Full text of author Daniel Goleman’s talk: Why Aren’t We All Good Samaritans?
In this talk, the author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time.
TRANSCRIPT:
Daniel Goleman – Author of Emotional Intelligence
You know, I’m struck by how one of the implicit themes of TED is compassion, these very moving demonstrations we’ve just seen: HIV in Africa, President Clinton last night.
And I’d like to do a little collateral thinking, if you will, about compassion and bring it from the global level to the personal. I’m a psychologist, but rest assured, I will not bring it to the scrotal.
There was a very important study done a while ago at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help, we do sometimes, and we don’t other times.
A group of divinity students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic. Half of those students were given, as a topic, the parable of the Good Samaritan: the man who stopped the stranger in — to help the stranger in need by the side of the road.
Half were given random Bible topics. Then one by one, they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon.
As they went from the first building to the second, each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning, clearly in need. The question is: Did they stop to help?
The more interesting question is: Did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the Good Samaritan? Answer: No, not at all.
What turned out to determine whether someone would stop and help a stranger in need was how much of a hurry they thought they were in — were they feeling they were late, or were they absorbed in what they were going to talk about.
And this is, I think, the predicament of our lives: that we don’t take every opportunity to help because our focus is in the wrong direction. There’s a new field in brain science, social neuroscience. This studies the circuitry in two people’s brains that activates while they interact.
And the new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help. That is to say, if we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them.
There are these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, that act like a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel “with” automatically.
And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering, we’re automatically prepared to help. At least that’s the argument.
But then the question is: Why don’t we? And I think this speaks to a spectrum that goes from complete self-absorption, to noticing, to empathy and to compassion.
And the simple fact is, if we are focused on ourselves, if we’re preoccupied, as we so often are throughout the day, we don’t really fully notice the other.
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And this difference between the self and the other focus can be very subtle. I was doing my taxes the other day, and I got to the point where I was listing all of the donations I gave, and I had an epiphany, it was — I came to my check to the Seva Foundation and I noticed that I thought, boy, my friend Larry Brilliant would really be happy that I gave money to Seva.
Then I realized that what I was getting from giving was a narcissistic hit — that I felt good about myself. Then I started to think about the people in the Himalayas whose cataracts would be helped, and I realized that I went from this kind of narcissistic self-focus to altruistic joy, to feeling good for the people that were being helped. I think that’s a motivator.
But this distinction between focusing on ourselves and focusing on others is one that I encourage us all to pay attention to. You can see it at a gross level in the world of dating.
I was at a sushi restaurant a while back and I overheard two women talking about the brother of one woman, who was in the singles scene. And this woman says, “My brother is having trouble getting dates, so he’s trying speed dating.”
I don’t know if you know speed dating? Women sit at tables and men go from table to table, and there’s a clock and a bell, and at five minutes, bingo, the conversation ends and the woman can decide whether to give her card or her email address to the man for follow up.
And this woman says, “My brother’s never gotten a card, and I know exactly why. The moment he sits down, he starts talking non-stop about himself; he never asks about the woman.”
And I was doing some research in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times, looking at the back stories of marriages — because they’re very interesting — and I came to the marriage of Alice Charney Epstein. And she said that when she was in the dating scene, she had a simple test she put people to.
The test was: from the moment they got together, how long it would take the guy to ask her a question with the word “you” in it. And apparently Epstein aced the test, therefore the article.
Now this is — it’s a little test I encourage you to try out at a party. Here at TED there are great opportunities. The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called “The Human Moment,” about how to make real contact with a person at work. And they said, well, the fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry, close your laptop, end your daydream and pay full attention to the person.
There is a newly coined word in the English language for the moment when the person we’re with whips out their BlackBerry or answers that cell phone, and all of a sudden we don’t exist.
The word is “pizzled“: it’s a combination of puzzled and pissed off. I think it’s quite apt. It’s our empathy, it’s our tuning in which separates us from Machiavellians or sociopaths.
I have a brother-in-law who’s an expert on horror and terror — he wrote the Annotated Dracula, the Essential Frankenstein — he was trained as a Chaucer scholar, but he was born in Transylvania and I think it affected him a little bit.
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