During the Boston Marathon, a runner named Ajay Haridasse collapsed about 1,000 feet from the finish line. Four times he tried to get up and four times he fell back down. And then someone stopped. Aaron Beggs, from Northern Ireland, looked at his watch, looked at Haridasse, and decided to help. Within moments, a second runner, Robson De Oliveira of Brazil, stopped too. Both men sacrificed their personal best times to carry a stranger across the finish line.
“Three strangers, three different countries, and we’ll have a story for the rest of our lives,” Beggs said afterward. “It’s nice to be nice.”
The video went viral. Millions watched it as if human decency were a rare and precious sighting. But what if it isn’t rare at all? What if we’ve just lost the ability to see it?
We Underestimate One Another
A recent Pew Research Center survey asked people in 25 countries to rate the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens. Americans were the most cynical of all: 53 percent described the people of their own country as somewhat or very morally bad. In Canada, that number was 7 percent.
Leanne ten Brinke, a psychology researcher who has spent two decades studying deception, distrust, and dark personality traits, makes this case directly in a recent Boston Globe essay. The data, she argues, says we’re wrong about our neighbors. In a study published in Science, researchers distributed 17,000 wallets containing cash to 355 cities across 40 countries. Everywhere, including in the United States, people went out of their way to return them — and the more money the wallet contained, the more likely people were to return it.
I find this both reassuring and a little heartbreaking. Kindness and decency are there, but keep getting drowned out by everything loud and awful competing for our attention. In my practice, I see this constantly. People surrounded by goodwill that they can’t quite bring themselves to trust. Why is this person being so nice? What’s the ulterior motive? What am I missing?
Perhaps the problem isn’t the world. It’s the story we tell ourselves about it.
The Stories We Live By
Psychologist Jamil Zaki at Stanford posed a question to thousands of college students: if you were having a hard time, would a classmate reach out to you? Most said no. Then he flipped the question and asked: would you reach out to a classmate who was struggling? Almost everyone said yes. He calls this the “empathy perception gap.” Put simply, we don’t have a kindness problem. We have a perception problem. People are ready and willing to show up for each other. They just don’t realize everyone else is too.
The good news is that it didn’t take much to reverse this pessimistic mindset. Zaki and his team created posters for residence halls with messages like “95% of Stanford students are likely to help others who are feeling down” and “85% of Stanford students enjoy meeting and becoming friends with students they don’t know.” Students who lived in dorms where the posters were displayed began seeing their peers differently and reported reaching out more — to someone they didn’t know, or sharing something vulnerable with a friend. Students who received app-based prompts to connect were nearly 90 percent more likely to step out of their comfort zones. As Zaki wrote of the project, “To help young people believe in one another, we didn’t need to lie to them. We just had to tell them the truth.”
Someone Has to Go First
This matters beyond college campuses. The same dynamic plays out everywhere, including in workplaces, neighborhoods, families, and on the subway. We hesitate to start a conversation, ask for help, or reach out to someone we’ve lost touch with, not because we don’t want to connect, but because we assume that the other person probably doesn’t.
Moreover, when we believe most people are selfish and morally bankrupt, we start behaving in ways that confirm it. We become more guarded, less generous, and less open. We invite the very dynamics we feared. People tend to rise or fall to our expectations of them. The point isn’t to pretend the world is perfect. It’s to stop pretending it’s worse than it is.
Helping Helps
The research on happiness keeps arriving at the same conclusion: the path to feeling better isn’t inward, it’s outward.
Believing in other people’s goodness doesn’t just change how we see them. It changes how we show up ourselves.
Cornell psychologist Anthony Burrow tested this directly with his Contribution Project: he gave more than 1,200 high school and college students $400 to use however they wished to benefit themselves or others. Most chose to help others. Some paid for strangers’ laundry. Some donated books to their old schools. Some planted trees. Eight weeks later, the students who had received the funds scored significantly higher than those who hadn’t on every measure: wellbeing, sense of purpose, sense of belonging, feeling needed and useful. What Burrow found challenges what we assume about generosity. All too often, we think of giving as something that costs us. His research suggests it’s actually what fulfills us.
Which brings us back to the Boston Marathon and three strangers from three different countries who will have a story for the rest of their lives. It’s nice to be nice. The evidence suggests that most people already know this. We just keep forgetting to trust that the person next to us does too.
I wish you all the best,
Dr. Samantha Boardman
