Originally published 2018-09-24.
Videos of ordinary people pulling strangers from danger, stopping traffic for a lost child or carrying an injured animal to safety do more than make us feel good for a minute. Research suggests they correct a real distortion in how we see other people, and that watching goodness makes viewers more likely to act kindly themselves. If the daily news has left you doubting humanity, the evidence is more encouraging than your feed.
This page once featured a compilation of everyday heroes made by the Facebook page Curiosidades 10. The video is no longer online, but the question it answered is worth taking seriously: why keep faith in people when so much of what we hear about them is bad?
Why it can feel as if people are getting worse
Most of us meet small frustrations every day: a rude driver, a queue-jumper, a sharp comment online. Add a steady stream of crime and conflict from the news, and it is easy to conclude that people in general are selfish or cruel.
Psychologists call the underlying pattern negativity bias. Bad events and bad information grab our attention faster, stick in memory longer and weigh more heavily on our judgements than good ones of the same size. A widely cited 2001 review by Roy Baumeister and colleagues summed it up in its title: “Bad is stronger than good.” Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman described the same tendency the same year, showing how a single negative detail can colour our whole view of a person or situation.
News organisations know this. Alarming stories draw readers, so they are selected, repeated and shared. None of that means the stories are false, but it means the picture they add up to is skewed. The neighbour who helped someone change a tyre this morning will not make the evening bulletin.
What the evidence says about strangers helping
For decades, students learned the story of Kitty Genovese, murdered in New York in 1964 while, supposedly, 38 neighbours watched and did nothing. It became the textbook example of the “bystander effect,” the idea that people in a crowd are less likely to help because each assumes someone else will.
The famous version turned out to be badly exaggerated. A 2007 paper in American Psychologist found there were far fewer eyewitnesses, that many who heard the attack could not see it, and that police were called at least once. In 2016 the New York Times itself described its original reporting as flawed.
More recent work paints a far kinder picture. A 2019 study led by Richard Philpot examined 219 real public conflicts caught on security cameras in Lancaster, Amsterdam and Cape Town. In more than 90 percent of them, at least one bystander stepped in to calm things down or help, and the chance of intervention rose, rather than fell, as more people were present. Classic lab experiments on the bystander effect are real, but in everyday life, on three continents, strangers usually help.
Why watching heroes makes us want to help
There is a name for the warm, chest-swelling feeling that comes from seeing someone do something unexpectedly good: elevation. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt described it as an emotional response to moral beauty, the opposite of the disgust we feel at cruelty.
Elevation seems to change behaviour, not just mood. In one study, students who watched a short documentary about Mother Teresa reported that warm feeling and said they wanted to help others. In a 2010 experiment by Simone Schnall and colleagues, people who had watched an uplifting clip spent almost twice as long helping a researcher with a dull, unpaid task as those who had watched something merely funny or neutral. Their willingness tracked how much hope they felt about humanity, not simply how happy they were. A separate study found that students who felt strong elevation on a volunteering trip did more volunteering once they got home.
So the instinct to share good-news videos is not naïve. Seen at the right moment, they can nudge people from cynicism towards action.
Kindness from people we barely know
One curious thing many people notice is that some of the most generous moments come from strangers: the passer-by who chases you to return a dropped wallet, the nurse who stays after a shift, the shop assistant who goes out of her way. These people owe us nothing, which may be exactly why their help lands so powerfully.
Gratitude is part of the picture too. Almost everything that makes daily life work, from clean water to the bus that arrives on time, depends on people we will never meet doing their jobs well. Noticing that is not sentimentality; it is simply an accurate description of how societies run.
You may have read that looking for good in others builds “optimistic neural pathways.” That phrase is a loose metaphor rather than an established finding. What research does support is more modest and still useful: what we pay attention to shapes what we remember and how we judge, and habits of attention can be practised.
The everyday heroes video
The compilation that originally appeared here gathered short clips of people stepping in to help strangers and animals. Like most videos of its kind, it worked because the helpers were ordinary: no capes, no training, just someone who noticed a need and acted. The clips were a reminder that heroism is usually a matter of seconds and attention rather than special courage.
(The Facebook video originally embedded here is no longer available.)
If you watch compilations like this, look past the drama to the moment of decision. What did the helper notice that others missed? What did they do first? Those details are the parts you can actually copy.
Practical ways to keep your faith in people
- Balance your information diet. Follow at least a few sources that report solutions and acts of service, not only problems.
- Notice small helpers. Make a habit of spotting one kind act each day, whether you were the recipient or just a witness.
- Say thank you specifically. Telling a bus driver, cleaner or call-centre worker exactly what they did well costs nothing and is rarely forgotten.
- Prepare to help. A basic first-aid course makes it far more likely you will step forward in an emergency, and know what to do when you do.
- Act on the feeling. When a story moves you, use that energy straight away: donate, volunteer, check on a neighbour.
Faith in humanity does not require believing everyone is good. It only requires seeing people as they actually are: capable of harm, but far more often, when it counts, willing to help.
Sources: original video by Curiosidades 10; Wikipedia: Negativity bias; Wikipedia: Bystander effect; Wikipedia: Elevation (emotion).
COMMENTS