how you you like to interact with them. And you just need to find a way to do it in a way that will not humiliate somebody.

• 1:23:24Shankar Vedantam?

  Yeah, I think Alison's point is well taken, though, which is that I think there are some roles, and perhaps young women have to experience this in particular, but it's not limited to young women. It's also people who play certain roles. If you're a psychotherapist, if you're a doctor, I think people expect you to constantly be able to give them attention, to show that you care. And I have a friend who's actually a therapist, who's often exhausted by the end of the day, actually practicing, and almost feels like he doesn't have more mattering to give, if you will, to other people.

• 1:23:58Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah. That's an important point, because there is a link between burnout and mattering, but most people are thinking about it in terms of, you know, well, I wasn't doing something that was effective, I wasn't making a difference. But you can make too much of a difference, and this is something that was talked about in work by Nancy Schlossberg, who's talked about mattering and retirement and the need to feel appreciated. And of the people that she surveyed, she found that caregivers were the only ones who said, hey, you know, there is a problem when mattering goes too far, because I feel like I'm being used up, and it's never enough, and the more I give, the more that is needed. And people have to be good to themselves at this point.

• 1:24:39Speaker 06

  I think that regarding your friend there and others, that at some point, you have to think about mattering to yourself, and where is the line in terms of needing to focus on restoration of oneself and self-care? Because it's so easy to get the reinforcement of having that impact on people and just let it keep escalating till it gets out of control. And it's funny that one person who actually had this happen was Herbert Freudenberger, who invented the clinical concept of burnout. And Freudenberger was working to excess himself, so this is how he got many of his insights about burnout. He would be working 18 to 20 hours a day, so that he got totally burned out and depleted,

• 1:25:21Speaker 06

  to the extent that, in one account that he talks about in his book, it was the case that the family was ready to go on a vacation, the kids were ready to go, and he literally was so physically depleted. By giving so much of himself to others that he that he couldn't get out of bed. And the family vacation had to be canceled or postponed at that point. And you know, the moral of the story is that you need to retain some of this for yourself, that you need to matter to yourself and to engage in self care and know that there is a point at which it's just too much to keep giving and giving without giving something to yourself as well.

• 1:25:59Shankar Vedantam?

  We heard from some listeners who wondered if placing so much importance on mattering can be naive. Listener Andrew has practiced medicine for more than thirty years all over the world, including nearly a decade as a doctor in California prisons. Here he is.

• 1:26:14Speaker 03

  I've seen this pattern over and over. People chase importance the way they may chase a drug. Praise, status, attention, it feels good briefly, but it's fragile. Purpose can disappear with one mistake, one lost job, one broken relationship.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  What I've come to believe is that pinning your sense of meaning on feeling important or having some guaranteed purpose is a recipe for heartbreak.

• 1:26:40Shankar Vedantam?

  So Gord, Andrew's comment makes me wonder how we distinguish between needing to matter versus needing to feel important or have high social status.

• 1:26:49Speaker 06

  Yes, I think there's a almost an artificial form of mattering in terms of what Andrew was referring to where you're pinning your entire sense of self on mattering to others. We're recently doing work on that need to matter and we do find that there are people with an outsized need to matter and that they will probably be seeking any form of getting that sense of mattering, including through social media and all the likes and the attention that they can get there as opposed to developing the caring relationships with people who really truly know you and care about you. So I would say that mattering is vitally important. I think everybody needs it to some degree, but it needs to be in a balanced way

• 1:27:31Speaker 06

  and along with other positive sources of the self that in terms of will build self esteem and address the other needs. When people talk about psychological needs, they talk about three main ones, the need to. Feel autonomous and self determined, the need to to feel connected to others and and the need to feel competent. And I would say that mattering is is a vital fourth need that needs to be there, but we can't neglect the other three needs as well and having a more balanced approach to life. And it is sad that some people's need to matter, as Andrew says, becomes all consuming and all important. And, you know, it's going to need that constant reassurance of being

• 1:28:11Speaker 06

  someone who who is mattering, because it's really geared and driven by a deep sense of insecurity that the lasting feeling of mattering hasn't been established earlier in life.

• 1:28:23Shankar Vedantam?

  We've talked on the show in the past about awe and how beneficial it can be to gaze up at a sky full of stars and contemplate the vastness of the universe. Listener Aditi flagged the tension between the idea that we're a tiny speck in the universe and the idea that we all matter.

• 1:28:40Speaker 04

  I've been thinking about some spiritual and philosophical teachings about the idea that in the grand sweep of human history and world history and just life, that each of us is just a blip. And at the same time, we're told that our lives deeply matter. How should we navigate this tension? Is there something grounding or even liberating, maybe healthy, about accepting that we might not actually matter as much as we think we do?

• 1:29:17Shankar Vedantam?

  What do you think, Gord?

• 1:29:19Speaker 06

  There's a lot to unpack there as well. I think that it's a wonderful point in terms of making the connection between mattering, not just in terms of relationships with other people, but mattering in terms of the big picture. And here I go back to the work of Fromm, who talked about how we can feel very insignificant and small in society, with billions of people in the world, that indeed, we are just one very small piece of the puzzle. I think it's important to accept that, but then also to accept that, you know, you don't have to matter in terms of the big picture, you just need to Matter in terms of the people in your life or the people who could be in your life, so that you can offset that sense of of the feeling of not mattering,

• 1:30:02Speaker 06

  not being hugely significant in society through establishing the connections and the relationships with people. Fram was interesting because he really introduced the concept of reactivity to not mattering and said that, you know, once we feel small in society, we can do things that are very deleterious and add to our sense of estrangement and isolation. Or we can find adaptive proactive ways of getting a better sense of significance through the what we do in terms of our daily activities. And at the end of the day, you know, there will be times when people are struck by that sense of, wow, I don't really matter in this gigantic picture. You know, that's when we really need the support of people who do care about us.

• 1:30:50Shankar Vedantam?

  Gordon Flett is a psychologist at York University in Canada. He's the author of The Psychology of Mattering: Understanding the Human Need to Be Significant. Gord, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:31:02Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you, Shankar. It was a pleasure once again.

• 1:31:09Shankar Vedantam?

  We also heard today from Gary Knight, a photographer and the executive director of the Seven Foundation, as well as Amit Kumar. Amit is a psychologist at the University of Delaware.

• 1:31:23Shankar Vedantam?

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

• 1:31:41Shankar Vedantam?

  I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.