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Passage 1: Paul Bloom writes about our expanded morality.

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I admit that it is an unusual way to see the world, but, when reading the newspaper, I amconstantly struck by the extent of human kindness. The newest bit of good news comes fromThe Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, which estimates that Americans willgive about $250 billion in individual charitable contributions in 2010, up several billion from last

year. People donate their blood to strangers, travel on humanitarian missions to places such asHaiti and Sudan, and risk their lives to fight injustice elsewhere. New Yorkers have also grownaccustomed to reading about subway heroes – brave souls who leap onto the tracks to rescuefallen commuters and then often slip away, uncomfortable with attention or credit.

As a psychologist, I am fascinated by the origin and consequences of such kindness. Some of our moral sentiments and moral motivations are the product of biological evolution. Thisaccounts for why we are often kind to our own flesh and blood – those who share our genes. Italso can explain our moral attachments to those we see as members of our immediate tribe.There is an adaptive logic to being kind to those with whom we continually interact; we scratchtheir backs, they scratch ours. However, there is no Darwinian pay-off to sacrificing our resources to anonymous strangers, particularly those in faraway lands.

The explanation for our expanded morality comes from intelligence, imagination, and culture.One powerful force is the use of language to tell stories. These can motivate us to think of distant people as if they were friends and family. The vicarious experiences generated byGreek tragedies, televised sitcoms, and newspaper stories have all played an important role inexpanding the scope of moral concern. Another factor is the spread of ideologies, both secular and religious, that encourage us to care for distant others, that persuade us to expand our kindness beyond our immediate circle.

Even the much-maligned force of capitalism might make us nicer. A recent study of 15 diversepopulations, reported in the journal Science, found that the societies that treat anonymousstrangers most fairly are those with market economies. As Robert Wright has emphasised, aspeople become increasingly inter-dependent, the scope of moral concern expands accordingly.Nobody would argue that we are losing the distinction between those who are close to us anddistant strangers. What has happened, though, is that the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ isnot as sharp as it used to be.

The effects of our kindness are not zero-sum. Those who receive charity have their livesimproved, but those who provide it also benefit. It feels good to be good. Indeed, one recentstudy found that spending money on others is more rewarding than spending it on oneself. It isnot just short-term pleasure: those who donate wealth and time to others tend to be a lothappier in their entire lives than those who do not. The paradoxical finding here is that onegreat trick to being happy is to forget about being happy and instead try to increase the

happiness of others.

Experimental economists have found that people will sacrifice their own resources to punishcheaters and free riders, and will do this even to anonymous strangers that they will never again interact with – a behaviour dubbed ‘altruistic punishment’. There is a pleasure to this aswell. Just as giving to someone in need elicits a positive neural response, so does taking fromsomeone who deserves it.

This is the flip side of charity. We are motivated to be kind to anonymous others, but we arealso motivated to harm those who treat these anonymous others badly. This can drive our powerful impulse to deal with distant evils through sanctions, bombings, and war. We wantthese wrongdoers to suffer. Laboratory findings show that people will continue to punish even if 

they are well aware that doing so is actually making things worse. It is not difficult to see theconsequences of this in the real world. The extension of human morality is a wonderfuldevelopment for humanity, but it would be even better if it were tempered by cold-bloodedrationality.

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Passage 2: Dacher Keltner and Jason Marsh write about the bystander effect.

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Every day when Stewart boarded the school bus, the boys would tease him mercilessly. For 40years, Peggy has felt guilty about Stewart: she still cannot explain why she did not stick up for him. If she had spoken up, other kids might have chimed in to stop the teasing. Perhaps mostsurprising and distressing is that Peggy considers herself an assertive and moral person but

those convictions are not backed up by action.

We have all found ourselves in similar situations. We witness a problem, consider some kind of positive action, then respond by doing...nothing. Something holds us back. We remainbystanders. Every day we serve as bystanders to the world around us not just to people inneed on the street but to larger social, political, and environmental problems that concern us,but which we feel powerless to address on our own. Indeed, the bystander phenomenonpervades the history of the past century.

‘The bystander is a modern archetype, from the Holocaust to the genocide in Rwanda to thecurrent environmental crisis,’ says Charles Garfield, a clinical professor of psychology. ‘Why’,asked Garfield, ‘do some people respond to these crises while others don't?’ In the shadow of 

these crises, researchers have spent the past few decades trying to answer this question. Their findings reveal a valuable story about human nature: often, only subtle differences separate thebystanders from the morally courageous people of the world. Most of us, it seems, have thepotential to fall into either category. It is the slight, seemingly insignificant details in a situationthat can push us one way or the other.

Psychologists attribute this behaviour to a diffusion of responsibility: when participants of studies thought there were other witnesses to the emergency, they felt less personalresponsibility to intervene. The end result is altruistic inertia. Psychologists also suspect thatbystanders may not intervene in an emergency because they have been misled by thereactions of the people around them. Passive bystanders studies succumbed to what is knownas 'pluralistic ignorance’ – the tendency to mistake one another's calm demeanour as a signthat no emergency is actually taking place. There are strong social norms that reinforcepluralistic ignorance. It is somewhat embarrassing, after all, to be the one who loses his coolwhen no danger actually exists.

Lateness, the presence of other people – these are some of the factors that can turn us all intobystanders in an emergency. Yet another important factor is the characteristics of the victim.Research has shown that people are more likely to help those they perceive to be similar tothem, including others from their own racial or ethnic groups. In general, women tend to receivemore help than men. However, this varies according to appearance: more attractive andfemininely dressed women tend to receive more help from passersby, perhaps because they fitthe gender stereotype of the vulnerable female.

We do not like to discover that our propensity for altruism can depend on prejudice or thedetails of a particular situation – details that seem beyond our control. However, these scientificfindings force us to consider how we'd perform under pressure. Even more frightening, itbecomes easier to understand how good people in Rwanda or Nazi Germany remained silentagainst the horrors around them. Afraid, confused, coerced or wilfully unaware, they couldconvince themselves that it was not their responsibility to intervene.

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