Ted Audio Collective. You're listening to how to be a better human. I'm your host Chris Duffy. I spent almost all of my life living in big cities.

And something that I've noticed is that there's this idea out there that the people who live in big cities are cruel or callous, that if you live in a big

metropolis people don't care about each other. But that has not been my experience, not at

all. I mean sure people are gruff and they're often in a rush but I am always struck by how

excited people are to help out a stranger in every place that I have ever lived if you

look lost someone is going to come up to you and ask if they can give you directions.

If you're a parent at the bottom of a staircase with a big stroller,

some random person is going to pick up the front end of that stroller and help you get it up the stairs.

And if you fall down, someone's going to

to laugh at you, but someone else is going to check to make sure that you're okay. And now for whatever reason, when I see those moments of

kindness, I often think about them as exceptions to the rule.

Right, like, oh, that's nice that there's one nice person out there who helped that

old lady across the street rather than just pushing her down into

traffic and stealing her purse like most people. But the thing is, that's actually not what most people would do.

Compassion, empathy, optimism, and faith in our fellow humans,

those are not as fleetingly rare as it might appear

from just watching the news.

Today's guest, Jameel Zaki, is a psychologist who studies empathy.

And Jameel believes that while we might think empathy is in danger of

disappearing completely from our world, That does not have to be the case.

Here's a clip from his TED Talk where he explains that many of us don't fully understand

how it is that empathy works. For centuries, philosophers and scientists have told us it's a trait, inherited through our genes,

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