What drives us to carry out acts of kindness for total strangers? | The Excerpt
- - What drives us to carry out acts of kindness for total strangers? | The Excerpt
Dana Taylor, USA TODAYNovember 13, 2025 at 7:12 AM
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On the Thursday, November 13, 2025 episode of The Excerpt podcast: In honor of World Kindness Day — we’ve partnered with the Humankind team at USA TODAY for a deeper exploration on the topic of compassion. In honor of World Kindness Day — we’ve partnered with the Humankind team at USA TODAY for a deeper exploration on the topic of compassion. What drives us to carry out acts of kindness for total strangers and how can we actively cultivate this selflessness as a society? Abigail Marsh, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Georgetown University, joins The Excerpt to talk about empathy and altruism — why we help, even when it costs us.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's the Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, November 13th, 2025. In honor of World Kindness Day, we've partnered with the Humankind team at USA TODAY for a deeper exploration on the topic of compassion, what drives us to carry out acts of kindness for total strangers and how can we actively cultivate this selflessness as a society? Joining me to dig into all of it is Abigail Marsh, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University. Abigail studies empathy and altruism, why we help even when it costs us. Thanks so much for joining me on the Excerpt, Abigail.
Abigail Marsh:
Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
You've shared that a life-changing event in college sparked your research into altruism. What happened?
Abigail Marsh:
Yeah. I was visiting my hometown of Tacoma, Washington during the summer between college years, and as I was driving south on the Interstate 5 freeway over an interpass, a dog ran out in front of my car and I swerved to avoid it as lots of people do, which resulted in my car spinning out, actually doing big donuts across the freeway until I ended up stranded in the fast lane of the road on an overpass that had no shoulders and the car wound up facing backward into oncoming traffic and the engine died. And so I was in imminent danger of being hit by any of the cars and trucks that raced by until a stranger appeared.
What seemed to me out of nowhere, I later figured out that he must have stopped immediately upon seeing my stranded car, pulled across to the other side of the road and then run across five or six lanes of freeway traffic to reach me in the middle of the night, get me back to safety, and then after making sure I was going to be okay, just disappear again with a very kindly you take care of yourself and there's something about actually being rescued by a stranger and owing your life to somebody that you've never met before who risked his life to save yours that I think puts the capacity of humans for altruism in a whole new light and made me really motivated to try to understand it.
Dana Taylor:
How did that moment shape your worldview and ultimately lead you to study empathy and altruism?
Abigail Marsh:
I think I had never appreciated previously how profound it is for somebody to risk significant injury or death to save a stranger. And I don't know if I ever fully believed it was possible until it happened to me, as is so often the case. And given how I almost certainly owed my life to this man whose name I never found out to my great dismay, it really bothered me that I didn't understand why he had done what he'd done. And it motivated me to try to study it as a scientist later in my career. And I also feel it's a little bit of a debt of gratitude that I can pay back for what he did.
Dana Taylor:
And what does your research reveal about why some people are hardwired to instinctively help others even at great personal risk while others hesitate?
Abigail Marsh:
What seems to be the case is that people exist on what I call a caring continuum. So people vary in how much care they feel for others, including people who are complete strangers. With people who are psychopathics, who have unusually callous, remorseless personalities and engage in a lot of antisocial behavior on one far end of the continuum, which is anchored at the other end by people who are unusually empathic and generous and compassionate and are much more likely to engage in acts of extreme altruism like my rescuer did. And I've studied other heroic rescuers in the years since, as well as people who have given bone marrow or an organ like a kidney to a stranger using both brain imaging research and behavioral research and lots and lots of interviews to try to understand especially why extraordinary altruists do what they do. And what we've discovered is that such people are sort of anti-psychopathic.
So the things that people who are psychopathic have too little of, people who are very altruistic have more of. They are better at empathizing with other people's distress. They really seem to understand and recognize when other people are suffering or need better than the average person does, which I think is one reason they're motivated to help when other people are in need. And this seems to be associated with both structural and functional differences in their brains. For example, a region of their brain called the amygdala, which tends to be smaller than average in people who are psychopathic tends to be larger than average in people who are very altruistic.
Dana Taylor:
I know that you've explored so many examples of altruism and kindness in your research. Can you share one that really stands out to you?
Abigail Marsh:
Oh gosh, there's so many to choose from. It's very difficult. Maybe one of them is an altruistic kidney donor who I met years ago when we brought him in for a brain scan here at Georgetown University. But what was so interesting about him is that he had, as he tells it, not been a really nice guy when he was younger, when he was a young man. And then there was a moment in his life that mirrored in a beautiful way what happened to me that he believes changed his personality for the better. And he was driving, I think it was at night also down a lonely road in Indiana when the car ahead of him drove off the road into a culvert and then started to spew smoke. And he stopped immediately, ran down, rescued the driver, saving her life, and they stayed in very close touch until her death years later.
And she told him before he died that he really needed to make sure that what he had done meant something. Make sure that this has a bigger meaning. And he ended up deciding to end up donating a kidney to a stranger. That he decided that this thing he had done in his life merited changing the way that he behaved towards other people in general. And not only did he donate a kidney, but now he runs ultra marathons to raise money and attention for the cause of altruistic kidney donation. And I love the story because I think it shows how much capacity we all have to become more altruistic than we really are. And how many of us may have altruistic capacities that are latent within us that we don't even know about?
Dana Taylor:
You've talked about the size of the amygdala, but what happens when someone acts selflessly? Are there changes that occur in the brain and the body?
Abigail Marsh:
Well, we think so. We know that for most people, helping others is intrinsically rewarding. And this is what it means to be an altruistic individual or an altruistic species to find it rewarding and gratifying to help other people. Some people will argue, well, if you find helping others gratifying, if you find it pleasurable or rewarding, then it can't really be altruistic, then what you've done is selfish. But I think that doesn't logically hang together because that would require that the most altruistic people are those who give begrudgingly or unwillingly, which doesn't make any sense.
And so the beauty of the fact that helping other people is pleasurable means that we believe a burst of dopamine is released in regions of the brain, like the striatum when we help other people and there's an intensely pleasurable sensation associated with the release of dopamine that makes us want to do that behavior again. And so that means that altruism is a learned behavior because it's so reinforcing. And this suggests that most people can learn to become more altruistic if they just start and learn firsthand the pleasures and the joy that come with helping other people. And most of the very altruistic people I work with, that's exactly how they did it. They started out by donating blood and then they just went from there.
Dana Taylor:
Looking broadly at our society, would you say that we're becoming more altruistic or less? What trends have you been able to document here?
Abigail Marsh:
This is a really important question. I think it's very widely perceived that we're becoming more selfish and less altruistic as a society, in part because of the biased representation of society that we see in all forms of media. And this includes both social media and traditional media. But if you look at the data, if you look at people's actual behavior over time, most of the evidence suggests that people are actually becoming more cooperative and less selfish over time. Rates of unselfish giving behaviors like helping strangers and donating to charity have gone up over time, as has people's cooperative behavior in laboratory tasks that have been running for decades now. And even though the researchers who studied those trends anticipated they would see that people were becoming more selfish because that's what many people believe, they're really surprised to find that the opposite is true.
Dana Taylor:
How do cultural and societal factors help shape kindness in altruism? What are some pop culture examples of altruism?
Abigail Marsh:
Well, there are so many good pop culture examples of altruism, and one of my favorite recently is the actor Jesse Eisenberg, recently announcing that he was going to be donating his kidney to a stranger just a few weeks from now. He is a long time blood donor, as many altruistic kidney donors are. And he decided given the need for kidneys out there that he was going to pitch in and help solve the problem, which I think is fantastic. One of the most important societal factors that contributes to altruism, especially increasing altruism, is really good news, and that is wellbeing. There's lots of evidence looking over time and around the world that in general, when wellbeing is higher, people are feeling more sense of purpose in life and are feeling more satisfied with their lives are even more likely to be altruistic. And then being altruistic in turn increases our wellbeing. And so in theory, these two positive societal trends can reinforce each other over time.
Dana Taylor:
Technology and social media have transformed how we connect and help others. Based on your findings, do these platforms amplify genuine altruism or encourage more performative acts of kindness?
Abigail Marsh:
This is a great question, and of course, technology is changing so quickly. It's hard for us to keep up and have clear scientific answers. I think like a lot of tools, social media, which just is a tool and all the technology we use today, gives us the opportunity to be more altruistic if we would like to be. So for example, platforms like GoFundMe, which never existed before, give so many people the opportunity to help strangers they never would've had before, including I've heard recently Taylor Swift, who has done many sneaky donations to needy strangers on GoFundMe over the years. However, the problem that many researchers, including me are concerned about right now with technology, phone, social media, is that they're replacing the in-person interactions that people used to have with each other on a much more frequent basis. And especially those really positive daily interactions with other people that remind you just how lovely and how nice most people are in person.
And having those rewarding experiences with other people improves the way that you think about other people, reminds you how nice they really are and makes you more likely to be altruistic. Unfortunately, social media platforms in particular tend to amplify the voices of the most narcissistic and the least pro-social people among us. That's what the algorithms do, and I worry that it's making people more cynical about human nature and less likely to want to help other people because of the perception that it gives them about human nature. So I think that's what we need to be cautious about.
Dana Taylor:
And then for those who want to be more compassionate themselves, what's one small science back step they can take today?
Abigail Marsh:
I think the most important thing that you can do if you'd like to be more pro-social, is just start. And it doesn't matter what you do. It's kind of like working out when people say, what's the best workout I should do? Experts always say, whatever you enjoy doing, because then you'll do it. You'll keep doing it. And the same is true with helping other people. If you don't mind needles, maybe donating blood is a thing for you. Maybe working in a volunteer soup kitchen or other center where you can work with people directly, if you're a very extroverted person is the thing for you. Maybe donating money is the right thing. As long as it's something that you personally find rewarding, it's much more likely to lead to an increasing spiral of pro-social behavior in the future.
Dana Taylor:
For more stories of kindness, please check out USA Today's Humankind at usatoday.com/humankind. Thank you so much for being on the Excerpt, Abigail.
Abigail Marsh:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, and Humankind producer, Ronnie Li for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Compassion is the fuel for altruism | The Excerpt
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