“Polarization doesn’t seem to be a fixed trend in Gen Z’s minds,” said Jadon Urogdy. “We have a bright future. Our identities and views are still malleable, and that’s exactly why this moment matters so much.”

Urogdy and his classmates also found that Gen Z, which is the cohort born between 1997 and 2012 and considered the first true “digital natives,” is more comfortable than their elders in having a political conversation online—findings that suggest they may be more reachable and receptive to online interventions aimed at reducing polarization.

A cohort studying itself

Urogdy’s results were among many findings from Democracy in the Balance: Polarization and the Road Ahead, a spring quarter course taught by Ashley Fabrizio, a Stanford alum and head of research at the nonpartisan think tank More in Common. Working with Fabrizio and her team, students created and conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,610 U.S. adults that oversampled Gen Z to provide a more granular look into their political attitudes and opinions.

Fabrizio, who has taught the course for three years, has found that working with students surfaces concerns that standard polling may miss. “If we want to know what Gen Z’s political beliefs and attitudes are, we should let our students, as members of Gen Z, use their intuition to decide what matters in a survey,” Fabrizio explained.

Working in small groups, students were allocated several minutes of survey time to explore topics such as the political influence of online content promoting masculinity—aka the “manosphere”—the religious revival in Gen Z’s lives, and their beliefs about the American dream. Fabrizio guided students step by step through survey design, showing them how to craft research questions, field the survey, analyze data, and, finally, present their findings.

Students also examined the academic literature on polarization’s effects in American politics, such as how it contributes to political gridlock, drives support for political violence, and erodes trust in American institutions.

“There are many legitimate divisions in politics over competing policies and values, but polarization often drives us apart unnecessarily,” said Fabrizio. “Young Americans will have to find their own ways of bridging partisan differences and overcoming misconceptions about one another. I hope this class helps students see the value of doing so and gives them a sense of agency in addressing polarization.”

Scrolling deepens divides, but does not distort

Natalia Galperin was excited about the opportunity to run her own study from start to finish, a first for the Stanford undergrad majoring in psychology. She also wanted to expand on her prior work as a research assistant for political scientist Shanto Iyengar in his Political Communication Lab, where she studied the effects of negative political campaign ads.

For her research project, Galperin examined the role of social media in inflating Gen Z’s hostility toward people from the opposing political party, a phenomenon political scientists call “affective polarization.”

“We thought Gen Z would be more polarized and misinformed because we get so much of our news on social media compared to older generations,” Galperin said.

What she and her classmates found reveals a more complicated picture.

While Gen Z respondents who said they used social media daily or almost daily were more likely to dislike the opposing party, their scores were almost identical to those of other generations.

“We found that greater social media engagement is generally linked to more polarized views of political parties, and the effect is seen at similar rates across all generations, not just Gen Z,” said Galperin, who will be interning with More In Common this summer.

Galperin also wanted to know whether social media deepens the divide between what Gen Z thinks people from the other side believe versus what they actually think, a phenomenon known as “perception gaps.” In testing people’s perceptions on immigration, she found that Gen Z did not appear to hold wildly distorted views about the other side—findings that push back against the familiar narrative that being online warps a person’s perceptions of politics.

Taken together, actively using social media seems to harden Gen Z’s feelings more than it distorts basic facts.

Gen Z is not a political monolith

The class also found a wide range of political viewpoints, including differences between Gen Z who identified as Democrats and Republicans.

For example, in Urogdy’s project, he and his teammates found that those who were the most confident that polarization can be reduced identified as conservatives and Republicans, while liberals and Democrats believed the opposite—a finding that Urogdy said tracks with prior research: A person’s view of government depends on whether or not their political party is in control.

Galperin’s team also found lower levels of affective polarization among Republicans and Gen Z overall, and Democrats who reported actively using social media daily have higher perception gaps on immigration-related issues than average.

Another student team’s project revealed further complexities. They found that many Gen Z respondents are more likely than other generations to attribute problems like the affordability crisis to systemic failures in democracy itself rather than to specific policies or leaders. In their data, a notable share of young people said the system itself “is not capable of doing its job,” signaling a deeper, structural disillusionment.

“I think we’re all exhausted by the political system,” Urogdy said. “There’s this underlying feeling that what we want isn’t being translated into tangible change, and I think that there’s this overall feeling that instead of having animosity towards people across the aisle, there’s an animosity towards the system itself.”

Urogdy is pragmatic about what comes next.

“We can’t say polarization will disappear if we will it away,” said Urogdy, who is majoring in political science. Now, he feels he has a better understanding of what kinds of solutions matter. If people are disillusioned with the system, surface-level fixes—such as messaging—won’t last, he said. Efforts need to be ongoing. “If Gen Z is still one of the most reachable generations, the answer is sustained civic engagement, where we can rebuild trust in the system while working to reform it. We have a long path ahead,” said Urogdy, who said he is optimistic.

Fabrizio, too, is hopeful. “Gen Z is inheriting a polarized nation, but they are inheriting deep wells of democratic vitality, as well,” Fabrizio said. “America has a long history of self-government, a robust civil society, and communities that remain deeply committed to democratic values. Gen Z has high standards for our democracy, but living up to them is within reach. I hope older generations will listen and be inspired by Gen Z’s vision for the American dream.”

This article was originally published on Stanford News. Read the original article.

“I said goodbye to everything I knew and loved in Philadelphia and came to the Bay. Not knowing a soul.”

When she arrived, it hit her. “I was like, wow, I’m in a place that like, literally nobody knows me. So if I am dead in a ditch, like nobody will figure it out for a long time.”

This could have been a story of loneliness and disconnection, but it wasn’t, because someone took her under their wings—actually two strangers, her roommates Lauren and Deirdre. “They took me in and welcomed me and brought me into their whole social world, which showed me so much love.”

This isn’t the experience for most people. Darilys Matos Acevedo grew up in Puerto Rico. “In Puerto Rico, a stranger talks to you all the time. If you went down the street and you talked to somebody, if you made eye contact . . . you had to smile at them or you said good morning or good afternoon.”

Then she moved to Boston for graduate school. “I had never even visited the place. I knew nobody here.” And where she got smiles and small talk in Puerto Rico, in Boston she “got glares.” “And I’m like, oh, OK. You don’t do any of that here.” It was painful and created a large void in her life.

As Darilys talked to other Latinos in Boston, she assumed “I’m the only one who feels this way, but I wasn’t. There was like a whole group of people that felt like that.”

Their stories are different, but they reveal the same truth.

Moving doesn’t simply change where we live. It interrupts the invisible web of relationships that makes everyday life feel familiar, that makes us feel like we belong. And the majority of the 13 million American adults who move each year experience this.

At the US Chamber of Connection, our recent study on social connection in America explored the impact of life transitions on social connection. It found that 40% of people navigating a relocation struggle with social connection, and they report 35% more barriers to connection compared to everyone else. Two of the most common barriers are not knowing where to start and not wanting to go out alone.

The impact is lasting, as someone shared with us. “Two years ago, I was going on a vacation, and I could not find ONE neighbor to water my plants while I was away. I had lived in this building on and off for over 15 years. I was mortified. How could it be that I had nobody in my building to help with such a small task?”

The invisible cost of a new address

Moving ranks among the most stressful life events a person can experience, on par with divorce and job loss. But the stress isn’t just logistical; it’s psychological. Moving severs the informal ties and daily routines that quietly anchor our sense of who we are and where we belong. The result is a predictable but rarely named experience: not just loneliness, but identity dislocation. The question isn’t only “who do I know here?” but “who am I here?”

To understand the scale of that loss, consider what a typical adult social network requires to build: roughly 200 hours to develop a close friend, 90 hours for a friend, and five hours of repeated interaction for each of the weak ties (neighbors, familiar faces, community contacts) that make daily life feel anchored. A typical adult carries around 1,300 hours of accumulated relationship time. When you move, you leave all of it behind and start from zero.

This is also, paradoxically, what makes the first year after a move one of the most powerful windows for connection. Disruption breaks old habits and makes people unusually open to forming new ones, a phenomenon researchers call the habit discontinuity effect. People who have just moved are more likely to join things, try things, and reach out than they were six months earlier at home.

What closes that window isn’t lack of desire. Research by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago finds that people systematically underestimate how much strangers want to connect and overestimate how awkward the attempt will be. Both the newcomer and the potential neighbor hold back, each assuming the other isn’t interested. Both tend to be wrong.

And the effects of getting it right last longer than most people expect. Vanessa Elias, the founder of Block Party USA, shared with us the story of a neighbor who brought her family a pie when she moved in as a six year old. She remembers her name, Mrs. Fisher, decades later.

Creative experiments welcoming people across the country

What would happen if welcoming became a civic practice instead of an individual virtue? This year, the US Chamber of Connection recruited over 250 people across 25 states to run creative experiments that aimed to help others feel more welcome in their neighborhoods. They were trained on the science of connection and worked together across the country to support each other. We call them the Welcome Committee.

For many of the volunteers, they signed up because they had an experience like Liz. One shared that “when we arrived to our new town we felt welcomed, surprised, and alive through these touches, and wanted to build more.” Or as another volunteer explained, “people are still welcoming me and I still feel at home here. So it gave me this strong sense of duty to pay that forward. I wanna create spaces where people can land and feel comfortable.”

For others, it came from an experience more akin to Darilys’s. “I would have loved to find this kind of thing when I moved,” shared one early volunteer. “I’ve been in my neighborhood and city since 2019 and have yet to make close friends in the neighborhood or city where I live. It feels scary and uncomfortable to get out there. But I’m realizing the huge impact of not having close friends. I’m ready to make the effort. Because if I’m feeling this way, I can’t be the only one.”

They each began by inviting a neighbor for a conversation. They shared their stories of their neighborhoods growing up. Dreamed about the ideal neighborhood together. Explored the Six Points of Connection, a clear and actionable checklist for individuals and leaders to define and strengthen social bonds. And then they explored how they might together make the neighborhood more connected.

They ran some creative experiments. Lindsay turned their suburban garage door into a community message board. Kaitlin created a traveling tin of homemade baked goods that moves neighbor to neighbor down the street, each recipient required to bake something and pass it on to someone new. Sarah hosted a gathering for other people named Sara(h) in her town. Courtney started flyering the neighborhood to organize a dog gathering in someone’s backyard. Nithya left a flower and a handwritten note for each of the five nearest neighbors inviting them to coffee.

Many of the volunteers nostalgically tried things they remembered from their childhood or had seen in a movie. Kate moved an iron chair and table to her front step and started having her morning coffee there facing the street. Jon made lemonade with his kids and set out donuts for anyone walking by. Chet started introducing himself on his daily dog walks. Anne organized a multi-household yard sale across eight houses. And many of them hosted potlucks and block parties.

They all expressed knowing “how meaningful it can be to walk into a new space and find someone who is genuinely glad you are there.” And they wanted to make people feel that way.

Four ways to support newcomers

As the volunteers conducted their experiments, they began to share their findings. They mirrored much of what we have learned from social scientists over the last 50 years. Four themes emerged that help to inform how we can all do more to help new residents, and any neighbor, feel more welcomed.

1. The first step is the most important. Stop playing “invite chicken.” Many of our volunteers shared a version of the same experience: sitting at home hoping someone would call and invite them to hang out, attend an event, or even just watch Netflix together. They assumed that the people they wanted to call were probably busy or uninterested. Those people were likely sitting at home thinking the same thing. Nobody called. Everyone stayed alone.

Call it invite chicken: a standoff where everyone loses despite everyone wanting the same thing. The barrier isn’t reality; it’s anticipation. Someone just has to go first.

And sometimes, when we do break the game of chicken, we don’t get the response we wanted. When Hazel hosted her first neighborhood coffee gathering, one neighbor texted that he was too nervous to come. She didn’t give up. She texted back encouraging him. He came. At one of Elizabeth’s gatherings in San Diego, a man had been dragged along by his wife, who promised they’d stay just five minutes. He was the last to leave.

We are poor forecasters of our own social experiences. People overweight the discomfort of initiation and underweight the pleasure of connection. The host who sends the follow-up text, the wife who insists on five minutes, isn’t being pushy. They’re correcting for a cognitive error the reluctant person can’t see from the inside.

2. We are more motivated working together. Partner with someone. Erin hosted a neighborhood gathering in New York City and reflected afterward on what she’d do differently. Her top lesson: “I appreciated the help I did get from neighbors and wished I’d had a co-planner to share more of the work with.”

This is consistent with what research finds: People are significantly more likely to initiate and sustain kind and helpful behavior when they’re doing it alongside someone else. A partner doesn’t just make the work easier; they make follow-through more likely, because the social cost of backing out now involves someone else. Several Welcome Committee volunteers named the US Chamber of Connection cohort itself as the thing that got them out the door. Not the training, not the tools, but the fact that others were doing it, too.

3. We gain comfort with repeat exposure. Build a rhythm. Hansen has been hosting a monthly porch gathering (coffee, bagels, same spot) for two years. Recently, he watched neighbors spontaneously make plans to go cycling together and quietly organize to look out for a boy on the street whose father is dying of cancer. Neither of those things was planned. They happened because the same people had been attending his events and they had built comfort with each other. Hansen didn’t suggest they help the boy but had created the environment for it to be possible.

Research finds that repeated contact with the same faces makes us like and trust them more, independent of what’s said. Those repeated encounters build weak ties, which are how people find help in a crisis, how trust spreads beyond close friends, how a community starts to look out for itself. The first gathering gets you in the door. Showing up again is what builds the neighborhood.

4. Spontaneous actions of connection are powerful. Look for opportunities. The best welcoming often isn’t planned. When a neighbor left cookies on Kaitlin’s porch with a note that just said “happy spring,” the gesture was small, spontaneous, and agenda-free. It didn’t just make her smile; it made her want to pass something on. Walking through her neighborhood, Annie spotted a moving van, walked straight over, and introduced herself as a Welcome Committee member. The mover, who didn’t even live there, told her he wished he could move into the community. Another volunteer simply invited people they saw running to join their running group. They were seen and welcomed.

What these moments share is spontaneity and clarity of intent. Research finds that unexpected gestures create a positive disruption that formal invitations don’t. They bypass the social calculation people run when a stranger approaches, and they signal warmth without asking for anything back. Research finds that being noticed is the precondition for feeling like you belong.

And having a clear role removes the ambiguity that makes first moves feel risky. When Annie said “I’m a Welcome Committee member,” her motives were transparent before she said another word. You don’t need a plan. You need to look up.

Connection is a lifestyle—a rewarding one

Giving to others produces more sustained well-being than spending on yourself. The helper’s high is real. Welcoming a newcomer isn’t just a form of service; it’s one of the highest-return social investments you can make.

Liz knows this firsthand. The woman who arrived in the Bay Area not knowing a soul, wondering if anyone would notice if she disappeared, is now the person who creates spaces for others to land. “People here took a chance on me,” she says. “So it gave me this strong sense of duty to pay that forward. I want to create spaces where people can land and feel comfortable.”

All friendships begin the same way: by talking to strangers. Someone just has to go first. Years later, Liz became the person who notices.

If you faced what passengers of Southwest Airlines 1380 experienced, you would probably do what they did: frantically write goodbye messages to your family and loved ones, thinking that these are your last moments on Earth.

But on that flight, the pilot, Captain Tammie Jo Shults, came on the intercom and said 10 simple words: “We’re not going down; we’re going to Philly.”

The passengers would later talk about how those 10 words were transformative, turning their panic into possibility. By sharing those 10 words, Captain Shults was helping her passengers make sense of their experience and reframe the dramatic descent, from “plummeting to Earth” to a planned and orchestrated path to safety.

As Captain Shults expertly landed the plane, she calmly and peacefully talked to air traffic control. After landing, she got up and went row by row, looking every passenger in the eye to make sure they were OK. People talked afterward about her words, her stature, and her empathy as she walked down that aisle.

Contrast Captain Shults’s experience with another captain who also dealt with a massive hole in his vessel, Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia. Headed out on a seven-day cruise in the Mediterranean, the ship got too close to shore. It’s debatable why that happened: Captain Schettino claims he was saluting mariners on the shore; prosecutors claim he was trying to impress his mistress who was on board. But what isn’t in dispute is what happened next: The rocks tore a 115-foot hole in the side of the ship, which caused it to eventually capsize.

Before calling the Coast Guard, Captain Schettino spent time getting his story straight. The crash had caused an electrical blackout, but he was going to try to say that the blackout caused the crash. He tried to pin the responsibility on the helmsman. It took him almost an hour after the crash to sound the evacuation siren.

While people were frantically trying to find safety, Captain Schettino was nowhere to be found. Finally, the Coast Guard discovered him in a lifeboat—though Captain Schettino claimed that he “accidentally” fell into the lifeboat. But he also somehow fell out of his captain’s uniform. He was sitting in a lifeboat watching his boat sinking, hiding in civilian clothing. You can hear the outrage in the Coast Guard’s voice when he says in an audio recording, “I’m gonna make you pay for this.” And Captain Schettino did pay. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for manslaughter and abandoning ship.

These two people faced very similar situations. They were both captains, dealing with holes in the side of their vessels, but how they responded to their crises was completely different. Captain Shults helped people make sense of their experience. She was courageous, competent, and calm in landing the plane, and she compassionately connected to each of her passengers. In contrast, Captain Schettino caused the accident, refused to take any responsibility, and did not take any action to help his passengers save their lives. As a result of his selfish negligence, 32 people died, and numerous people were injured.

Why do some leaders create feelings of inspiration that percolate a wellspring of hope and possibility in others, while other leaders create seething cauldrons of infuriation and resentment? I’ve asked this question to tens of thousands of people across the globe, and here is what I learned about what makes a leader inspiring.

Three aspects of good leadership

My first big idea is that “inspiring” and “infuriating” leaders exist on an enduring continuum that is made up of three universal factors:

• Being a visionary, how we see the world
• Being an exemplar, how we are in the world
• Being a mentor, how we interact in the world

We can inspire people in how we communicate, how we present ourselves, and how we interact with others—through our words, our actions, and our interactions.

My second big idea is that these are the three factors of inspiring leadership because each one fulfills a fundamental human need. Being visionary fulfills the fundamental need for meaning and understanding. That’s what Captain Shults provided when she said, “We’re not going down; we’re going to Philly.” She helped people make sense of their experience.

Being an exemplar fulfills the fundamental need for protection and passion. Captain Shults courageously protected her passengers with her calm and competence.

And being a mentor fulfills the fundamental human need for belonging and status. That’s what Captain Shults offered as she walked down the aisle: She made her passengers feel recognized and seen.

By surveying tens of thousands of people across the globe, I have found these three dimensions to be universal. There is not a single inspiring characteristic that is mentioned in one country that’s not mentioned in the dozens of countries in the world where I have collected data.

Visionaries

Effective visionaries not only offer a clear perspective on the world, but they also make their vision easy to follow and understand, and so engaging that it captures our attention.

The easiest way to make something easy is to make it simple. I call this the Inception Rule, after the movie Inception, where Leonardo DiCaprio tries to plant an idea in someone’s head during a dream. He discovers it’s not about how deep you go; it’s about how simple the idea is. As a leader, you want to constantly be thinking how to reduce your ideas to their simple core.

Another way that we can make things easy to understand is to repeat them, the way a chorus repeats in a song. The more people hear it, the more they will remember it.

Let’s consider Zoom’s vision: Delivering Happiness. It’s simple, and bubbly. But that vision is also deeply practical—it helped Zoom’s employees efficiently make high-stakes decisions during the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic. As millions of people began using the product for the first time, Zoom needed to decide on its product’s baseline level of functionality. Too many features would overwhelm people, but too few features would stymie people. They needed the Goldilocks baseline of features to deliver happiness.

Similarly, delivering happiness led Zoom to invest heavily in customer service. Most of us know how much an hour-long wait for customer service can destroy happiness. So, Zoom hired many agents so wait times would be as short as possible.

To make our visions more engaging, we can use visual language. Andrew Carton, an associate professor of management at Wharton, did a study where people were told that a company’s mission was to either “make our customers satisfied” or “make our customers smile.” Then, he had people create a product. When they were working under the more visual vision (“smile”), they created more engaging products.

How to become more visionary: We can inspire people to be more visionary by having them reflect on their values. In one of my studies, we worked with a Swiss employment agency. When people came in to register for benefits, half of them were asked to reflect on their values, why those values mattered to them, and how they demonstrated them. For example, my own values include generosity, courage, and kaizen (a Japanese word for continued improvement).

Two months later, the people who had reflected on their values were twice as likely to have a job. The effects were so profound that the employment agency asked us to end our study and give everyone the reflection activity.

Exemplars

To be a great exemplar, the first thing you want to do is to consistently embody your vision; don’t be a hypocrite. As former CEO of PepsiCo Indra Nooyi once noted, “Don’t ask someone to do something that you wouldn’t do [yourself].”

Inspiring exemplars are calm and courageous protectors, like Captain Shults. And they show passion. When you ask someone to talk about a passion of theirs, their eyes light up, they smile a big beaming smile, they speak quickly and dramatically use their hands, and they lean in as if telling you a secret. When we are passionate about something, it’s revealed in our eyes, our mouth, our voice, and our bodies. And when you listen to someone’s passion, you smile, your eyes light up, and you feel the energy inside of you.

In my research on Dragon’s Den, which is a variant of Shark Tank, when entrepreneurs expressed more passion—in their eyes, their voice, their hands—they were dramatically more likely to receive funding. You can’t inspire others if you aren’t inspired.

How to become a better exemplar: Think about the moments in your life when you felt the most powerful and in control, your best self. Hundreds of studies around the world have used this technique that my colleagues Deb Gruenfeld, Joe Magee, and I created. We’ve even found that people are more likely to be selected for jobs if they’ve engaged in this reflection.

Mentors

Consider this proverb by Confucius: “Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand.” When you involve people, they feel seen and heard and they feel like people, not objects.

Inspiring leaders empower others everywhere across the globe. Even in cultures that are less individualistic than the United States—like Thailand or Saudi Arabia—there’s nothing more infuriating than when a boss micromanages you, rather than involves you or trusts you.

Inspiring leaders also elevate others. They share credit rather than steal credit, which is one of the most infuriating things that can happen at work. Finally, inspiring leaders empathize with others. They do what Captain Shults did, in making sure each of her passengers were OK, versus only thinking about themselves, like Captain Schettino.

How to become a better mentor: Reflect on the perspectives of others. My colleagues and I did a study with medical students who were tasked with diagnosing what was wrong with patients. Before meeting their patients, half the students were told to take the perspectives of their patients and to think about a recent time when they had engaged in perspective taking. Ultimately, the patients were more satisfied, trusting, and likely to follow the advice of the doctor who had been reminded to engage in perspective taking.

How to become an inspiring leader

My third big idea is that inspiring leaders aren’t just born; they’re also made. Because there is a universal set of inspiring attributes and behaviors, they can be practiced, nurtured, and developed.

My fourth big idea is that when you’re a leader, you don’t have the option of not having an impact. Your behavior is going to inspire or infuriate. I call this the “leader amplification effect.” Everything you say and do as a leader gets amplified. Your criticisms become humiliating criticisms, but your compliments become glorious praise.

My fifth big idea is that you can REIP what you sow. This phrase, drawn from the Bible, suggests that if we put inspiring energy out in the world, we receive inspiring energy in return. But my REIP is a homonym of reap, and it stands for reflect, emulate, intend, and practice:

• Reflect on your own inspiring and infuriating experiences as a leader once a month.
• Emulate: Identify the inspiring people in your life and think: How could I emulate them?
• Intend: Turn these reflections into an explicit intention. What specific behavior can you commit to enacting or implementing?
• Practice: Turn your intention into a daily practice.

My final big idea is that inspiring leaders think like architects. Like an architect who designs buildings to produce particular reactions and interactions, leaders design policies and practices that lead people down the inspiring path, even when they’re not present. So instead of just changing individual behavior, you can think about: How can you change a broader dynamic?

Thinking like an architect moves you from viewing a situation as a person problem—What’s wrong with this employee?—to start to think about what’s wrong in their environment, and how you can redesign that environment to help the employee be the best version of themselves.

Here’s one practice that Joseph Stagliano, president of NBT Bank, designed to inspire those around him. Although he has over 1,200 employees, he sends a birthday greeting to every single person. That sounds impossible, but he does it in 10 to 15 minutes over coffee every day.

The message is simple yet personalized. He showed me an example that said, “Hey Monica [pseudonym], Happy birthday! I hope you had a great weekend? How did track and bowling go?” Although his message was short, Monica’s response was extensive, overflowing with information and enthusiasm.

I shared that idea with the CEO of another company, and then a month later, he told me he started doing something similar. Every morning over coffee, he reached out to one person in his organization, and he expressed either gratitude or praise. He said he did this to put a skip in their step, but they ended up sending him such glowing replies that it put a skip in his step. The CEO reaped the inspiring energy he sowed. You can, too.

This essay is based on a talk that is part of the Positive Links Speaker Series by the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations. The Center is dedicated to building a better world by pioneering the science of thriving organizations.

But sometimes, the movies we watch become more than that—they become conversation starters, litmus tests, or unexpected mirrors of our own relationships.

These nine movies expose the underbelly of romantic relationships: the resentments, fantasies, secrets, compromises, and alternative lives that can coexist alongside love. Watching them runs the risk of cracking open a door that would be better kept closed, for the longevity of your relationship.

Last month’s The Invite, starring and directed by Olivia Wilde, tops our list of nine movies you might want to watch without your partner—or at least be very sure you know what conversation you’re signing up for in the post-screening debrief. Each movie asks a question that might be safer left unanswered.

1. The Invite (2026)

What happens when you say the quiet part out loud?

The Invite turns the dinner-party setup into an examination of everything couples are usually too embarrassed, jealous, or afraid to say to each other.

Angela (Wilde) and Joe (Seth Rogen) portray a married couple whose relationship has become strained by years of resentment and disappointment. When Angela invites their upstairs neighbors, Piña (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), over for dinner, what begins as an attempt at connection becomes a much more revealing conversation about sex, attraction, love, and what people want from their partners, when they’re being honest.

As Piña and Hawk probe the tension between Angela and Joe—also glimpsed through their apartment windows and in elevator encounters—they force the quiet parts of the other couple’s relationship into the open. The questions Angela and Joe were afraid to ask each other come to the surface, like, “Do we love each other anymore? Can we salvage this relationship? Do you want to be with someone new?”

“Novelty is a powerful aphrodisiac. In long-term relationships especially, cultivating novelty—whether through stories or experiences—is key for sustaining passion,” says Esther Perel, sex therapist and consultant on The Invite, on her blog. “Maintaining a sense of mystery and surprise helps counteract the routine and repetition that can sometimes lead to a decline in desire over time.”

We tend to think of monogamy as a set of universally accepted rules: Don’t sleep with someone else. Don’t cross the line. But long-term relationships are also built on unspoken knowledge about what our partner wants, what they find attractive, what they would never do, and what they might secretly wish they could do. Lifting the lid on that box may reveal that the relationship is beyond repair.

2. Indecent Proposal (1993)

What’s more important: Love or money? Would you risk the former for the latter? Can a couple withstand different answers to this question?

David (Woody Harrelson) and Diana (Demi Moore) are a financially struggling, yet happily married, couple, who are offered $1 million if the wife spends one night with a wealthy stranger, played by Robert Redford. The movie takes a question that sounds like a parlor game and puts it inside a marriage: What, exactly, would you be willing to sacrifice for a life-changing amount of money?

Diana’s decision to revisit the proposal after David’s initial hesitation—an uncomfortable pause that both she and the audience notice—begins her agreed-upon one-night stand.

From there, suspicion and mistrust begin to take hold, gradually eroding the relationship and ultimately pushing Diana toward the wealthy stranger.

What happens when a hypothetical becomes real? When money, desire, jealousy, and pride enter a marriage, it becomes much harder to separate what you thought you would do from what you did.

Indecent Proposal can turn a hypothetical into an uncomfortable inventory of your partner’s values—and your own.

Although it’s not every day a millionaire asks to sleep with a spouse, the question, and the length of the pause before answering, can reveal a lot about both sides.

3. Unfaithful (2002)

Can anyone be tempted, and can one handle the consequences of infidelity?

Unfaithful, starring Diane Lane and Richard Gere, is a movie about a married suburban woman who meets a younger man and becomes increasingly drawn to him. There is no grand declaration that her marriage is over, no decision to go looking for an affair. There is simply attraction, followed by curiosity, a series of small choices that gradually lead down a road from which there is no return.

Some people believe that infidelity happens only to certain kinds of couples—unhappy couples, disconnected couples, couples whose marriages were already in trouble. But some people in loving relationships can still notice other people, feel chemistry, or wonder what it would be like to be with someone else.

In fact, that is part of what sucks you into Unfaithful: Richard Gere’s character is a quintessentially good husband—a devoted father, attentive partner, and decent man.

“I often find that the affair is a form of self-discovery. It’s not that the individuals having the affairs want to leave their partners, but the people they have become. They are looking for another version of themselves—which is the most powerful variety of ‘other’ there is,” says Perel in an interview with Goop.

A crush can remain a crush. A fantasy can remain a fantasy. But sometimes people begin feeding the attraction, creating opportunities to see the person again, or keeping secrets that gradually become more important than the relationship they are protecting.

Interesting fact: Both Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful were directed by Adrian Lyne, who’s been married since 1974 to his wife Samantha.

4. Marriage Story (2019)

Can you love someone and still need to leave them?

Marriage Story begins with a husband and wife listing the things they love about each other. It’s tender enough to feel like the opening of a great romance, but the film quickly reveals a more complicated reality. Inspired by director Noah Baumbach’s own divorce, the story explores what happens when the things we love about our partner begin to pull us in different directions.

Charlie (Adam Driver) loves that Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) makes people feel comfortable, knows how to handle difficult family situations, plays with their son, knows when to push him and when to leave him alone. Nicole loves Charlie’s determination, his energy, his intelligence, and the way he throws himself into the things he loves.

It is an intimate portrait of a couple who, despite everything that will follow, genuinely know and admire one another.

The film follows Charlie and Nicole through the painful mechanics of divorce: lawyers, custody arrangements, money, competing versions of the marriage, and the realization that ending a relationship does not mean you stop having to deal with the person you are leaving.

Nicole has spent years adapting herself to Charlie’s life and putting parts of her own ambitions aside. Charlie has built a career and a world around his creative work but has failed to recognize how much his wife has sacrificed to support it. Neither is simply the villain. Neither is simply the victim.

That is one of the film’s most uncomfortable truths about long-term relationships: Love does not necessarily disappear before a marriage ends. Their issues aren’t due to flat-out incompatibility; they are problems of identity, compromise, resentment, and the slow accumulation of problems that were never fully addressed.

Another question the movie asks is whether love is enough to make a marriage work.

5. Gone Girl (2014)

Do we really know our partners?

Gone Girl turns marital secrets into psychological warfare; this is anything but a love story.

Based on Gillian Flynn’s novel, the film follows Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) on the day his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears. As the investigation unfolds, the image of their marriage begins to unravel, leaving everyone—including the audience—to wonder whether Nick killed her.

At the heart of the film is a deeply unsettling possibility about how little access we have to another person’s reality.

One of the qualities that relationship researchers have found important is emotional responsiveness: the feeling that your partner understands you, validates your perspective, and cares about your well-being. In other words, a healthy relationship depends less on “I know everything about you” than on “I feel safe being known by you.”

6. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Is fantasy a form of betrayal?

In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice (Nicole Kidman) and Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) appear to have a comfortable marriage—secure in the routines and flow of the life they built together. That is until Alice tells her husband about a sexual fantasy involving another man.

Bill becomes consumed by the idea of what his wife has imagined. The fantasy begins to feel like a secret life, and the distinction between imagining something and wanting it becomes increasingly difficult for him to see.

According to Perel, our “sexual fantasies are a fount of information about our internal lives and the relational dynamics of our partnerships.”

People also can make complicated decisions about whether to disclose fantasies to their partners. Sometimes disclosure can create intimacy. Sometimes people keep fantasies private because they fear judgment or because the fantasy itself has nothing to do with what they want in real life.

Eyes Wide Shut makes that ordinary fact feel like a threat.

7. Revolutionary Road (2008)

Are we living the life we actually wanted?

In Revolutionary Road, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) have built the respectable suburban life they were supposed to want, in this movie set from the late 1940s to mid 1950s. But April begins to wonder whether they have mistaken a socially approved life for the life they truly desire.

What happens when the pendulum swings too heavily toward one person’s idea of the life they could have lived, leaving the other to defend the life they have actually built? In Revolutionary Road, April’s longing for a different future increasingly collides with Frank’s investment in the life they have created together.

Long-term relationships inevitably require compromise. But compromise can feel very different when it is experienced as a choice rather than a sacrifice. A relationship should provide a sense of “we” without erasing the “I.” Researchers have also found that relationships can be important sources of personal growth: Partners can help one another explore new identities, pursue goals, and become more fully themselves.

Revolutionary Road painfully takes us through the psychological unraveling of Frank and April—who seem to experience their marriage as a narrowing of possibilities rather than an expansion of them.

Content warning: The film explores difficult themes involving self-administered abortion, death, and questions autonomy.

8. Closer (2004)

Can you love someone and still hurt them?

Closer, directed by Mike Nichols and based on Patrick Marber’s play, strips relationships down to their most uncomfortable elements like attraction, jealousy, dishonesty, and the desire to be wanted.

The film follows four people—Dan (Jude Law), Alice (Natalie Portman), Anna (Julia Roberts), and Larry (Clive Owen)—whose relationships become increasingly entangled. What begins with a chance encounter between Dan and Anna eventually develops into a complicated web of love affairs, betrayals, and shifting loyalties. It leaves viewers asking, “Do we want to be loved, or do we want to be desired?”

The characters repeatedly demand honesty from one another, but when they get it, the truth often hurts more than the lie. They want to know whom their partners have slept with, what they felt, whom they wanted, and whether they were ever truly enough. Yet knowing the truth doesn’t necessarily bring them closer. Sometimes, it gives jealousy something concrete to attach itself to.

9. The Drama (2026)

Would you still love your partner if you knew the worst thing they ever did?

The Drama takes place in the days surrounding the wedding of Emma Harwood (Zendaya) and Charlie Thompson (Robert Pattison), a young couple whose courtship seemed out of a storybook. Over drinks one night with their best man and maid of honor, they each confess the worst thing they’d done. This revelation sparks disgust and soul-searching, as they’re forced to confront the question: “Do you still love me?”

We all seek unconditional love from our partner. The Drama stretches this promise to the breaking point, complicated by the judgment of friends who also know the ugly truth. If you dare to watch this film with your partner, you’d be wise to think twice before sharing each other’s deep, dark secrets.

Is there some way to nurture the positive aspects of imagination while minimizing the problematic? According to Cassandra Vieten, director of research at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, there is. In her new book, Imagine That, she explains imagination’s importance in our everyday lives—a way to understand our past, navigate the present, and explore future possibilities. If we learn more about its inner workings, she argues, we can use it more consciously and deliberately to create the kind of life we want.

“Imagination is something we all possess, something we can all practice, for free and with equal opportunity,” says Vieten. “When someone develops this capacity, they gain something almost magical: the ability to see multiple futures simultaneously and navigate toward the preferred ones.”

Imagination as part of everyday life

Many of us tend to conflate imagination with creativity, thinking that being able to imagine new ideas is the same as bringing them to fruition. While the two may indeed be related, this is far too limited a view of what imagination can be, writes Vieten.

“Imagination is an essential, foundational capacity that allows us to simulate reality and transcend it to explore possibilities beyond the known,” she says.

In our everyday lives, imagination is what helps us make predictions as well as come up with novel (or creative) ideas. For example, we might imagine how stopping for a coffee on our way to work will help us focus (simulation imagination, based on past experience). But we might also use our imagination to transcend what’s known and come up with a totally new innovation or product idea once we arrive at the office (generative imagination).

“Imagination weaves throughout the fabric of our cognitive, sensory, and relational lives—you are constantly speculating, visualizing, rehearsing, wondering,” she writes.

These types of imagination show up differently in the brain, writes Vieten. Simulation is primarily centered in the default mode network (DMN), a part of the brain that remains active when we aren’t engaging in a specific task. The DMN is where we tend to mull over future interactions, plans, or options, often subconsciously (or even unconsciously).

Generative imagination, on the other hand, comes by freeing ourselves from the DMN’s limitations (or, some would say, tyranny). If we can get out of the everyday chatter and let our minds truly wander freely around disparate parts of the brain, making new neural connections, we have a better chance of generating something truly unique.

“Rather than simulating or iterating, comparing and contrasting, generative imagination is focused on combining, reconfiguring, or transcending existing knowledge to generate novel outputs,” writes Vieten.

Either way, imagination isn’t frivolous, she writes; it’s important for our everyday functioning as well as creative self-expression. It helps us solve problems, while also expanding possibilities of what could be, giving us “the gift of wonder, whimsy, and surprise, the whoas and the wows of our lives,” she writes.

Imagination’s darker side

Imagination can sometimes be problematic, though. For example, we might imagine that our spouse is mad at us and worry about what might happen when she gets home from work when, actually, she’s not mad at all. This can cause us needless worry, not to mention potentially trigger a fight.

We can also imagine that other people are unpleasant or even dangerous based on untested biases. These can be formed in part via our imagination, which tries to prepare us for unknown encounters, often behind the scenes at an unconscious level.

“We regularly imagine entire narratives, scenes, and interactions without intending to or even knowing we’re doing it,” writes Vieten.

Our imagination is often busy filling in the missing parts of our memories and perceptions, which are by nature incomplete. Memories, rather than being etched in our minds, are recreated (and often changed) each time they’re recalled. Similarly, we can’t perceive everything at once, so our imagination completes the picture for us, adding interpretations, too. This means it’s easy to corrupt memories or miss details of a situation—which can sometimes lead to problems (think eyewitness accounts of crimes, for example).

Understanding these darker sides of imagination can help us tame them somewhat, says Vieten. “You can practice bringing greater attention to what you are imagining, recognize it as imagination, and decide whether it holds useful information, is irrelevant, or is actually causing harm.”

How to increase your imaginative capabilities

While the book covers the neuroscience behind imagination, it’s also about how to harness our imagination more effectively. Your personal imagination style may depend, in part, on your genetics (such as neurodiversity), culture, and life experiences. Understanding this can help you figure out where you might want to try moving the needle one way or the other.

To assess your own imaginative strengths and weaknesses, here are some key imagination modes Vieten outlines in her book.

1. Receptiveness. “How willing you are to imagine—and how receptive you are to whatever bubbles up.” If you are high in receptivity, you may find it easy to do guided visualizations, for example; if low in receptivity, you may be less willing to imagine unknown scenarios.

2. Presence. How much do you embody your imagined experiences? If you tend to be absorbed, immersed, and emotionally involved in imagined scenarios, you’re high in presence; if you tend to observe these imaginings from a distance, you’re less so.

3. Embellishment. “How vivid, detailed, and elaborate people make their imaginings.” Those high in embellishment can imagine intricate scenarios with much more detail, clarity, nuance, and complexity. Those low in embellishment might be more “big picture” folks, who may not be able to conjure up details as much.

4. Originality. How much your imagination is fueled by what is or could be, based on reality, versus how much it veers from that and is based more on fantasy and novelty.

5. Temporality. How much your imagination is associated with time (in other words, assessing the past or projecting into the future) versus how much it is agnostic around time (not based on any particular time). (Vieten admits the science on this mode is not completely settled, but says there appear to be some differences in how people engage with time while imagining.)

Each of these modes has pros and cons, she argues. For example, being high in receptivity may mean you’re more cognitively flexible and open to new experiences, but can also mean you’re overly compliant and easily manipulated. Similarly, the upside of being high in originality is that it can fuel advancements in art and science, though it can lead to boredom with everyday life.

Considering my own strengths and weaknesses, I noticed that I seem to be high in receptivity and embodiment, but low in embellishment and originality (and mixed when it comes to temporality). Recognizing this makes me think about paying more attention to details in my environment and playing around with more fantastical ideas, especially if I’m wanting to fuel my creativity.

To that end, Vieten provides avenues for stretching our imagination in different ways. Some ideas for accessing different aspects of imagination deliberately include rehearsing something before doing it, brainstorming ideas, engaging all of our senses when imagining something, reframing an idea from a different perspective, and freewriting.

Vieten also suggests creating environments conducive to being more spontaneously creative. Setting time aside to daydream, being in solitude where your mind can wander, taking walks in the woods to de-stress, or, possibly, taking psychedelic drugs (in a safe, controlled environment) can all help us disengage our DMN and allow creative thoughts to enter more freely.

“One of the key ways to make imagination welcome is to remove the practical pressures of the world,” she writes.

Beyond self-help

Imagine That is full of suggestions for unleashing your imagination, all based on the emerging science of imagination that Vieten and her colleagues (and others) are exploring.

But while the book reads mostly as a self-help guide, there’s also an important message about why using our imagination is beneficial to society as a whole. Too many of us are experiencing the hopelessness and despair that come with being alive right now, writes Vieten. It’s too easy to get lost in the negative news cycles and focus on all of the problems in the world, making it more difficult to imagine anything better for our collective future.

Learning how to engage our imagination more readily can create a sense of hope in our current situation. Not only can it bring more joy and aliveness to our individual lives, countering malaise, it can also lead to new ways of collaborating with others and innovating to solve societal problems, thereby providing a better life for everyone.

“So many of the issues facing us locally and globally are rooted in our collective inability to imagine new solutions, alternative futures, creative pathways forward that could build a world that promotes thriving for all,” writes Vieten. “My deepest hope is that [you] take a deeper dive into the science, the practice, and the magic of imagination and [see] how it can re-enchant your life and our world.”

That couldn’t be further from the truth. Research suggests we compare ourselves to romantic partners more than anyone else in our lives—on average several times per day. In my own studies, I’ve endeavored to unpack these daily partner comparisons to understand: What kinds of people make partner comparisons, and why? The answer, it seems, depends on the type of comparisons partners are making: either based on our unique abilities, or on the opinions we hold. The good news: Comparisons can offer a learning opportunity and even bring us closer together as partners.

Who’s doing better?

Many partner comparisons revolve around who is better at a given activity—also known as “ability-based comparisons.” These comparisons can range from trivial (Who’s the better bowler?) to weighty (Who’s the better parent?).

In my latest study with collaborators Robin Edelstein and Stephen Garcia, we studied patterns in who makes more of these ability-based comparisons. We surveyed over 1,100 U.S. adults in romantic relationships, asking them questions about how regularly they compare themselves to their partners. For instance, one question asked them, “To what extent do you pay a lot of attention to how you do things relative to how your significant other does things?” Participants also completed measures of self-esteem, relationship quality, and demographics.

The results were clear: People who were younger, those with lower self-esteem, and those in shorter and less satisfying relationships were particularly likely to make ability-based comparisons. Men in relationships with men also reported making more of these comparisons than any other gender pairing, but we only surveyed 37 men in same-gender relationships, so take this finding with a grain of salt.

Does my partner think differently?

A second type of comparison involves comparing judgments and attitudes—known as “opinion-based comparisons.” In these comparisons, people evaluate their own opinions by comparing with those of their partners. For instance, before enthusiastically locking in a major purchase, a partner might wonder, “Would my partner consider this a good deal, too?” Similar considerations may arise in the contexts of voting, child care, or anywhere judgments lead to decisions.

When it came to who was most prone to making opinion-based comparisons, our results flipped: These were most common among people in longer and more satisfying relationships.

The equity-assessor and the self-improver

Taken together, these individual characteristics paint two portraits of people who frequently compare themselves to their partners.

The first portrait is that of a young, insecure partner who is in a newer relationship and unsure whether that relationship will work out. Think Bella Swan from Twilight who worries endlessly about whether Edward is too good for her. And, indeed, when we asked participants why they made partner comparisons, two of their motives included assessing equity and predicting the relationship’s trajectory. For instance, participants grappled with questions like, “Am I doing for her as she is doing for me?”

The second portrait is that of someone in a long-term relationship who respects the knowledge and expertise of their partner and seeks to harness it as a tool for growth and decision making. For this one, think Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec who regularly compares her own judgments to those of her long-term work wife, Ann Perkins, as a means to make better decisions. This theme, too, emerged from our participants. For instance, one participant lovingly wrote about how his partner outshines him in most areas, and this dynamic continually inspires him to grow.

Understanding me and you

Yet partner comparison isn’t limited to these two portraits. Whereas these portraits describe those who compare most frequently, we found most people make some comparisons sometimes. What motivates occasional comparers?

The two most common motives for partner comparison were striving to gain a deeper understanding of oneself and one’s partner. With respect to self-evaluation, one participant shared that they compare regularly to their partner because comparison helps them benchmark their progress toward goals. Want to know if your cooking class has paid off? One of the best ways to evaluate your growth is to see if your latest dish can delight your family in the same way that your partner’s cooking always does.

Partner comparisons can also help us understand our partners’ quirks, what we call partner evaluation. For instance, one participant shared how she compares her upbringing to that of her partner, which helps her understand why her partner thinks, feels, and behaves so differently than she does.

Partner comparison is a tool

It’s no secret that social comparison can sting. No parent wants to hear, “I like Mom better,” and no newlywed wants to hear, “How did you land such a catch?” We find in our studies that partner comparisons are often involuntarily thrust upon people who would have preferred not to be compared. It can be true what they say, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

But comparison does more than push our emotional buttons. Partner comparisons help us assess our relationship and calibrate our behavior, such as how we divide household labor. They allow us to make important decisions, like who should take ownership over responsibilities. They serve as sources of growth, and they teach us about ourselves and our partners.

Comparing yourself to your partner isn’t necessarily a sign that something’s wrong. Rather, partner comparison can be a handy strategy for making sense of your social world. The key is to use it as a tool that stays in its place, rather than letting it undermine your self-worth or relationship.

Serena D’souza contributed to this article.

Fauci is a physician and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as chief medical advisor to President Trump during the period of Covid-19—who has subsequently become a scapegoat for those who didn’t like the restrictions that came with the pandemic. As Senator Rand Paul put it, based on the evidence-free conspiracy theory that Dr. Fauci funded research that led to the pandemic: “One million Americans died from COVID and not even an apology from Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

While we might recognize such claims as preposterous, it would be a mistake to treat these hearings as mere political theater. Those who are treating errors in the understanding of Covid-19 as criminal threaten one of the most important public goods we have during an infectious disease crisis: the willingness of experts to publicly admit mistakes.

Dr. Fauci has openly acknowledged missteps, communication errors, and evolving judgments in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic—an honesty that is not matched by his critics. Instead, his honesty has been leveraged by them to sow doubt in science itself.

But the reason we turn to experts during a crisis is not because they are omniscient. Of course they aren’t. It is because they learn faster and better than non-experts. Learning, however, is a naturally error-prone process. And learning when a novel infectious disease is fueling a global pandemic is particularly so. One can hope that scientists responding to such a crisis will be able to reduce uncertainties in a linear and predictable fashion. But that is not the norm.

As a social scientist, if I discover something new, when I present my findings to my colleagues, the most likely result is that they will tell me all the ways they think I might be wrong. My job is to prove that my findings hold even after considering their counterarguments. Skepticism is essential in the process of separating fact from fiction. We have more confidence in results that have survived such pressure-testing.

Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the pandemic received just this type of skepticism from other experts. And yet much of the political commentary surrounding these normal and essential controversies cited the evidence of controversy as proof the CDC was flailing.

This approach treats science as though the discovery of new facts unfolds like a treasure hunt where the first person to find the treasure opens the lid and everyone can see the treasure with their own eyes. In a treasure hunt, discovery and validation are essentially the same thing.

But science does not work this way. Take the discovery of HIV. Dr. Luc Montaignier identified the virus under an electron microscope in February 1983. Uncertainty surrounding whether the virus was causative or opportunistic led to more than a year of additional research, culminating in four papers published by Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues in 1984, that affirmed Montaignier’s finding. According to Montaignier, it was one of these publications, in particular, that “convinced the scientific community that this new retrolentivirus was the cause of AIDS.”

This example shows something that is true across the sciences. New discoveries that eventually become accepted as scientific facts can linger for an extended period as mere “claims” while uncertainties are addressed.

Critics argue that the scientific uncertainty around the discovery of the AIDS virus was unnecessarily prolonged and cost lives. If moving quickly on yet-to-be-validated evidence is the right approach during a pandemic, note that Fauci and his public health colleagues are currently being attacked for doing exactly that. Public health experts believed at the outset that COVID-19 was like SARS, with transmission most likely to occur late in the course of infection. Hence the guidance that directed the public and health care workers to wear masks when caring for patients already showing symptoms. Mounting evidence of asymptomatic infection eventually proved that COVID-19 transmission was very different from SARS, leading to new masking guidance.

When should public health experts act on early, but unvalidated, evidence versus taking the time to iron out uncertainties? While it may look obvious in hindsight, there is no magic formula that can sort out in advance when the better course will have been to slow down and validate versus act on plausible, but still uncertain, claims.

Climate scientists would almost certainly never argue their experience in the public eye has been a picnic. But they had one big advantage over those trying to guide the response to a pandemic driven by a novel infectious disease. Climate scientists had decades—as opposed to only weeks or days—to conduct research before they were asked to explain what they knew to the public. In fact, climate scientists did not always expect warming to result from burning fossil fuels. Up until the 1950s, the prevailing wisdom was that the oceans would absorb excess carbon dioxide so that there would be minimal if any warming. Roger Revelle and Hans Seuss, who together discovered the error, both received awards for their research.

When a novel infectious disease comes to town, the first cases detected are rarely the actual start of the outbreak. There are no tests to make a positive diagnosis. Some of the suspected cases turn out to have other causes. People who are infected are overlooked. Data collected at the outset is patchy and error-prone. As the public health community pivots to emergency response footing, they begin to collect data more systematically. Even so, new data can rapidly overturn early assumptions. The case definition for COVID-19 was updated almost weekly during the first 10 weeks of the pandemic.

Monday morning quarterbacking is easy. Try advising countries on how to manage a growing pandemic while the ground is moving beneath your feet.

As the United States’ performance during the COVID-19 pandemic is reviewed, even those who are not engaging in political grandstanding tend to reduce the effort to a scorecard that tallies the times experts were right versus the times they were wrong. Even if the reversals are few in number, they are barely tolerated. We usually give examinations to people after they have had time to learn and master the material. What is the right metric to use for public health experts who are trying to inform us when the answers are still being discovered?

Speaking of treasure, I think we were lucky during COVID-19 to have public health experts who were willing to admit mistakes as soon as they were discovered. Things will go markedly worse for us if, during the next pandemic, they are less forthcoming.

An earlier version of this article first appeared on MS NOW.

Catch a concert

You don’t need expensive tickets to the hottest concerts of the summer to reap the happy rewards of listening to live music. “Collective effervescence”—the feeling of meaning and closeness with others that we experience in a positive group activity—is key to a concert’s feel-good benefits, researchers say. While listening to songs at home is fun, too, the “sacredness and connection” of collective effervescence is rooted in the togetherness of a crowd at a concert, and the uplift can continue for as long as a week after.

Free and cheap local live music options abound in many areas, whether it’s an old-time swing band in the gazebo in the park, a vocalist on the patio at a nearby café, or a full orchestra playing to a grassy outdoor amphitheater. Bring a blanket, let the kids run if you’ve got any, and soak in that sweet collective effervescence.

Set your sights on water—or even jump in

A beach or lake vacation may not be in the plans this summer, but you can still treat yourself to a walk next to a stream or a paddle in a nearby pond.

Research finds that people who regularly spend time in natural environments like parks, woods, and beaches tend to have better physical and psychological health, and water offers specific benefits to well-being. According to new research from 19 countries, water-centric “blue spaces” like rivers, lakes, and oceans bring us feelings of restoration, calm, and greater mental and emotional energy. Being near water is itself beneficial, but swimming or even wading boosts the restorative effects.

My own summer favorites are regular evening walks around a small local lake and—if I can make it work—getting out on a stand-up paddle board at least once a summer. Happiness!

Look up at the night sky

Research on the benefits of nature has generally focused on daytime hours, but that’s beginning to change. Researchers have created a “night sky connected index” (NSCI) to measure the effects of outdoor time at night, especially looking up at the sky, and they found that people with a higher NSCI tend to have “greater mental well-being and happiness.” Looking at the night sky is also linked to feelings of awe, according to the same study, and experiencing awe can help reduce negative thinking and boost our happiness.

August is Perseids meteor shower time: Every year, across the Northern Hemisphere, thousands of meteors may be visible as they streak across the night sky. As a child, my siblings and I would often sleep in the backyard in mid-August and happily count meteors while we lay on our backs in our sleeping bags. My backyard sleeping days are behind me, but I admit that lately adulthood has been so busy that I haven’t even looked up at night. Time to find the magic again.

Enjoy a meal with others—outdoors

No matter what outdoor activity you choose, getting outside in green space specifically (even parks and street greenery count!) is beneficial. But you can boost your outdoor fun—and health—even more by inviting others to share a meal together. Recent research finds that eating with others makes people feel more happiness and less stress, pain, and sadness that day compared to days when they only eat alone.

You don’t have to host a dinner party or spring for an expensive restaurant meal. Greater Good reader Catherine Michaud shared her simple, satisfying summer recipe with us: “Find a local park with good shade trees. Bring a book, a blanket, a friend (or three), lawn chairs, picnic, and board/lawn games.” Count us in.

Put up your feet while your kid climbs a tree

Speaking of kids: As a kid of the 80s, I climbed countless trees with friends and siblings. But I am having trouble remembering a time when my own kids clambered up branches just to see how high they could go.

A recent Australian paper reviewed many studies about adventurous play and “overwhelmingly” concluded that children engaging in risky outdoor play showed better overall mental health and social abilities and were less prone to anxiety. “Risky outdoor play” generally includes activities involving high speeds or heights, play with dangerous tools (saws, knives) or near dangerous elements (fire, water, cliffs), rough-and-tumble play, and activities in which the child could “disappear” out of adult sight. This list may make some of us (including me) a little nervous, but maybe we could at least let the kids help build, light, and tend the fire for some late summer s’mores?

The authors of the study specifically caution against helicopter parenting; it’s key, they say, that the kids learn to evaluate risks themselves. This isn’t a permission slip for parents to neglect safety, but it is a reminder that this summer it’s OK for parents to turn down the worry-meter, skip the hovering, and instead sit on the patio with a book or a friend while the kids take in a joyful climb or a bike race down the driveway.

Watch sports for the win

This year’s World Cup excitement is over, but the sporting fun doesn’t need to end: People who watch sports, either live or on TV, tend to show a number of health benefits.

A new study published in the journal Nature found that watching live sports reduces the stress hormone cortisol and increases the social-bonding hormone oxytocin. So, whether it’s an evening of Little League or the Big Leagues, and whether you’re in the middle of a cheering crowd or cozied up on the couch during a thunderstorm, take a break from the end-of-summer rush and relax into a game, win or lose.


Apple-pick your way to less stress

Greater Good reader and mom Aja Russo loves taking her kids strawberry picking every year in early summer. But if you missed strawberry picking time, and you didn’t plant a garden this year (raising my own hand), it’s not too late. Start reaping the benefits of gardening at a pick-your-own farm. Research finds that even short periods of gardening can lead to feeling calmer and more relaxed.

What to pick? Peach picking is still going strong in many areas, and apples aren’t just for autumn—popular varieties are ready for picking in August in much of the United States. If the climate where you live doesn’t cooperate with picking fruit right now, you can still exercise your green thumb and boost well-being by tending a plant indoors.

Indulge in ice cream

Yes, we said what we said. Most of us intuitively know that eating ice cream makes us feel good, but researchers were surprised when decades of observation found a lower rate of cardiovascular disease among diabetic people who ate a small amount (about half a cup) of ice cream a few times a week compared to diabetic people who never ate ice cream.

Now, scientists caution that this doesn’t mean that ice cream is a health food, but it certainly suggests that we don’t need to heap a topping of guilt onto our occasional cool treats. There’s still plenty of summertime left for a sunset trip to the local ice cream parlor with friends or family. Yum!

If you live in a place where the autumn chill will soon set in, now is prime time to revel in long evenings, soft temperatures, and as much summer well-being as you can seize. As the famous song goes, “Summertime, and the living is easy.” And healthy!

When I got confused about where to send my kid to school, I found a ragtag group of parents all over the country who were committed to being a force for integration. When I fell down the hell that is our elder care “system,” I found solace in day programs, support groups, and all other manner of collectivizing. And when I was pregnant and in my late 20s, trying to figure out how to be a grown-up, you better believe I jumped on the chance to live in intergenerational, interfaith cohousing with some intentional community veterans. I lived there for over a decade and it completely transformed how I understand abundance, cooperation, and, yes, the many uses of homegrown kale (true to stereotype).

So, of course, I am over the moon about a new anthology, Living, Together: Reimagining Community in the Age of Disconnection, just out from Beacon Press (who also published my book, Do It Anyway, back in the day). Living, Together features a few of my favorite contemporary thinkers on interdependence, including Rhaina Cohen (author of The Other Significant Others) and, as mentioned, Dani McClain.

Here’s an interview with the anthology’s editor, Samantha Paige Rosen.

Courtney Martin: You begin the book talking about your own pleasurable experience of living with your parents as an adult—something that grew out of crisis, but has become a choice. It seems that in the case of multigenerational households, part of the challenge is rewiring adult relationships and not falling back into early conditioning. How did you do this rewiring when you all lived together as adults?

Samantha Paige Rosen: For me and my parents, I think a handful of different things occurred. First, some of the rewriting began before I moved in with them. I lived with them for nine months when I was 24 after I returned from the East Coast and was considering a career shift. I stayed with them during the summers I was in graduate school for the next couple of years, and I did the same for most of my college summers. All that time, they were seeing the adult I’d become and I was seeing them with emerging young adult eyes. I think this cemented the adult-level friendship between us so that by the time I moved in at 29, after which I ended up staying for six years, we could build off of the rewiring we’d already done.

Another piece is communication. I love talking about my feelings and my perspective, and I want my loved ones to feel comfortable doing the same. So as much as my mother likes to joke that I talk everything to death—and I know I have to pick my moments; not everyone is receptive at every moment—I attribute the way we understand each other as adults to my communication skills and my parents’ openness to that, much of the time.

What that meant was that when there were instances over the six years I lived with my parents where my mom doted on me like she did when I was young, or my dad was a little too opinionated about my whereabouts, I could remind them, Thank you, I love you, and, as an adult, I’ve got this! If they’d make an assumption based on how I acted when I was younger, I’d call them out on it, nicely, and let them know that the thing they’re saying isn’t true of 30-something me. Of course, this goes both ways, and I let my parents know they could call me out, too. I worked hard to make sure I was seeing my parents as the fully realized adults they are and not just my mom and dad.

At the same time, I’ve always said that neither of my younger sisters could have lived with my parents as adults, but I obviously could. I don’t always need to be in charge, and I don’t mind a little doting! My sisters prefer to run the show and feel strongly about their independence. So perhaps there was an element of luck, personality-wise, too.

For readers who live in multigenerational households and have the difficulties around rewiring, I’d say tell and show your loved ones the ways you’ve changed—and often—and ask them to do the same. Communication is everything (and when that doesn’t work, demonstration is). And are there minor aspects of falling back into early conditioning that wouldn’t be so terrible to embrace?

CM: It seems like one of the biggest barriers for so many people to live more creatively and interdependently is cost. Cohousing, for example, is notoriously expensive to create and is still too elite a movement, as a result. What did you learn about the role that finances play in our ability to, as the subtitle says, reimagine community?

SPR: I relate to feeling priced out of communal living. I remember my college friend, Francesca, sending me this article about cohousing when I was at my most overwhelmed and depressed living alone, about six months before I ended up moving in with my parents. I had never heard of cohousing; she saw I needed communal living before I did. I remember feeling enraged, honestly, because she was like, “This is what you need!” and I felt like, Why did you make me aware of something I clearly needed but couldn’t afford?! The subtitle of the article was literally “Where Responsibilities Are Shared And Life Is A Little Less Lonely,” and I was so lonely, overworked, and just kind of crushed by the weight of life.

But a few weeks into living with my parents, I realized I was living communally, just in a different way. And now, I live alone in a townhouse and my parents live across the parking lot. We have dinner at least twice a week, we share groceries, we pet-sit for each other; I take my cat there in a backpack every day to play with their cats. Some people might say I live alone, and in some ways I do, but I can still reap some benefits of communal living in an informal way and that I can afford.

I’m not going to pretend that finances don’t offer access, or at least a wider ability to reimagine community. But only a few of the stories in Living, Together feature forms of intentional community that can have a high price for entry, like cohousing. That’s by design: I wanted readers to feel like they had many different models for getting their needs around communal living, and even community outside the home, met.

In the book, Amanda E. Machado and Rhaina Cohen both share stories of renting homes with friends, and Amanda’s essay, in particular, talks about the cost-sharing element of that approach. Essayist Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom lives in a separate space above their parents’ house, and Dani McClain shares the house she grew up in with her mother and daughter. Gabrielle Korn has a house with an attached studio apartment she rents out, and also offers for free to writers seeking short residencies.

Suanne Carlson shares a glimpse into the nomadic life, which I think more people are going to be forced to do if this housing crisis continues; for Suanne, living out of a vehicle is a choice that allows her to travel, feel at home in nature, and get together with other nomads who see home and community the way she does. Tiffany Harris writes about how she made a career out of how much she liked having roommates by supporting programming for Jewish people in their 20s who want to share living space and traditions with other young Jewish people. Simone Gorrindo writes about having an interdependent relationship with a neighbor when they were both new military wives and were incredibly lonely.

All of these forms of communal living have pluses and minuses. There’s no perfect way to live, and when you’re interdependent with others, there will always be friction. If you want the kind of communal living where you have completely separate space from other people, then, yes, it could be more expensive. (Although not necessarily: tiny house communities? Fourplexes? Accessory dwelling units? Separate apartments on the same floor as loved ones?) But there are so many other ways to live communally if you think outside formal intentional communities and realize you can…make up whatever you want!

[Here are some resources on making cohousing more affordable.]

CM: What was the biggest surprise of working on this anthology?

SPR: Working on the anthology further broadened the way I defined communal living.

I really have come to believe that communal living is any way a person is regularly interdependent with others around their home base, sharing time, resources, and offering a sense of safety.

Maybe it’s several generations of a family living within walking distance to one another, or neighbors who deliberately make time to see each other most days, share groceries or meals, and offer rides to doctors’ appointments. But to me, communal living is less about the roof you have over your head and more about how intentionally interdependent you are with others.

Reading the Q&A with Hank Gamel and Fran Biederman in Living, Together, where Fran, who is 91, talks about all the different ways she and her neighbor support each other got me thinking about this. So did Kristen Arnett and Simone Gorrindo’s essays. Kristen’s friends, her chosen family, all live within a short drive from each other. They celebrate every milestone together and jump at the chance to offer help, like inviting those who don’t have power during hurricane season to the house of whoever does. Simone’s neighbor taught her how to drive and helped Simone furnish her house. For a period of time, they had regular dinners, watched each other’s kids, and Simone even slept at her neighbor’s house on anxious nights while their husbands were deployed.

CM: What is one thing you have changed in your own life because of reading this book? A new tradition with your parents? A new way of using space?

SPR: I’ve become more flexible about the way I think about home, community, and my own future. As I write in my introduction to the book, I bought pretty hard into the American dream as a kid, including the idea of a “forever home.” I think I was seeking a feeling of safety, and the finality of a “forever home” seemed to offer that. But reading my contributors’ stories, seeing their openness to different configurations of housing and home, and the way those changed as their needs did over time, has taken the pressure off of finding that one ideal living scenario. I no longer feel like I’m searching for a place to settle; I just feel more settled within myself.

And it couldn’t have happened at a better time, because home and housing is so tenuous now for so many of us.

It feels freeing to have my attitude be that right now I live in a two-bedroom townhouse across the parking lot from my parents. It meets a lot of my needs, but not all of them. And when I’m missing having people in my immediate space, or there’s another reason this doesn’t work as well anymore, I tell myself that this living scenario can be for me until it isn’t. When my needs change, I can adapt to them. Someday, I hope to live close to a bunch of artists who also raise kids communally, in whatever form of housing that takes. But not today, and that’s fine!

This Q&A is republished from Courtney Martin’s Substack newsletter, Examined Family. Read the original newsletter.

Imagine receiving a comment like that—how would you respond? A possible—and tempting—response is to volley the vitriol right back, wishing death in return, giving back the hatred that had been communicated to you first. After all, in certain corners of the online world, many people do exactly that, publicly engaging in rhetoric so toxic and disturbing that it sends chills down your spine.

But Marron did not behave like most people. Instead, he did something that most people would probably question. He reached out to the person who wrote “you should kill yourself” and asked if they would have a spoken conversation with him.

As a psychologist who studies conflict conversations, this is the sort of incredible psychology study that I wish I could run—but no Institutional Review Board would ever approve.

What happened when Marron reached out to his online haters is not what you might have expected. First, you might expect that none of the commenters would respond, let alone agree to have a conversation. But instead, dozens of them agreed to talk to Marron (and even be part of a later-produced podcast that he created, aptly called “Conversations With People Who Hate Me”).

Second, even more shocking than their willingness to talk, the conversations were sort of…good. Over the course of the conversations (some lasting up to an hour), both communicators experience moments when they acknowledge each other’s viewpoints, moments when they not just listen to each other but seem to understand each other, even moments when they possibly find just a tiny bit of common ground. They almost never reach real agreement, but they also don’t sound like they hate each other by the end, much less want to kill each other.

By inviting his haters to a spoken conversation, Marron did something brilliant. He removed them from a context that is fundamentally dehumanizing—an anonymous, text-based, engagement-optimized, algorithm-driven environment—in other words, an online comment section. The very design of most online platforms brings out the worst in us, eliciting a level of vitriol rarely observed in the offline world. Having a spoken conversation allowed Marron and the person who thought they hated him to re-humanize each other, recognizing and consequently treating each other as people who have faces and families and rich, complex opinions instead of as nameless adversaries defined by idiotic, strawmen positions.

Marron’s case study illustrates something I’ve been researching for almost 20 years now: why certain types of conversational structures—specifically, spoken versus written conversations—seem to fundamentally change the constructiveness of communication. In 2017, I published a paper called “The Humanizing Voice.” It posited that hearing what a person says, compared to reading even the same words in text form, can humanize the communicator. For example, in one experiment, hearing a political opponent’s statement caused observers to attribute more “uniquely human” traits (e.g., greater rationality and thoughtfulness) to their opponent than reading the opponent’s same words. As another example in a different experiment, hearing a script spoken by a voice actor, compared with reading the same script, made observers assume the original creator was more likely a human than an AI program. 

In my latest published research, my coauthors Burint Bevis and Mike Yeomans and I put the “humanizing voice hypothesis” to a different type of test. Rather than having observers form evaluations of previously recorded statements that they either heard or read, we asked real political opponents to have hundreds of live conversations. By changing the medium of the entire conversation (from speaking to writing, for instance), we could test how the medium influenced both which language people used—language production—as well as the way people’s opinions were understood—language consumption. Changing the conversation medium also let us directly test how constructively disagreement conversations unfold, specifically how much communicators feel understood and how much conflict they experience.

Before we collected real conversations, we first examined people’s preferences and predictions. What we found underscored the appeal of the online comments section. In a survey of 200 adults, respondents strongly preferred to write to a disagreeing stranger than talk to them (84% vs. 16% preference, respectively). Why? They thought it would be more comfortable and easier, and also lead to better conversations (e.g., less conflict).

We think these predictions—and everyone who believes writing vitriol in online comment sections will be a good use of time—are mostly wrong, based on the experiments we ran next.

We conducted a series of experiments at universities across the U.S. to test the real effect of conversation medium on disagreement conversation outcomes. Our final analysis set for our paper included 1,842 conversations. In all experiments, communicators were randomly assigned to either speak or write to each other, typically for short (e.g., nine-minute) conversations about their topic of disagreement.

For example, in one experiment, we identified some topics that would be controversial among a sample of UC Berkeley students (e.g., California government reparations for slavery). We first asked participants to tell us their own opinions on the designated topics, then assigned them to talk or write to a disagreeing partner, and finally asked them in private surveys how the conversations went.

The talkers reported having more constructive conversations than the writers—specifically, greater understanding, less conflict, more liking and positive impressions, and more openness to changing their attitudes toward their partner’s attitudes. They didn’t even have to see each other to accrue the positive benefits of speaking; talking to each other without video on sufficed.

We found that the effect of medium persisted even when we made the conversations a bit shorter or longer (e.g., six minutes or 12 minutes), changed their synchronicity (enforced pauses or no pauses), and changed it from a dialogue to an exchange of monologues (only one chance each to communicate). Further, these other structural changes (conversation length, synchronicity, and interactivity) did not have as much impact as the conversation medium on the reported constructiveness of the ensuing conversation.

We partnered with an organization called “Bridge USA” to run conversation events on multiple college campuses, including Minnesota State University, Mankato, and Arizona State University. We selected a topic that would be polarizing for the community (e.g., for Arizona State University, we selected the U.S./Mexico border wall being built) and advertised the events as opportunities to discuss this topic. We randomly assigned attendees to sit at a “speaking” or “writing” table, where they either spoke or wrote with a partner about the topic.

After each short conversation (six to 10 min), attendees completed a survey about their experience and then rotated and moved to another conversation. Most attendees had at least five conversations during the event. The conversation events showed the same results: Speakers reported having more constructive conversations, liking each other more, and finding more attitude alignment, than writers. This was even true when they largely agreed at the outset.

At Arizona State University, we also asked communicators to predict their partner’s actual attitudes after the conversation ended, and speakers were more accurate than writers. This suggests that they didn’t just feel more understanding in the spoken than written conversations, they actually had more understanding.

To understand changes in the production of language, we analyzed the laboratory conversations for which we had clean recordings (699 in total). The structure of language among pairs who had been assigned to speak was very different than pairs assigned to write. For instance, speakers produced shorter, quicker exchanges than writers, with more overlapping words. They also tended to use less formal and more agreeable language.

Particularly interesting to us was that speakers used more receptive language—language that signaled their openness to opposing views, like more subjectivity (e.g., “in my opinion” or “I believe”) and fewer negative emotions (e.g., “this is terrible”)—than writers did. We found that the more receptive language in the spoken (versus written) conversations was also associated with more constructive outcomes, like greater reported understanding in the post-conversation surveys.

Marron understood the intuition of my results before they were published. Not only did he avoid the ultimately unconstructive allure of getting into online arguments, he leveraged the humanizing value of a spoken conversation. By engaging constructively with his antagonizers, he lived the research while providing a powerful example for all of us.

Let’s follow Marron’s example and try living the research. The next time a disagreement is brewing, instead of replying over text, try talking. Ten minutes of speaking could save you a lifetime of misunderstanding.

And the list goes on. What are educators doing to address these increasingly challenging pressures? What practical strategies are they implementing to rebuild positive, relationship-centered classrooms?

Amid these pressures, many educators are creating hopeful new ways of rebuilding school climate, as we learned through our research. This article highlights promising, relationship-centered practices that educators are using right now to foster belonging, productive classroom discussions, conflict resolution, and emotion regulation for both students and themselves.

Connection before correction: Cultivating a sense of belonging

Sarah, a fifth-grade teacher we encountered in our research, notices that Maeve often acts out on test days. As a math test is about to begin, Maeve becomes disruptive—bothering classmates, crumpling papers, and making accusatory comments. Sarah can either immediately correct the behavior or first connect with Maeve. She chooses connection.

Sarah pulls Maeve aside and asks how she’s feeling about the test. Maeve admits she’s nervous and afraid of failing. Sarah listens, reassures her that mistakes are part of learning, and shares that she gets test jitters, too. Feeling seen and supported, Maeve calms down. Only then does Sarah briefly address the earlier behavior, recognizing it was rooted in Maeve’s anxiety.

According to a survey our team administered to nearly 100 educators, teachers are utilizing practical ways to prioritize connections through strategies such as warm individual greetings when students enter the classroom, empathy and validating feelings, sharing personal stories about their lives, and showing sincere interest in students’ lives. By actively listening, using reassuring words and facial expressions, and recognizing student hobbies and activities, they establish common ground for building caring relationships. Saying something as simple as “I understand how you feel” can build a bridge.

Research indicates that when students are in a state of “belonging uncertainty,” they may question the quality of their social connections, directly impacting their motivation. A compromised sense of belonging can cause students to interpret tasks as more difficult than they are as they align the challenge with a feeling that they simply don’t belong. Connecting before correcting can bolster students’ view of problems as more temporary and typical than permanent and unsolvable.

Empowering student voice

Soon after the murder of George Floyd in June 2020, numerous graduates from a suburban high school reached out to their hometown school district’s curriculum office. Across their college classrooms, cafeterias, and dorm rooms, discussions about race in modern America were intense. All of the alumni who reached out felt ill-prepared to engage in such discussions. The director of curriculum shared this feedback with the secondary social studies and English language arts (ELA) teachers.

The teachers responded with fear and concern. They were worried that facilitating classroom discussions around controversial and emotionally charged topics, such as race, would lead to microaggressions, hurt feelings, and repercussions for teachers as a result.

Classroom discussion driven by student voice, where students share their ideas and learn from one another, can sometimes be counterproductive. Research indicates that teachers require explicit professional learning to design and sustain structured student voice practices, including strategies for eliciting authentic input, facilitating deliberation, and engaging students as co-designers of the practices.

To achieve this, the secondary social studies and ELA teachers received training in creating structured environments for discussion using evidence-based best practices:

• Co-create classroom norms: Let students set the norms and rules for class discussion.
• Scaffold respectful civil discourse: Structured techniques like Yes-No-Maybe and Respectful Debate teach students to articulate opinions, listen deeply, and reflect on others’ ideas.
• Practice audience-focused communication: Students tailor their messages for different audiences—classmates, teachers, administrators, or community members.

This framework validates all students’ voices and choices and tends to increase their internal motivation, while maintaining a safe and structured environment.

Structured, student-driven open forums—such as Socratic seminars, student-led meetings, and restorative circles—help formalize respectful exchanges and cultivate trust so students feel safe to take intellectual, social, and emotional risks, all of which are foundational conditions for productive discussion in and out of the classroom.

Co-regulation as the foundation for student-centered discipline

After a peer conflict in algebra class, a middle school student visited the counselor’s office, displaying signs of emotional distress—rapid breathing, tense shoulders, and defensive responses. Instead of asking questions about the situation or reinforcing expectations about appropriate behavior, the counselor sat next to the student, and in a calm tone of voice said, “It looks like you’re feeling frustrated, so let’s slow things down and take a few deep breaths together.” After the student’s breathing slowed and their tense shoulders softened, the counselor asked several open-ended questions to help the student reflect on and make sense of the experience and determine a clear plan of action to repair the peer conflict.

Self-regulation involves a wide range of skills, including emotional awareness, self-soothing, and flexible thinking. Students learn how to self-regulate through co-regulation, the bidirectional process between a child and adult, in which a calm and caring adult provides the environment and scaffolds for the child to regulate their emotions and behavior during stressful situations. When a child experiences feelings of anxiety or overwhelm, their nervous system enters “fight or flight” mode, which may manifest as an emotional meltdown or withdrawal. Through the calm and steady presence of an attuned adult modeling regulation techniques, the balance of their nervous system can be restored.

One of the counselors we surveyed draws upon the 3 Rs from psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry with her students:

• Regulate: Help the student to use exercises such as deep breathing or rhythmic movement to reach a calm state.
• Relate: Connect with the student through active listening and empathy to understand their perspective.
• Reason: Invite the student to engage in reflection and problem solving.

Perry’s steps are grounded in neuroscience, acknowledging that the lower brain must be regulated first before students can access higher brain regions, such as the cortex, to carry out activities like reasoning.

Over time, engaging in co-regulation with caring adults fosters whole-brain integration, reduces the long-term impacts of stress, and helps children to build resilience by internalizing emotional regulation skills through safe, supportive relationships.

Restorative practices to build accountability

After two students got into a heated argument during a group project in a seventh-grade social studies lesson, one student slammed her laptop and said, “That’s it! I give up! You do everything your way.” The other student rolled her eyes and continued typing. Rather than sending the students to the main office or school counselor, the teacher invited them both into the hallway for a restorative conversation.

She asked them each to share their perspectives and then to consider who was affected by their actions. After each student had an opportunity to share, she guided them toward repair and resolution by asking them, “What can you do to improve the situation?” and “What do you need to do that?” Within five minutes, both students verbally agreed to apologize to their fellow group members, as well as to clearly define everyone’s roles within the group. The restorative conversation allowed the girls to resolve their conflict, strengthen their relationship, and shift the focus from blame to accountability.

Restorative practices like this conversation consist of formal and informal processes that help to resolve conflict, foster relationships, and build a sense of community. Numerous studies find that exclusionary forms of discipline, such as suspensions, have detrimental effects on students, including heightened mental health challenges, increased misbehavior, and lower academic achievement. Restorative practices offer a relationship-centered alternative that empowers students who have committed wrongdoing to take full accountability by understanding how their behavior affected others, acknowledging the harm it caused, and taking meaningful action to repair the harm.

Whether used formally through restorative circles and conferences or informally with restorative conversations and talking about feelings, when students are exposed to restorative practices, research finds they show benefits such as experiencing decreased bullying and violence, improved mental health, fewer suspensions and expulsions, improved behavior, and restored relationships.

One school administrator we interviewed said, “I have found that schools who use restorative practices encourage stronger bonds and relationships between teacher and students and between students themselves. This sense of community is a vital facet of a positive school culture and climate.”

Routines to promote educator wellness and connection

Just before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the emotional labor demands on teachers increased to levels unseen in history. In an effort to mitigate the emotional distress of his teachers, one principal asked each staff member to give a positive shoutout to a colleague in the first few minutes of every staff meeting. This routine did lift the mood momentarily and promoted greater positivity, but there was still a great deal of emotional turmoil under the surface that was unaddressed.

Just as students benefit from adult co-regulation that scaffolds their ability to regulate their emotions in stressful situations, so do teachers. An effective co-regulation strategy that works for principals aiming to co-regulate their staff’s emotional distress involves adult modeling and scaffolding of emotional regulation strategies.

In the midst of COVID, the principal implemented a three-minute routine at the start of each staff meeting by modeling a strategy called structured SELf-Questioning:

• I do: The principal models via a think aloud, asking and answering out loud two questions (“What am I feeling?” and “What can I do to self-calm?”)
• We do: Staff ask themselves the same questions, write down their answers, share in pairs, and share out with the whole group if time permits.
• You do: Teachers replicate this in their classrooms with their students.

As the emotional challenges facing schools intensify, the steady ability to navigate one’s own emotions while helping others do the same is the key to a principal’s success.

Providing teachers with evidence-based adult SEL experiences—such as those embedded into staff meetings or professional development—can meaningfully improve educator well-being and promote greater engagement. Abundant research finds that SEL training and SEL teaching have major benefits for both teachers and students.

Reclaiming relationships as the heart of schooling

The pressures facing today’s schools are real, complex, and often overwhelming. It is becoming increasingly clear that meaningful change does not need to start with expansive policy revisions or punitive approaches; it begins with relationships.

Across classrooms, counseling offices, and staff meetings, educators and administrators are choosing connection over correction, regulation over reaction, and restoration over exclusion. They are prioritizing belonging, elevating student voice within classroom environments, engaging in co-regulation, utilizing restorative practices, and tending to educator wellness.

While these approaches are not quick fixes, they are grounded in research, brain science, and the lived experiences of educators who understand that behavior is a form of communication. When students and educators feel seen and heard, they take more academic risks; and when conflict is approached with repair instead of punishment, relationships thrive. Rebuilding school climate is not about returning to what used to be; it is about shaping how we will move forward, intentionally. And these educators and administrators remind us that the path forward is always better with connection.

He passed before that distance was ever repaired. I did not have the tools in time. I kept wondering why this happened so easily, to families and friendships and people who had once known how to be in the same room together.

Then I went to graduate school at Colorado State University. I became a graduate teaching assistant and facilitator for the Center for Public Deliberation (CPD), which became the most fulfilling part of my time in graduate school.

Part of what drew me to this work was my experience with my father, though our story is one many people will recognize. In recent years, political division has worked its way into kitchens and living rooms across the country, coming between people and making once-ordinary conversations hard to have. You may have felt it at your own table.

When I found the CPD, I found the tools I had needed so desperately and had not known existed. These were not techniques for winning an argument or even holding your ground. They were ways of reaching the “why” underneath another person’s perspective, the experiences and stories and information that had built it.

The goal, I discovered, should never have been agreement. It was understanding, the point where someone’s view makes sense to you as something a person could reasonably arrive at, even when reaching that point is hard. That was exactly what my father and I had never had a way to give each other. It showed me the path I wanted to take in life.

Even beliefs that look irrational on the surface usually trace back to a real concern or value underneath. Understanding that root does not mean every belief holds up equally against facts. Some do not. What it means is that curiosity about the person’s underlying concern is what makes deep value-based conversation possible. You can respect where someone is coming from and still hold the line on what is true.

The CPD is hired by cities and local organizations across Northern Colorado to bring community members together around shared challenges. Rather than holding traditional town halls, where people often talk past one another, the CPD designs events that foster collective wisdom: the recognition that the knowledge of a group is far more powerful than any single person’s alone.

What I loved most was who filled the room. A retiree and a college student, a small business owner and a recent arrival, people from across the political spectrum and from neighborhoods that may rarely interact. The issues were as varied as the people: housing, how communities care for their aging members, student mental health, and, with the local newspaper, misinformation and political polarization. Whatever the topic, the aim was the same: to give a group what it needs to work through a shared problem, together.

As a facilitator, my role was to help people, using techniques like uncovering the value tensions underneath their disagreements. This is more delicate than it sounds.

When people argue, they tend to argue about conclusions, but conclusions are not always where the real disagreement lives. More often we hold many of the same values and simply weigh, rank, and apply them differently, shaped by what our own lives have taught us.

Take accessory dwelling units (ADUs), small additional homes built on existing properties. One neighbor might prioritize privacy, worried that an ADU next door changes the quiet street or brings people they don’t know closer to their daily life. Another might prioritize freedom, believing homeowners should have the right to build on their own land as they see fit. Both values can be held by reasonable people. Neither is wrong. The disagreement isn’t really about ADUs. Instead, disagreement lives in which value, privacy or freedom, someone weighs more heavily when the two come into tension.

Naming the value underneath a position does two things at once: It shows the group where the actual tension sits, and it makes the other person’s view legible as something a reasonable person could hold. Once you can see that, movement becomes possible. We were not necessarily searching for common ground that already existed. But, rather, we were building it together.

At some point, tools stopped being something I reached for and became something I embodied in everyday life. I noticed it less as a single moment and more as a pattern showing up everywhere. I found myself curious in interactions that used to pass by unnoticed, wanting to know more about people for no reason other than wanting to know them. When someone said something I disagreed with, my first instinct stopped being to argue. It became asking what shaped that belief, what experience or value sits underneath it, digging past the kind of surface-level exchange most conversations settle for.

Curiosity tends to be contagious. When I show someone true interest, they often show it back. What started as one person asking questions turns into two people learning from one another. That only works, though, if it stays voluntary. Some people are private, and that is their right. I am not asking anyone to disclose more than they want to. If someone wants to share, I listen. I ask. I learn. It stopped being a skill I used and became a way I move through the world.

Long after the events ended, I would catch myself in a heated debate at a dinner or with friends, reaching for the why underneath what someone had said instead of what I deemed to be disagreeable or flawed. I stopped needing to win. I started assuming the person across from me knew something I did not, and that searching to discover their reasoning was the most respectful thing to do.

The harder lesson was patience, and most of it was with myself. Some conversations made me frustrated. Some I simply got wrong. The discipline was never to pretend otherwise but to notice the mistake and repair it, and then to extend that same grace outward. Other people arrive carrying their own frustration and stumble in their own ways, and they need the room to learn that I needed, too.

Sometimes the best thing I had to offer was curiosity. It was a single conversation across difference that left someone feeling heard, which can feel rarer than it should.

That curiosity follows me well beyond any event, into encounters that have nothing to do with policy. In an old mining community in Wyoming that had largely emptied out, I stopped to talk with a man who made pottery. The town was the kind of place where the buildings tell the story before any person has to, where you can read the initial boom and the migration in the empty storefronts and homes.

We sat together while he told me what it had been like to watch his town change, the prosperity that came and went, the quiet the exodus left behind. He spoke about staying when others left, about his craft, about what it means to keep making something with your hands in a place that feels as though some had forgotten.

I was not there as a researcher and I had no agenda. I simply wanted to know, and so I asked, and he told me. I think about that conversation more than he would ever guess, and it gave me something no book could impart. This is what curiosity does. It lets you hear about other people’s lifetimes rather than just their opinions, and it asks something of you in return: the willingness to admit that your own understanding is incomplete, and that other people’s stories and experiences are part of what fills in the gaps. This requires us to choose curiosity over certainty, again and again, even when certainty would be easier.

I do similar work now at Unify America, helping design and support civic assemblies that bring everyday people together to address shared problems. The timeline is slightly longer than those evening events in graduate school, but the ethic is the same.

What moves me most still happens in the small moments of connection: people who would never have crossed paths in ordinary life, of different ages and neighborhoods and political realities, sitting down together over weeks and slowly getting to know one another. They share meals. They learn the names of each other’s kids. They discover, often to their own surprise, that a person they assumed was their opposite carries many of the same worries and hopes they do. I have been in the room while it happens, and you can feel the shift when it comes. The distance that seemed permanent reveals itself as circumstantial.

I don’t say this to suggest that dinner-table tension is the whole story. Many people are living through a period of real precarity right now, for reasons that differ sharply depending on who you ask and what news you consume. Some people are afraid for their safety. Some are afraid for their livelihoods. Some are afraid of being unheard or unseen in a country that no longer feels familiar to them. Whatever the reason, whether it belongs to you, your neighbor, or a stranger you pass on the street, it comes from the same place. We are all moved by our hopes, our dreams, our values, our experiences, our fears.

That’s part of what makes this work harder than it looks from the outside. You cannot ask someone to be curious about a neighbor’s perspective while pretending the stakes are small. The fear is real, even when two people in the same room are concerned about two completely different things. Deliberation does not erase that concern or resolve it. But it does something else that matters as much. It reminds people that they are not just living alongside one another, they are co-creating the communities they share. That means everyone has a seat at the table, not to win an argument, but to build something together that helps all of us navigate life the best way we know how and become a little more of the people we hope to become. Belonging grows out of that kind of collaboration. It is hard to build when we default to blaming our neighbors for our differences, and it gets easier when we choose curiosity instead, again and again, until it becomes a way of being with each other rather than a technique we reach for.

The same attitudes carry weight beyond any single conversation. When people practice curiosity and patience with each other, they build the capacity to do something bigger together: to take part in shaping the decisions that govern their shared life. Civic processes work best when the people inside them can actually hear one another, weigh trade-offs, and hold a disagreement without needing to end it in conquest. That capacity does not appear on its own. It is built the same way any skill is built, through patience, in rooms like the ones I have described, and in the ordinary conversations that happen everywhere else. The more of us who carry these attitudes in public life, the more capable we become, together, of building a collective vision of what it means to participate in a shared civic life.

This is why I do this work. Not because I am trying to solve polarization as an abstract problem, but because I know what it feels like when understanding breaks down between people you care about, and what it feels like when it can be repaired. Every assembly, every conversation, every moment of curiosity is a chance to help others experience what I am still learning myself: that we do not have to choose between our perspectives and our relationships. We can seek to understand one another not out of self-interest, but because human experience is rich beyond measure, and we are all a little incomplete without each other’s stories.

“From my work with elders, I learned stories, games, and how to become a better person,” said a student named Mya. It even relieved despair for one resident, Jodi, who said, “I went from a daily dread that I was still alive and breathing . . . to anticipat[ing] an awesome day that was full of life and joy.”

Many extracurricular activities, sports, meetups, and other community programs bring people of similar ages together: children with children, teens with teens, adults with adults, seniors with seniors. But new research on an intergenerational program known as iGen suggests that these initiatives may be especially beneficial to our health and well-being.

Finding meaning in connection

For the study, the 25 participating students—as well as three elders and eight long-term care staff members—completed a variety of surveys. At the end of the day, they rated how meaningful their interactions with different groups of people were, how much fun and positive and negative emotions they had, and the quality of their physical health that day. They also reported how many kind and helpful actions they performed, and how strong their social connections and sense of belonging were.

Everyone completed surveys for 10 straight school days in late September and early October, and then again in June.

The results suggested that people were experiencing meaningful interactions between generations, and highly meaningful interactions with their peers of similar ages. While people didn’t become happier, healthier, or more kind overall over the course of the program, the researchers did observe changes on a daily basis.

On days when people had more meaningful interactions, they tended to feel better, more connected, healthier, and kinder. This was true for both interactions with people the same age (like students with students, or elders with elders) and intergenerational interactions—although the benefits seemed more pronounced between generations than with peers.

This link appeared even stronger toward the end of the program than near the beginning. In June, having meaningful interactions through iGen seemed to have an even bigger impact on people’s well-being than it did in the fall. The researchers, led by Jason D. E. Proulx, suggest this might be because students had deepened their relationships with elders by that point, or they were savoring their last few weeks together.

The length and depth of this program—spending whole days together over 10 months—may have contributed to how powerful it was, the researchers suggest.

Although this research only reflects one program, with a majority of white participants, it offers promising evidence that programs like this can help young and old alike, and comprise a valuable part of students’ education. Other research finds that interacting across generations can improve mental health and cognitive function in older people, and a sense of purpose for all of us.

“Programs like iGen may be one effective and scalable intervention to foster more inclusive, meaningfully connected, and happier communities,” write Proulx and his colleagues.

Mya’s mother Tanya said that she “built long-lasting friendships with the residents . . . but also learned the value and appreciation of life.”

“It took those sixth-grade kids to bring life back into focus for me,” said Jodi, who had thought her life was over and sometimes wanted it to be. “iGen saved me.”

We are beginning to expect a lot from these pre-teens, whether it’s keeping a promise, taking responsibility, or showing courage. But too often, we have not given them the language, structure, or time to think through how to make the right decision in those moments that matter.

Scientific research can help—believe it or not! There are a range of compelling studies that offer middle school educators a roadmap on what skills and mindsets students need to make the right decisions.
 
Self-determination theory emphasizes the importance of intrinsic motivation—and there are compelling data that middle school students are more likely to act consistently when their goals are personally meaningful, not externally imposed.

In addition, David Yeager’s work on adolescent motivation highlights that young people are deeply driven by a desire for status and respect from their peers and mentors. When students feel respected and see themselves as capable of contributing to others, their motivation and behavior improve.

More recently, research by Benjamin Rogers and his colleagues suggests that when individuals of all ages see their lives as part of a broader “hero’s journey,” they are more likely to act with purpose and be a force for good.

Overall, researchers point to a clear and compelling insight: Students need opportunities to define who they are, who they want to become, and how their everyday choices—guided by their values—align with that identity. This insight directly informed a curriculum we designed for middle school students titled Moments That Matter.
 
The Moments That Matter curriculum is a program of the Griffin Institute at the National Medal of Honor Museum, based in Arlington, Texas. For middle school students, a “moment that matters” could be when they’re being pressured to lie, steal, or cheat or when they want to hang out with their friends, but their mom needs them to stay at home with a younger sibling.

Tapping into their own personal interests and experiences, our mission as educators was to take middle school students on a journey of self-discovery, empowering them to explore two essential questions: Who am I? Who am I becoming for others?

While students learn about the history of the Medal of Honor—the highest U.S. military decoration—the curriculum is primarily focused on four core values that have enabled ordinary Americans to do extraordinary things: commitment, integrity, sacrifice, and courage.

Each student begins their journey by identifying their own superpowers, the unique strengths, talents, and skills they will need to become their best selves for others. Students are also encouraged to identify the superpowers of their classmates. At the core of these activities is an opportunity for students to discover how their unique strengths can connect to and support the values and goals that mean the most to them.

One of the cornerstone moments of the curriculum is when students are encouraged to reflect and write down a set of goals that focus on who they want to become for others. Some students write they want to be the best friend they can be. Others say they want their parents to see them as trustworthy and responsible.

After students have written about a specific goal that will enable them to be their best self for others, teachers guide them through a series of lessons on each of the four Medal of Honor values. The lessons do not focus on hypothetical scenarios but on how each student’s everyday choices and decisions directly connect and shape their personal goals and identity.

Commitment: Turning goals into action

Students are encouraged to reflect on commitments they have already made, whether it’s helping their parents with the dishes or wanting to be the best teammate. Students also collaboratively explore the reasons why it’s sometimes hard to keep their commitments (e.g., peer pressure, competing priorities, wanting to fit in). In addition, students learn how to develop positive habits and routines that will help them to consistently “live” their commitments.

Each student then creates their own “commitment action plan.” The plan includes:

• a commitment they will implement within the next seven days;
• the habits and routines they will create;
• the challenges they may face; and
• a person they will ask to hold them accountable to their commitment (a friend, parent, teacher).

Integrity: Aligning our values, words, and actions

Students next learn why integrity is important in those moments that matter—and how integrity occurs when we align our beliefs, words, and actions. Students read and discuss different scenarios where someone has shown integrity (and the value or belief at the heart of that person’s integrity, such as compassion, friendship, or sportsmanship).

Students then create their own “Integrity Action Plan.” They start by writing down their North Star values, the values and beliefs most important to them (e.g., honesty, fairness, kindness). Every student is also encouraged to come up with their own personal motto that they will repeat to themselves whenever they need to be reminded why it’s important to follow their North Star values.

Sacrifice: Acting for others, not just ourselves

Students next explore how sacrifice is almost always linked to a conviction or strong belief about who they want to be. Students also discover how empathy and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can help them decide when to make a sacrifice. They write in their journal about a fictional character from a movie, show, or book who made a sacrifice and how empathy might have motivated the character to make that sacrifice.

Each student then creates their own “sacrifice preparedness plan.” They first write down a particular conviction or belief (e.g., “I want to be caring”). Next, they reflect on those “moments” when they may need to make a sacrifice to stay aligned with their convictions and beliefs. A week later, students come together to reflect on two questions: How does making sacrifices impact people in your life? and How could you start making sacrifices for the things or people you care about?

Courage: Acting despite fear, danger, or hardship

At this moment in the Moments That Matter curriculum, students are eager to explore the three essential “tools” that produce courage in those moments that matter: commitment, competence, and confidence. They learn that:

• commitments push us to act with courage;
• competence is having the knowledge and skills to do something scary or difficult; and
• confidence is that internal feeling of “I can do this!” —an indispensable tool that fuels our courageous behaviors.

Students also learn about the power of positive self-talk.

Finally, students are invited to write their own “courage action plan.” At the heart of the plan is identifying the different areas of their lives where they may need to act with courage.

Next, they create their own “if/then” scripts: “If” I am in this situation, “then” I will respond with courage because I have made a commitment, practiced the skills and knowledge to do the right thing, and can leverage my confidence and positive self-talk to overcome my fears or doubts.

What have we learned from tracking the classroom impact of Moments That Matter? Teachers who piloted the curriculum have told us that what they most appreciate about it is how it encourages student voice (e.g., how students were learning from each other as they shared with their peers why they sometimes did not show integrity or courage).

The post-assessment data collected from our pilot implementation is also promising. Students report increased levels of self-awareness, a greater willingness to take responsibility for their actions, and a stronger tendency to think about their values when making everyday decisions.

Perhaps most powerfully, we appreciated hearing from teachers that the Moments That Matter curriculum gave them the opportunity to serve as mentors. As one teacher shared with us: “The curriculum reminded me why I became a teacher. It gave my students space to talk about character in a way that felt authentic and meaningful for students—and me.”

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In contrast, a 16-year-old white girl said, “I think it’s OK. . . . I do feel bad for minorities. . . . I’m white however and come from a somewhat similar background so I will be alright.”

These two teenagers responded very differently to the racial climate created by Trump—during his first presidency. Research on adolescents during Trump’s first term takes on new relevance now that he is back in office.

As a scholar of adolescent development, I have studied U.S. teenagers for over two decades. When Trump took office in 2016, I was in the midst of leading a five-year study to understand how young people become civically engaged. My colleagues and I were tracking adolescents’ beliefs and behaviors over time, which gave us a unique opportunity to document changes after Trump was elected.

Focusing on 1,400 ninth through 12th graders, I hypothesized that adolescents would become more divided during Trump’s presidency, given the political divisions evident among adults in 2016. And, like other social scientists, my team and I did identify diverging worldviews about racism and inequalities among teenagers and increased discrimination.

Decades of research show that adolescents are influenced in lasting ways by societal events and political shifts, such as the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and changing presidential administrations. Likewise, the short-term impacts of Trump’s presidency identified by research may portend long-lasting effects for this generation of young people.

Diverging worldviews

In our study, young Trump supporters were more likely to be white and male and to have politically conservative parents, and less likely to be immigrants. Teenagers in our study who disapproved of Trump were more likely to be female and Latino, Black or Asian, to have politically liberal parents, and to have parents or grandparents who were immigrants. These groups were not just different demographically; they diverged in their worldviews about race and inequality over time.

Across Trump’s first year in office, young Trump supporters decreased their race consciousness—that is, their support for racial equity and inclusion declined. We measured race consciousness by whether high schoolers agreed with statements like “I show support for equal rights for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds” and “I express concern about discrimination faced by racial and ethnic groups.”

Young Trump supporters also grew less aware of inequalities in society during this timeframe, becoming less likely to endorse statements like “In America, certain groups have fewer chances to get ahead.”

Conversely, young Trump detractors increased their race consciousness and awareness of societal inequalities during this time. Another study that interviewed youth of color during Trump’s first presidency similarly found that adolescents critical of Trump developed deeper capacities to understand societal inequalities in response to Trump’s policies.

Did these divergent beliefs translate into different behaviors?

Interestingly, only young Trump supporters in our study became more likely to vote after Trump’s first election. This heightened interest in voting among young Trump supporters aligns with 2024’s election results. Although people ages 18–29 were more likely to support Kamala Harris than Donald Trump, the majority of white youth (54%) and young men (56%) who voted turned out to support Trump. The adolescents we surveyed in 2016 and 2017 are among this cohort of young voters in 2024.

Increased discrimination

The divergent beliefs of Trump supporters and detractors may have implications for other behaviors in addition to voting.

After Trump’s first election, 28% of K–12 teachers reported witnessing increases in students’ derogatory remarks toward underrepresented groups, especially in predominantly white schools. Students were emboldened to make bigoted statements about immigrants, Muslims, and other groups. Researchers documented incidents of anti-Black racism and anti-transgender discrimination in schools.

Our study found that Latino youth experienced more discrimination after Trump was elected. Latino adolescents also expressed fears and anxieties due to Trump’s hostile immigration policies and rhetoric, and they attributed Trump’s stance to racism. Four psychologists who systematically reviewed the available research concluded that the first Trump presidency harmed Latino adolescents’ mental health.

These studies did not definitively attribute increased discrimination to actions of young Trump supporters. But young Trump supporters did become less concerned about discrimination and racial equity. And adult Trump supporters did endorse more racist and anti-immigrant attitudes and the use of political violence compared with other adults.

What about now?

Trump’s executive orders in 2025 have expanded the detention and deportation of immigrants, declared that gender is binary, and declared that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are illegal.

Based on how people responded in the early days of Trump’s first term, these orders may directly harm adolescents and embolden discrimination again. For example, immediately after the 2024 election, crisis calls from LGBTQ+ youth increased by 200%, and harassing texts were sent to Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ adolescents across 20 states.

The executive order to eliminate teaching on racial and gender equity from schools, if upheld, would limit adolescents’ opportunities to learn about racism, sexism, and inequalities faced by different groups.

Adolescents’ awareness of and concerns about inequalities diverged during Trump’s first presidency based on their political views. Given the policy focus of Trump’s second term, I anticipate similar or greater divisions in young people’s racial attitudes and actions than my research revealed over the course of his first term.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the book, King addresses loving people responsible for racial segregation and violence against Black Americans, but he does so without ever condoning racial harm.

While King’s understanding of forgiveness flowed from his theology, psychology offers a perspective on whether forgiveness may be more or less helpful for us when a broader social offense has been committed or is ongoing. Though most forgiveness research has looked at offenses between two people—like friends or family members—a few efforts have tried to understand intergroup offenses, like racism. Even wrongs committed between two community members in the U.S. and elsewhere happen within an inescapable reality shaped by race.

Thus, for Americans from racially marginalized groups, considering whether to forgive involves taking into account our individual wellness, as well as the historical context and the social and cultural worlds we live in.

Racial pressure to forgive

On the whole, forgiveness should be viewed within a larger context, says Michael Perez, a social psychologist at Wesleyan University, particularly when it comes to race. If social justice is yet to be achieved, then forgiveness has some risks.

In a courtroom in October 2018, Brandt Jean hugged and forgave Amber Guyger, a white off-duty officer, for fatally shooting his older brother Botham Jean in his Dallas apartment, drawing media fascination with his forgiveness in spite of her murder conviction.

Perez, who was a psychology Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University at the time, became troubled by the coverage. It held echoes of the racially motivated gunning down of nine Mother Emanuel AME Church congregants in Charleston in 2017. “What I felt was that in those instances because the forgiveness was so front and center the racial components of this case [melted into the background]. It was the forgiveness that took up all the narrative oxygen,” he says.

Perez prompts mental health professionals and psychologists to consider the social context of racism when public forgiveness is expressed through Black pain.

Historian and journalist Stacey Patton wrote for the Washington Post, “Black pain is only heard after forgiveness is afforded to these white perpetrators. Black rage is challenged as inappropriate and unhelpful, while the media and others celebrate the traumatized family members’ ability to respond to this latest heinous crime with compassion and love. When black forgiveness is the means for white atonement, it enables white denial about the harms that racist violence creates. When black redemption of white America is prioritized over justice and accountability, there is no chance of truth and reconciliation. It trivializes real black suffering, grief, and the heavy lifting required for any possibility of societal progress.”

If you are not white, Perez says, there may be “cultural expectations of decorum and how you should engage” that stigmatize anger or pushback. Perez worries about the risk of coerced forgiveness when society almost expects forgiveness from certain racialized groups.

In recent years, as public shootings of Black people receive attention, communication scholars have turned an eye to analyzing Black forgiveness whenever a socially visible violence occurs. Communication scholar Daniel Morris documents how news reporters frequently ask the relatives of victims of police brutality if they will forgive the perpetrators.

“We maintain that the wider public not only expects a rhetoric of forgiveness when racial ghosts of the past (and present) manifest in ways that cause Black pain but also those grief-stricken Black families must offer the forgiveness in non-threatening and [expeditious] ways that eases public consciences,” write scholars Andre Johnson and Earle Fischer.

Therefore, an individual choice to forgive may be influenced by larger societal pressures to do so, not just religious pressure but also racial pressure. 

In broader culture, Perez argues, Black forgiveness narratives may reinforce the idea that we live in a more equitable, colorblind society than we actually do, thus letting society off the hook from having to dismantle systems of injustice.

“A lot of the prevailing literature is that forgiveness is letting a weight down. But the pressure to forgive can actually be quite burdensome,” says Perez. The field needs “more people to really think about the idea of how racism can permeate seemingly positive things.”

One of researcher Robert Enright’s (non-sequential) four phases of forgiveness is examining your anger. Perez says we must afford people the right to process that anger on their own timeline. “Sometimes we shy away from the negative emotions,” he says. “But anger gets people to push for change.”

Perez worries that forgiveness just “helps Black people survive in a toxic environment of racism as opposed to addressing the sociocultural worlds that reproduce racism.”

Forgiveness as a coping mechanism

However, despite our social realities, Perez recognizes that some individuals choose forgiveness as a part of their journey. For some, forgiveness may serve as a coping mechanism to survive the environment in which they live day to day—and it may have some benefits.

African Americans who cultivate forgiveness as a general disposition have decreased depressive symptoms, according to a study by Jasmin Brooks Stephens, a University of California, Berkeley, psychologist. She surveyed 101 African American college students who said they had experienced racial discrimination.

Approximately 27% of them met criteria for clinical depression, and the more racial discrimination they said they experienced, the higher their depression symptoms. But this link was weaker when people had a higher tendency to forgive.

The findings corroborated a 2017 study, which found that African American men who practiced forgiveness developed fewer depressive symptoms even as they experienced everyday racial discrimination. However, younger men reported experiencing racism more often and struggled more with depression and granting forgiveness.

Several scholars have also looked at forgiveness through the lens of health.

In a 2012 article, sociologist Michael McFarland, an associate professor at Florida State University, and his colleagues explored the results from a 2001 nationally representative survey of older American Christians—both Blacks and whites. The study found that Blacks who have a more forgiving disposition are less likely to experience alcohol abuse and chronic health conditions.

But those who lived in rundown neighborhoods did not experience the same benefits. They found that Blacks who live “in more deteriorated neighborhoods may not receive the health benefits from forgiveness that those in less deteriorated neighborhoods receive.”

Together, these studies suggest forgiveness has benefits for those who belong to racial minority groups, but they may be limited when other social factors are not addressed.

Forgiveness as a benefits and risk assessment

Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of California San Diego, finds that people can cultivate unforgiveness as a survival mechanism, particularly in communities that receive underinvestment. Neighborhood culture there may encourage unforgiveness or even revenge to protect people from more harms. Being forgiving could be perceived as weakness and make someone vulnerable to being taken advantage of.

McCullough studies forgiveness through an evolutionary lens. He theorizes about what conditions lead to forgiveness.

After an offense, a victim has different choices about how to respond. In a 2021 review, McCullough and his colleague Thomas McCauley write, one option is to simply avoid the offender to reduce the likelihood of being harmed again—but that might be difficult depending on any prior relationship to the offender. The victim could take revenge, but that might have its own risks. Both of these strategies also run another risk: losing access to whatever benefits the exploiter offers, such as employment or educational opportunities, financial benefits, or even belonging, love, or acceptance.

Forgiveness might become the right solution, but it depends on the conditions that exist in a particular scenario. For example, a nonprofit that supports BIPOC youth relies on a high-profile donor. The donor makes some insensitive comments that reveal racial biases and are hurtful to staff members, who are also primarily members of these racial groups. In this case, the donor is a long-time partner of the organization and plays a vital role in connecting them to others in the community.

McCullough and his colleagues have found that our decision to forgive is related to our calculation of both the threat of future harm and the value of our relationship with the offender, though neither of these are necessarily the only clear cause of our choice to forgive.

If when confronted, the donor is dismissive and shows no intention to change, staff members might still choose a type of forgiveness to preserve the relationship, while remaining guarded around him. After all, the options to either avoid the offender or take revenge contain their own risks to the stability of the nonprofit.

But if the donor apologizes and takes accountability for the harm by committing to a racial bias training, the nonprofit director might value the relationship more and believe his staff is less likely to be harmed again—thus, encouraging forgiveness.

Intergroup forgiveness

Another line of inquiry is attempting to measure and define forgiveness in an intergroup setting, specifically as it applies to race-related offenses.

In 2015, Georgia State University psychologist Don Davis and his colleagues tested a newly created intergroup forgiveness survey with African American students, who answered questions about their decision to forgive, their perceptions of the value of relationships with an offending group, and how much they predicted being exploited by that group. Students also filled out questionnaires on forgiveness and microaggressions.

They found that students frequently chose to avoid the group—rather than forgive—when they did not judge relationships with that group to be valuable or thought future harm to be likely. The more they felt exploited, the more often they chose a strategy of revenge.

Taking it a step further, Davis and his colleagues asked a separate group of racially or ethnically marginalized students about how committed they were to religion and how connected they were to their racial or ethnic identity, alongside their intergroup forgiveness.

Within the population studied, their findings hinted that people with a stronger racial or ethnic identity showed more intergroup forgiveness. Of the participants, 72.5% had a strong racial or ethnic identity and were more likely to forgive, while the rest were less forgiving but varied in their sense of identity.

People with more religious commitment tended to show particular aspects of forgiveness indicating a decision to forgive—e.g., “I have made a commitment to forgiving them” and “My choice is to forgive them.” Davis says that this might support the idea that intending to forgive can be a coping strategy, similar to Stephens’s notion of forgiveness.

This research shows that interpersonal and intergroup forgiveness appear to be different things. Furthermore, members of the same group choose different strategies in response to race-based offenses, which only sometimes include forgiveness.

Radical forgiveness

Meanwhile, Perez agrees that there might be insights to learn from how Black Christians during the Civil Rights Movement reframed forgiveness not as weak but as power. Public, radical love expressed in peaceful protest highlighted the depths of racist hatred and aimed to move sympathetic whites to join them in social change.

In King’s writing on forgiveness, he was elaborating on the biblical text where Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive a brother who sinned against him. While Peter asks if seven times is enough, Jesus challenges him to 70 times that amount.

King’s elaboration is that no one who forgives that much could do so without forgiveness becoming a permanent character trait. Yet it is by displaying that inner change—actively standing against injustice using (in his case) faith-informed non-violent civil action—that puts on display the depth of the evil underlying racial discriminations.

In a later chapter in “Strength to Love,” King wrote about loving our enemies: “Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

King’s aim was to forgive so hard and thoroughly that justice would flow.

After peaking in 2004 with 64% of the public saying they basically trust the police, confidence sank to a low of 43% by 2022, from which it’s barely recovered, according to Gallup.

But that average conceals a landscape fragmented by race, class, and politics. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly nine out of 10 Democrats support major changes in policing, while only 14% of Republicans do. Two-thirds of all Americans say police treat Black people less fairly than others, a view embraced by almost all Black adults. In general, the lower you go in education and income, the more trust in police falls.

This distrust has an emotional impact on the human beings who comprise America’s police force. As Texas State University crime scientist Tamara Herold describes (based on others’ research), 80% of police are beset by chronic stress; one in four suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression; and suicide rates are 54% higher than in the general population. In many agencies, resignations are rising and recruitment is faltering.

Herold has served as senior advisor to the National Institute of Justice at the U.S. Department of Justice, and developed the pathbreaking Place Network Investigations violence reduction strategy. Her Center for Problem-Oriented Policing serves as a major clearinghouse for law enforcement strategies.

In searching abroad for alternative models of policing, Herold found Colonel Dr. Bernd Burger of the Bavarian State Police in Germany. He introduced her to Markus Ebner, an Austrian psychologist who has developed a new model of “positive leadership” and studied its implementation in police agencies.

I interviewed all three of them at the European Conference on Positive Psychology in Dublin, Ireland, in July. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Tamara, how would you characterize the emotional state of American policing today?

Tamara Herold: It varies across jurisdictions, but overall morale is much lower than it was 10 years ago.

The statistics reflect that. Agencies across the United States are struggling with recruitment, retention, and officer well-being.

Policing has gone through an extraordinarily difficult decade. While many professions face similar challenges, policing occupies a unique role in society. Without a healthy police force, it’s difficult to have a healthy society.

In recent years, police officers have also been heavily criticized in the United States. Some of that scrutiny has been entirely justified. Serious misconduct deserves public attention and accountability.

But one consequence is that many people who have never personally interacted with a police officer now begin those encounters with distrust. That creates an enormous challenge for officers who are trying to help, because successful policing depends on public trust.

JAS: Markus, tell me about positive leadership. What is it?

Markus Ebner: Positive leadership is a leadership style that fosters positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment among employees. It’s measurable, it can be developed, and we can study its outcomes scientifically. We call our model PERMA-Lead.

 

JAS: What are the benefits of positive leadership?

ME: There are benefits at several levels.

For employees, positive leadership is associated with lower stress and fewer symptoms of burnout. Leaders themselves also experience less stress and burnout.

At the team level, people cooperate more, support one another, and create a healthier workplace atmosphere.

At the organizational level, the benefits are measurable, as well. In one study of supermarkets, customers spent more money when stores were led by positive leaders, and employee sick days were lower. So positive leadership isn’t just good for people—it also benefits organizations financially.

   

JAS: You’ve studied positive leadership in policing. What did you find?

ME: We found strong relationships between positive leadership and important outcomes. Teams led by positive leaders reported lower burnout risk. They also felt more responsible for the team’s collective success.

When leaders were less positive, officers focused primarily on their own individual responsibilities rather than the success of the team. I think that’s especially important from a democratic perspective, because policing depends on collaboration and shared responsibility.

JAS: Bernd, how did you discover positive leadership, and why was it relevant to your work as a police commander?

Bernd Burger: I came to it almost by accident.

When I became a commander, I realized that younger officers were very different from my generation. They wanted explanations. The blunt, highly critical leadership style that had been common when I started my career simply didn’t work anymore.

I began giving presentations about younger generations and how police organizations could improve recruitment and retention. Eventually, I realized that leadership was really the central issue. People join organizations because of leadership, and they stay because of leadership.

That led me to Markus’s book on positive leadership. After more than 20 years in policing, I immediately recognized that the best leaders I had worked with naturally embodied the five pillars of positive leadership.

For police officers, that’s especially valuable because we don’t have much time to read scientific research. We need approaches that are practical, understandable, and easy to implement.

I became certified in the approach and now help police agencies throughout Germany and Switzerland integrate positive leadership into their organizations.

Germany also has an advantage in that police officers receive extensive education. Basic officers complete at least two and a half years of training. Middle managers complete another two years of study, and senior leaders earn an additional two-year master’s degree. In total, I received six and a half years of education before reaching senior leadership.

About a year and a half ago, Germany updated its national police leadership regulations. The new guidance emphasizes giving officers meaning and purpose, but it doesn’t explain how to do that. Positive leadership provides exactly those practical tools.

JAS: What are the biggest challenges to implementing positive leadership?

BB: Police organizations are traditionally hierarchical. When people rise through the ranks, they sometimes assume they no longer need to explain their decisions. They simply give orders.

But people need to understand why they’re being asked to do something.

Purpose is especially important for younger officers. People often say that policing’s purpose is simply to provide safety. I ask them, “If that’s all our purpose is, what’s the difference between us and the police in North Korea or Russia?”

 

For me, our purpose is to protect both safety and freedom. We must be transparent. We are accountable under the law. If we make mistakes, we must acknowledge them and learn from them.

That broader purpose helps officers understand why honesty, accountability, and learning matter.

Another challenge is bureaucracy. Police organizations operate within legal systems, and laws are written in very formal, dry language. That style often carries over into everyday communication.

Formal emails rarely make anyone feel appreciated or inspired. Supervisors become accustomed to communicating that way.

One thing I try to do in my workshops is help leaders see that they can give clear instructions while also being warm, respectful, and encouraging. You don’t lose authority by communicating positively. In fact, people usually respond much better.

JAS: Tamara, how can we apply these models and insights to improving American policing?

TH: First-line supervisors are absolutely critical. If you ask most police chiefs who’s really running an agency day to day, they’ll tell you it’s the first-line supervisors.

That’s why we’re focusing on Markus’s PERMA leadership training for those leaders.

We also need to rethink police education. Other countries invest three, four, or even six years educating police officers. In the United States, we often expect someone to be ready after four or six months of training.

At the same time, many people argue that policing is already too expensive. I think that’s shortsighted.

JAS: Yet many agencies seem to be responding with signing bonuses and higher salaries.

TH: Those measures are understandable, but they’re really bandages.

After losing so many excellent officers, agencies are trying to stop the bleeding. Recruitment bonuses might be intended to help fill vacancies, but they don’t address the underlying causes.

We need to ask why the profession reached this point in the first place. That includes investing in better leadership, better education, and more comprehensive training.

As Bernd mentioned earlier, it’s like putting makeup on someone who’s suffering from internal bleeding. They may look better temporarily, but the real problem remains untreated.

Too often, legislation is written in response to the worst examples rather than asking how to help the overwhelming majority of officers who are already doing excellent work every day.

Instead of focusing exclusively on preventing failure, we should also invest in helping good officers become even better.

JAS: Tell me about your work in Austin and with police departments across the United States.

TH: I’m a professor at Texas State University, and much of my work focuses on helping police departments develop evidence-based crime prevention strategies, particularly for violent crime.

What I’ve learned is that even the best strategies require excellent leadership. Successful implementation depends on leaders who know how to guide people effectively.

One concept I’ve learned from Markus’s team is what they call “authentic excellence.” It combines personal strengths with professional competencies.

My work has traditionally focused on building competencies—teaching police officers the science of crime prevention and community dynamics. Pairing those competencies with leaders’ individual strengths has enormous potential.

JAS: What are you hoping to learn through your research?

TH: We already know that positive leadership is associated with lower burnout and healthier organizations.

The next question is whether leadership training actually produces those outcomes over time.

We’ll be evaluating the effects of PERMA leadership training in American policing for the first time. We want to know how long the benefits last, whether some officers benefit more than others, and what kinds of organizational outcomes improve.

Will sick leave decline? Will public complaints decrease? Could positive interactions increase so much that citizen commendations become more common?

These are all empirical questions.

If taxpayers are investing in police training, we have a responsibility to ensure that the training actually works. The existing evidence suggests it will, but rigorous evaluation is essential.

A new Gallup Poll conducted in the United States paints a different picture of the state of kindness. Researchers surveyed over 2,000 American adults asking them to report on their everyday experiences—how often they’d witnessed kindness or received kindness from someone else—as well as how comfortable they were to initiate kindness toward a stranger. By asking individuals about their personal experiences (as opposed to their general impressions based on the current zeitgeist), the researchers found that kindness in the U.S. is more alive and well than we might expect.

“Kindness is swirling all around us, but the perception by ordinary people is that it’s not,” says Stuart Muszynski, president and chief executive officer of the Values-in-Action Foundation and codesigner of the poll. “There’s a kindness perception gap.”

The good news about kindness

Muszynski and his colleagues found that a majority of Americans reported seeing kindness regularly in their everyday lives. Sixty percent said that they’d seen people acting in kind, respectful ways often or very often, while 65% said they’ve been the recipients of kind acts from someone in their community within the last seven days.

Also, 73% said that they viewed other Americans as generally very kind or somewhat kind—a figure that belies our worries to the contrary.

“What shows up in the media every day is a very unkind America,” says Muszynski. “At the grassroots level, people see kindness every day. It’s around us all the time.”

An even higher percentage of those polled, 90%, said they would be very comfortable or somewhat comfortable initiating a kind act toward a stranger—a heartwarming finding. Muszynski points out that this reflects the fact that people who witness kindness are more willing to pay it forward.

“If you see kindness, you do kindness,” says Muszynski. “It’s a natural empathy reaction.”

Experiences of kindness may vary with age

Despite the good news, Muszynski noted some nuances around the findings. For example, younger adults were less likely to witness kindness or be the recipients of kind acts, giving them a less favorable outlook on the state of kindness in our country.

Young adults also felt less comfortable than older adults offering kindness to someone they don’t know. Only 35% of 18 to 29 year olds said they were very comfortable initiating a kind act toward a stranger—significantly less than the 49% of 30 to 49 year olds and the 64% of adults 65 and older that said the same.

“An individual is much more likely to see kindness, report kindness, and do kindness, and then that drops for individuals in the 18- to 29-year-old bracket,” says Muszynski. “That was really, really surprising to us as well as to Gallup.”

Muszynski speculates that this may be due to how distressed younger generations are. He notes that this age group has lived through the 2008 recession, increased political polarization, the COVID-19 pandemic, escalating climate change, and the rise of social media culture. These all could have added to their sense of isolation or feeling the need to look out for themselves first, making it more difficult for kindness to flourish.

“If you’re growing up with an individual as well as collective perception that there’s not kindness around you, you’re not necessarily going to feel comfortable [offering] kindness,” he says.

It could also be that younger adults are generally unhappier than their elders, for developmental reasons. Studies suggest that younger adults experience less positive and more negative emotion than older adults—in part due to older people benefitting from better emotion regulation skills. A poorer mood or outlook could have an impact on their kind behavior, as happier people tend to be kinder.

A recent Pew Research poll found that younger adults report greater mental health challenges than older adults, too, which means they will likely have less energy or emotional bandwidth to reach out to others in need.

Muszynski fears that because young people are more plugged in to the negative messages in social media, it could lead them to expect less kindness in the world. He points to research by Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki that found students had overly pessimistic views of how empathic and friendly other students were, based on false beliefs rather than fact. Once Zaki and his colleagues created a campaign to alert students to the fallacy of that narrative, students were much more open to engaging with one another.

“It’s really about social norms and the influence that social norms have in any kind of ecosystem,” says Muszynski.

How real is the kindness age gap?

Of course, one Gallup survey doesn’t paint the full picture on American kindness. Additional research adds context.

A recent meta-analysis pooling together findings from several studies around the world found that, overall, older adults tended to be kinder than younger adults—like the Gallup Poll. However, the difference between groups depended on the type of kindness offered. Older adults tended to be more open to sharing money or resources than younger adults; when it came to assisting someone or comforting them, the age differences were much smaller or unclear.

“Older adults may be more generous in some ways, but they are not necessarily more prosocial in every kind of situation,” says David Shum, coauthor of the study and a neuropsychologist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Shum and his colleagues also found that a person’s financial situation affected kind behavior. The differences in prosociality based on age were much stronger when an older person had a high level of income than when they didn’t. This suggests that a person’s socioeconomic status could play a role in kindness, too, and that the age difference effect may reflect a difference in means.

“If younger adults have fewer resources, they may appear less prosocial in some situations, even if they still care about others,” says Shum.

Complicating the picture, other research raises questions about whether age and other demographics are actual factors in kindness—and, if so, why.

For example, one study in Germany found that younger adults were actually more prosocial than older adults overall, though the type of kindness mattered, too. As people aged, their willingness to engage in genuine kindness (benevolence) or norm-based kindness (reciprocity or helping to promote fairness) decreased, perhaps because they had fewer resources. The opposite finding from the Gallup poll could be due to the study’s different time, place, and culture, as well as how kindness was measured (experimentally, in addition to self-report).

Muszynski believes economic stress could keep people from being more kind if they are focused more on survival. But economic factors couldn’t completely account for the age differences he found in the Gallup poll. While the poll did find that less educated and poorer people were more uncomfortable helping a stranger than those with more education and income, younger adults within those groups were still less comfortable reaching out to others than older people within those same groups.

We can all learn to be kinder

Regardless of the research on an actual age difference in kindness in the United States, everyone, old and young, could be nudged toward acting kinder. After all, kindness is a universal value, vital to the health of individuals as well as our nation. And it’s often contagious.

Fortunately, small, individual acts of kindness are pretty much the norm, not only in the United States but around the world. As the authors of an international study on kind behavior found, “requests for assistance are very frequent and mostly successful; and when people decline to give help, they normally give a reason.” Though cultural variations impact how this looks, kindness generally begets more kindness—just as Muszynski’s results suggest.

So, how to encourage more kindness to spread? It may be important to remind people that we tend to underestimate the value of our kindness toward others, thinking it won’t matter that much, when it does. Sometimes we have to just overcome our reluctance to step out of our comfort zone in order to initiate kindness toward a stranger and to see how nice it can be. For tips on how to do that in your everyday life, Greater Good offers several research-based kindness practices for any age group.

To Muszynski, part of the solution lies in making ongoing, everyday kindnesses easier to notice. Sometimes, people don’t label everyday actions as kind acts, he says; we don’t recognize that the nurse caring for us is being kind (not just doing their job) or that listening to a grieving friend is an act of kindness. He hopes to encourage more kind acts through a public kindness challenge that he and his team developed.

“I believe that the solution is to change the paradigm, change the dialogue, change the ability for people to see and understand kindness,” says Muszynski.

Wherever and whoever you are, it never hurts to practice kindness in your own life. We all have the opportunity to build a culture of kindness, making for a more perfect and compassionate union.

This phenomenon creates an exceptional opportunity for college and university faculty. Not only can they teach content, but they can help students cultivate character virtues needed for adult life and potentially see them spread throughout many areas of society.

Without too much heavy lifting, faculty can create classroom conditions that cultivate virtues like open-mindedness, awareness, empathy, and democratic citizenship. These virtues can help increase students’ capacity for ethical decision making, leadership, and professional growth, which are crucial for responsible participation in society.

As young people tackle heightened ideological polarization and partisan hostility in the U.S., they need the right tools to navigate tough conversations and connect with others whose lives look different from their own. Universities can offer a safe and structured, yet intellectually challenging, environment for their students to practice character virtues that are essential to a healthy society.

What university experiences support character development?

Our project team wanted to understand how students’ experiences at our university affect their capacity to cultivate character virtues. To do this, we conducted 12 focus groups with 51 undergraduate students, asking them to reflect on the aspects of their course experiences that either supported or hindered them in developing character virtues. Below are some key takeaways.

1. Activities that promote perspective taking and productive disagreement can support students in practicing virtues such as open-mindedness, awareness, and empathy. Examples of these activities varied in scope. Several students spoke about the importance of building meaningful relationships with peers, both inside and outside the classroom. They often mentioned how these opportunities were crucial in nurturing virtues related to open-mindedness and empathy.

Within classes, students highlighted that their most meaningful peer relationships were facilitated through working with members of their program cohort, participating in project-based group work, or discussing topics with partners. For example, students talked about how working in small-group settings encouraged them to build trust with one another, ultimately fostering a classroom environment that encouraged authentic dialogue and productive disagreement:

The [program] cohort that I’m in [is] still small enough where I could probably name everybody, and a fun fact about them, and like that’s super cool, because then I can also disagree with everybody because I feel comfortable, knowing who they are and I know their values, and I know how to contradict them in a way that’s productive versus just like arguing at someone for hours, [that] doesn’t get you very far.

One student, for example, recounted her experience completing an assignment that required her to interview someone who held a different political viewpoint from her. She shared:

I think [my Political Dialogue class is] where I started working on my open-mindedness . . . because [I realized] everyone has a deeper root for what they believe in. There was one guy I had to meet with and talk with, and the reason he was more [politically] conservative was because he grew up in the [Great] Depression era, and his [conservatism] came from the economic side. [This assignment] was really wonderful, because you also learn these skills of talking to people and presenting empathy and open-mindedness [to others].

One student shed light on how her course experiences have helped her grow in her ability to be more curious and less judgmental about people with different views than her own:

[My classes] allow me to have a wider perspective of people’s backgrounds, views, and ideas, and why they have them, even if it’s someone that I don’t agree with. I still appreciate being exposed to that. I think the way my classes are structured really help me learn from a different perspective . . . my professor will take time out of the beginning of class to literally put all [our] desks in a circle so that we look at each other when we speak. It’s little things like that that help with my moral development . . . when I leave [university], I’ll know how to properly listen to a person, ask follow-up questions, and ask clarifying questions . . . little things like that [can] help me learn about someone holistically rather than just [think] “they said a statement” and then I judge it based off of the statement.

2. Personal connections with instructors who show empathy help cultivate environments where students feel comfortable asking questions and sharing opinions. It is not surprising that students emphasized the critical role their instructors play. Specifically, they shared the importance of instructors demonstrating effort in building authentic and meaningful relationships with their students, and being accessible (such as lingering at the end of class, showing up where students spend time, making clear that faculty have time for and are interested in helping students, and providing office hours but also expressing to students how to use these office hours [e.g., “Come and chat”]).

Students also mentioned how the classroom culture set by their instructor influenced how comfortable they felt to express their opinions generally, but also how likely they were to engage in authentic dialogue with their peers:

I’m an [education] major, so a lot of our classes [involve] discussions. I feel [like this] relates a lot to being open-minded. I feel like a lot of the discussions in classes . . . the space is a lot more welcoming, for disagreement and challenging different ideas. And I feel like the professors are very supportive of that, too. I’ve also found that a lot of professors in that school [the School of Education and Human Development] are more willing to foster relationships with their students.

Not all students had positive experiences. Some students spoke about times when instructors created hostile classroom environments that discouraged authentic participation. One Black student shared about a time her professor used a racial slur and how this impacted her psychological safety:

I think that censorship is a big theme in classrooms and . . . I think that students don’t feel like they can truly express themselves because professors are not cultivating an environment where respectful debate is welcome. . . . I know one professor in particular—I love him, but he said something crazy . . . the N-word. And he’s white and tenured. That power dynamic gives you the ability to say something like that and not receive repercussions. . . . But students can’t. . . and that challenges your ability to truly like authentically, be yourself in the classroom. So, I appreciate when professors are who they are, but they are cognizant of the demographics that they are teaching. And even if those demographics are not in the room, they’re constantly including those demographics in their discussions, because to me, that’s true allyship and advocacy.

This example illustrates how important it is for instructors to be aware of their own personal attributes and past experiences, the power differences between them and their students, and the intersection of the two—especially in classrooms that include students with marginalized identities.

3. Understanding the relevance of course content within the real world impacts students’ virtue development. Students crave opportunities to apply their new classroom knowledge to real-world situations linked to current events in society. One student, for example, described how seeing real-life applications deepened their understanding of how they can exercise their civic-related virtues to make the world a better place:

I think using a real-life application project as a way to facilitate diversity [is meaningful]. I remember going to a conference two months ago and seeing a . . . competition where entrepreneurs pitched ideas about how they can use AI or machine learning or any type of technology to improve, for example, maternal health for Black mothers, since we are more likely to die in childbirth. . . . It’s really cool to see how innovative these projects can be and how it can help a lot of people who come from underrepresented backgrounds, or anyone who just wants the problem solved. So more of those real-life examples [in the classroom].

Though students want their learning to connect to real-world situations, it is not always feasible for instructors to implement experiential learning opportunities. Courses are already packed with specialized content and sometimes serve as a prerequisite for other courses. Saying yes to one type of content might mean saying no to another.

Yet we see that college student engagement has dropped in recent years—students, on average, spent 1.7 fewer hours attending classes, discussion sections, and labs in 2022–23 than in 2018–19. Is it possible that incorporating real-world situations would enhance engagement? What if every semester included at least one course built around real-world, experiential learning? This might include asking students to follow a current news topic related to the course content for the full semester, creating assignments that require students to engage with community members, or learning about a local problem related to course content (e.g., local water testing in chemistry, or analyzing data from the city on problems like transportation or affordable housing in a data analysis class).

If it is too difficult to rework curriculum to create real-world opportunities, faculty can turn to other means to engage students in real-world experiences. At least 65% of students enrolled in college engage in research with faculty, extracurricular activities with student organizations, or civic participation. That raises the question—are there ways that instructors can create connections between students’ classes and their daily lives and activities outside of class?

What university experiences hinder character development?

Students were also candid in sharing aspects of their lives that can sometimes limit or challenge their capacity to engage in virtue development:

1. Being the “bigger person” in every situation is difficult to sustain. It is difficult for students to engage in perspective taking and practice open-mindedness with beliefs that oppose their own. One student, for example, reflected on how she grapples with expressing empathy with others, especially to those who hold perspectives that oppose her personal values:

I think sometimes it’s really hard to be compassionate and empathetic when I just don’t understand why [someone is] doing that. And then there’s also the idea of being fundamentally different from somebody, and somebody’s fundamental views on life and morals, are just different from my own and so it’s sometimes hard to give people any benefit of the doubt when I’m like, You’re representing something that I fundamentally disagree with.

2. Students expressed feeling uncertain about their future. This can make it difficult for them to prioritize practicing certain civic virtues, such as social action, because they are focused on how to navigate their own uncertainties ahead.

Students expressed concerns regarding navigating an unstable job market, finding a job related to their degree, and ultimately establishing a career that is aligned with their values and how they want to contribute to society:

I’m currently about to graduate and I’ve accepted one job over another job. . . . I did have two [job] offers that I felt like both of them would have been making a positive change in the world, and would kind of get me closer to where I wanted to be in 5 to 10 years, but I picked one over the other largely because I feel really uncertain about where the economy is headed, where, like education in particular is headed. So, I chose a job over Teach for America, because I’m not super sure where the AmeriCorps is going to go. So yeah, I think financial stability matters to me. But I think at this point, making positive change also still really matters to me.

She also went on to share her concerns regarding the longevity of her career path, given current political realities:

As someone that’s studying public health intertwined in education, those are two things that I feel like are really being defunded or not invested in currently by the administration. Also, I got one of my offers rescinded initially, and that really sucked. I think that a huge challenge for me is trying to figure out and navigate this landscape of what do I do? [Do I choose] what I know will be good for my career in five years, post this [presidential] administration, or do I do what I need to do to be comfortable right now with where I’m at?

Young people will inevitably encounter circumstances that bump up against their character virtues. It is our responsibility, as educators, to provide our students with the tools they need to navigate these difficult moments, so they engage in ethical decision making. The best place to start, we’ve found, is by elevating the voices of your students and genuinely seeking to understand how you can best support their character development. So, start there: Listen first and create opportunities for students to stretch, practice, and apply virtues to real-life, day-to-day situations.

I’m certainly not the only one noticing this kind of vitriolic polarization. Recent polling suggests a majority of Americans believe that the country cannot overcome its current divisions.

As a professor of human development and family studies, I’ve researched and written about traumatic and adverse childhood experiences and existential anxiety for over 20 years. Scrolling through my feed, I was struck by the recognition that both sides had something in common: a profound sense of existential fear.

While political polarization has many potential causes, existential anxiety is one that has received less attention.

What is existential anxiety?

Philosophers have written about the concept of existential anxiety for centuries. My own empirical research is based on the writings of the mid-20th century philosopher Paul Tillich, who outlines three facets of this fundamental human fear:

• Fate and death—fears of nonexistence and uncertainty about one’s ultimate destiny
• Emptiness and meaninglessness—fears about life’s deeper purpose or ultimate concern
• Guilt and condemnation—fears of moral failure or threats to one’s ethical self

Existential anxiety is humanity’s inherent confrontation with mortality, moral responsibility, and search for meaning.

My colleagues and I have found that these fears are very common—between 75% and 86% of participants in our research endorse at least one concern. Higher levels of existential anxiety are associated with indicators of poor mental health, such as symptoms of depression and suicidal ideation. Existential anxiety levels are also elevated among those who have experienced a life-threatening event. For instance, after surviving a natural disaster, up to 94% of research participants reported at least one dimension of this fear.

Importantly, our research suggests that existential anxiety is associated with aggression. In one study of teens, we found that more extreme existential anxiety as measured with the existential anxiety questionnaire was associated with two kinds of aggression: proactive and reactive. Proactive aggression is goal-driven, deliberate, and unprovoked, while reactive aggression comes in response to a real or perceived provocation or threat.

Underlying theme in existential anxiety

Existential fears have their roots in things that pretty much everyone worries about, at least from time to time. But what specifically triggers this anxiety can be different depending on your worldview.

For instance, as I scroll social media, I see friends expressing anxiety about fundamental safety issues, the fate of the nation, cultural erosion, and the loss of traditional values. These concerns are mirrored by other friends’ posts expressing concern that the environment is being destroyed, democracy is failing, and equality is lost.

Though the content of these expressions can be ideologically opposed, each reflects deeper concerns about societal fate, death, or the end of a meaningful way of life. Unspoken but underlying is the fear that the “other side” represents a real and impending threat to one’s very existence.

Though the triggering circumstances can differ based on personal beliefs, both sides’ perspectives reflect existential concerns about meaning, moral direction, and survival.

But existential anxiety isn’t just the likely root of some of this distress. Research suggests that underlying fear can increase aggression. Left unchecked, fears may spiral into potential violence.

Where do we go?

The good news is that while core existential fears may never fully abate, you can identify them, alleviate them, and possibly even channel them toward adaptive action.

The techniques of cognitive behavior therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy provide a path toward finding common ground and preventing existential fears from escalating into violence.

Core to these techniques is recognizing and facing the fear. They both help participants overcome common tendencies such as seeing only one side of the evidence or catastrophizing that things are much worse than they really are. Acceptance and commitment therapy, for example, teaches participants how to cultivate psychological flexibility, learn to tolerate uncomfortable thoughts or emotions, and practice acting in alignment with one’s core values. Together, these skills foster positive action as opposed to destructive reaction.

As disturbing as my social media feed can be, I’ve also seen real-world instances of people figuring out how to connect across a divide. For instance, one poster appreciated another’s comment for helping her realize the existential value his perspective represented to him. Following that exchange, the second poster acknowledged he’d been seeing only one side. In other words, they each recognized the other person’s existential fear—accepting it as such helped them de-escalate the confrontation and move forward more constructively.

The critical point is that people on all sides of every issue yearn for safety, purpose, and belonging. Recognizing that the core existential concerns we all share underlie polarized fears might be an important step toward bridging divides and reducing the risk of fear-driven aggression.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But new research suggests that’s not necessarily the case. Instead, we tend to overestimate how badly these kinds of conversations will go and underestimate how much people’s views can change within a conversation, including our own viewpoint.

“Entering into a conversation is perhaps one surprising way of acquiring a broader view of an issue that you might care about,” says lead researcher Michael Kardas of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Having conversations, despite people’s predictions, [can] decrease polarization.”

Negative predictions can be overblown

In the study, diverse groups of adults from the United States (and, in some cases, from Britain) were recruited to discuss conflicting viewpoints on different issues, including a non-political one (whether dogs or cats make better pets) and two sociopolitical ones (whether cancel culture is good or bad, or whether Joe Biden was a good president).

Before having these 10-minute conversations, participants first reported on the strength of their views, their reasons why they held these beliefs, and their expectations for a discussion involving someone with an opposing view—in particular, whether they anticipated they or their partner’s views might shift and become more similar to each other.

Researchers gave participants prompts to guide their 10-minute conversation, including sharing their reasoning for their views and asking about their partner’s reasoning. After the discussion, they reported again on the strength of their views. Kardas and his team then compared their current ratings to their earlier predictions.

In all cases, people’s views changed more than they’d anticipated—and so did their partner’s views. Contrary to most expectations, the conversations ended up depolarizing their opinions, to some extent. For Kardas, this was a surprising result.

“People went into the conversations anticipating that no one was going to change their mind,” he says. “But it turned out that even on a conversation about a topic related to personal preferences, like cats versus dogs, people became less extreme in their views to a greater extent than they themselves expected.”

When the researchers surveyed the participants a week later, they found that people’s views on the issues were still less polarized than they were initially, though not as much as they were immediately after the conversation ended. Interestingly, though, the people whose attitudes changed the most, post-conversation, were also most likely to stay that way.

“This suggests that conversations offer, at least to some extent, a somewhat durable route to informing people about issues that carries forward into their later attitudes,” says Kardas.

Why discussion may decrease polarization

To get at why conversations across difference can be depolarizing, the researchers did several sub-experiments and analyses. One thing they discovered is that having these cross-group conversations widens your perspective, because you better understand what information someone draws upon to form their opinion.

For example, says Kardas, let’s say someone believes cancel culture is a good thing. They may have come to that opinion because they’re focused on an example like Harvey Weinstein, the movie producer who was exposed as a sexual predator and then “cancelled.” Someone else may believe cancel culture is bad, because they’ve seen it tar the reputation of someone whose behavior wasn’t criminal, but merely provocative—for example, Colin Kaepernick, who was “cancelled” for kneeling during the playing of the national anthem to protest racial injustice. Hearing how people came by their views for and against something can help us find points of understanding or even agreement, softening our own stance.

“When people formulate their attitudes, they’re often drawing on only a small subset, a small sliver of information that comes to mind when they think of the issue,” says Kardas. “[But] when you actually have a conversation, you recognize that the basis of your attitude and the basis of another person’s attitude are actually drawing on different facets of a multifaceted issue.”

That’s why it’s important to recognize that these conversations across difference have potential, he says. Otherwise, we just get our information only from sources we already agree with, like friends, family, or, often, social media. That might keep us stuck in our shared fears.

“If people expect that a conversation will be unproductive, unfruitful, unnecessary, because no one’s going to learn anything, no one’s going to change their minds anyway, then they’ll stay in the areas of social media and with people that share their views,” he says.

Knowing can make a difference

Can these findings actually change anything, though? Won’t we still be reluctant to talk to people who don’t agree with us?

To find out, Kardas and his team did another experiment. They gave some participants information they learned from their research showing that conversations across difference can reduce polarization, because a conversation partner’s views will become more moderate, their own views would become more moderate, or both views would move closer together. Other participants weren’t told anything about these results.

Then they compared how willing participants were to have conversations across difference (in this case, different views of Joe Biden’s performance). In all cases, those who were told about the research were more willing to discuss the polarizing issue than those who weren’t told.

The study adds to other research showing that our expectations for engagement across political and other differences might be overly negative, keeping us from hearing each another.

For example, Kardas says, a 2019 study found that people overestimated how badly they would feel listening to speeches by politicians on the other side of the political spectrum from themselves. Once informed that their fears about engaging across differences were likely exaggerated, people became 24–34% more engaged with diverse sources of information.

“It tends to be less emotionally jarring than people think it will be when you’re exposed to information that doesn’t align with your own beliefs,” says Kardas.

Similarly, research has shown that people overestimate how polarized we are politically and that correcting that view can help people become less extreme around their own positions. In another study, giving people more accurate information about how those in an opposing political party viewed members of their own party (less negatively than anticipated) helped people attribute more positive qualities to political opponents.

This is good to keep in mind, because many of us already have overblown fears around having conversations with people we don’t know, let alone someone we disagree with. If you expect people to be angry or upset with you based on your views, it could keep you from talking to them and, potentially, increasing civility.

“The same tendency for conversations to reveal unexpected areas of agreement that I’ve detected . . . also [seems to] produce a less hostile and more congenial conversation than people expect,” says Kardas.

This is good news for organizations who work to bring people on opposite sides of political issues together to have conversations, says Kardas. Though he doesn’t necessarily think depolarization is the goal of having these conversations, encouraging people to have them could result in more warmth and shared knowledge, making it easier to find consensus around solving our social problems.

“To the extent that people can acquire a complete understanding of an issue, and then arrive at what they themselves believe is the appropriate attitude, we can collectively be better informed citizens about the issues we consider socially and politically important,” he says.

Yet they can change the feel of a day. 

Most people know this from experience. A tense morning can soften when someone treats us with unexpected warmth. A crowded commute can feel less anonymous when another person makes space. A classroom, workplace, neighborhood, or family can become more humane through gestures that are almost too brief to record.

In a recent paper in the International Journal of Wellbeing, we use the term “microkindness” to describe these moments, though the word itself has appeared in earlier work. We define them as small gestures, motivated at least in part by genuine warm feelings toward others, that benefit someone else. These acts are brief, often lasting less than five seconds, and they involve little personal cost or risk to the person offering them.

That definition may sound modest. It is meant to be. Microkindness is not heroic sacrifice, sustained caregiving, or major generosity. It is the tiny act of human regard that passes from one person to another in ordinary life.

But the fact that microkindness is small does not mean it is trivial. Indeed, its smallness may be part of its importance. Because such acts are easy to perform, they are available almost everywhere. Because they are brief, they can occur many times a day. And because they are social, they may not stop with the first person who receives them.

The intriguing possibility is that microkindness may spread.

The flip side of microaggressions

The idea of microkindness partly arises as a counterpart to the better-known concept of microaggressions: brief, often everyday words or behaviors that communicate disrespect, exclusion, or contempt. One lesson from that literature is that small things can matter, especially when they accumulate. A single slight may be brushed aside. Repeated exposure can become a burden.

Microkindness invites a parallel question in the positive direction. If small acts can wound, can small acts also repair, include, affirm, or encourage?

This does not mean that a warm smile cancels out injustice, or that individual kindness is a substitute for structural change. The point is more precise: Daily social life is partly made out of small signals. Human beings constantly communicate whether others are welcome, noticed, respected, and safe. A microkindness is one way of sending a positive signal.

In a classroom, this might mean a teacher smiling warmly at a student. In a workplace, it might mean acknowledging someone’s contribution in passing. In public, it might mean a brief friendly exchange with a cashier or neighbor. These moments do not ask much of us. But they can alter the emotional tone of an interaction.

They may also shape what others do next.

Kindness as something that travels

When people think about epidemiology, they usually think about disease: how viruses spread, who is most at risk, and how outbreaks can be prevented. But the broader tools of epidemiology can also be applied to positive states and behaviors. This is sometimes called positive epidemiology: the study of the distribution, causes, and spread of positive health-related qualities, not only illness and risk.

In the case of microkindness, the question becomes: Where do these small acts occur? What makes them more likely? Who receives them? Who is left out? Under what conditions do they ripple outward?

This way of thinking matters because kindness is often treated as a private moral choice. It is that, but it may also be a social phenomenon. People act within environments. A family, school, workplace, online platform, religious community, or neighborhood can facilitate kindness—or make it less likely to occur. Some settings invite warmth; others reward suspicion, speed, competition, or emotional distance.

Research on social networks suggests that emotions and behaviors can cluster and spread among people. Happiness, cooperation, and prosocial behavior are not merely individual traits floating in isolation. They can be shaped by relationships and social norms. If kindness operates in a similar way, then the smallest acts of goodwill may contribute to a larger social climate.

That does not mean kindness spreads automatically. A smile may be returned, ignored, or misread. A friendly gesture may land differently across cultures, contexts, or relationships. What feels warm in one setting may feel intrusive in another. The study of microkindness needs to take these complexities seriously.

Still, the possibility is worth investigating: Some acts of kindness may not only benefit the person who receives them. They may increase the chance that kindness continues.

Why a smile may matter

Our paper focuses especially on smiling as an example of microkindness. This is not because every smile is kind. Some smiles are fake. Some may even express superiority or pleasure at another person’s discomfort. Context matters.

But a genuine, kind smile is one of the clearest examples of a microkindness. It is brief. It costs little. It can communicate warmth, safety, recognition, and goodwill. It can be offered to people we know well and to people we barely know at all.

Smiling is also interesting because it is visibly social. A person’s smile can elicit a smile in return. That returned smile can affect the next interaction. In this way, smiling offers a simple case for thinking about how microkindness might move through a room, a classroom, a gathering, or a community.

Imagine entering a meeting where no one looks up. The room feels closed. Now imagine entering the same meeting and being greeted by one person’s warm smile. The agenda has not changed. The organization has not changed. But the social meaning of the moment has shifted. There is now a signal: You are seen. You belong here.

Such signals may be especially important in environments where people are uncertain about whether they are welcome. A student entering a new school, a patient in a medical office, a new employee on a first day, or an older adult entering a community event may all be scanning for cues. A microkindness can serve as one of those cues.

This does not require exaggerating what a smile can do. It simply recognizes that human beings are relational creatures. Much of our well-being is shaped not only by major life events but by the texture of daily contact.

Microkindness and flourishing

The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard defines flourishing broadly as the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of life are good, including the contexts in which a person lives. Its framework often focuses on several domains: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.

Microkindness touches several of these at once.

It can support happiness, because warm social contact can lift the emotional tone of ordinary life. It can support mental health, not as a treatment in itself, but as one small part of a less hostile and more supportive social environment. It can support meaning, because offering kindness connects daily action to the good of another person. It can support character, because kindness is a habit of attending to others with goodwill. And it can support relationships, because relationships are built not only through major commitments but through repeated small gestures of care.

Microkindness is clearly not the whole of flourishing. But small acts are one part of the social world in which flourishing becomes more or less possible. They help create the atmosphere of a place. Over time, that atmosphere can influence what people expect from one another.

What this means in daily life

The practical implications of microkindness are intentionally modest, but not insignificant.

First, microkindness asks people to notice the many small opportunities for goodwill already built into the day. These are not elaborate interventions. They are brief acts of recognition: smiling, greeting, thanking, acknowledging, encouraging, or making space.

Second, it suggests that kindness may be especially powerful when it becomes part of a culture rather than an isolated act. A classroom in which students are greeted warmly, a workplace where people routinely acknowledge one another, or a community gathering where newcomers are welcomed may become an “epicenter” of microkindness. The goal is not forced cheerfulness. It is a shared norm of humane attention.

Third, it points to the role of institutions and media environments. If microkindness can spread, then the environments that shape attention matter. News and social media often amplify outrage, threat, and conflict. A healthier information environment might also make room for stories and signals of kindness, not as sentimental distraction, but as part of the social ecology that affects public life.

Finally, microkindness calls for humility. A gesture intended as kind is not always received that way. Cultural norms, power dynamics, prior experiences, and context all influence interpretation. Studying microkindness well will require attention not only to the person offering the act, but also to the person receiving it.

A small beginning toward a better world

The study of microkindness is still new. Our paper is an invitation to research, which asks whether the tools used to study the spread of disease might also help us understand the spread of kindness. It asks whether small gestures deserve more scientific attention. It asks whether societies concerned about polarization, loneliness, and distrust should pay closer attention to the brief moments in which people communicate goodwill.

That may seem like a small place to begin, but much of life happens in small places: in doorways, sidewalks, classrooms, checkout lines, waiting rooms, emails, meetings, and glances across a room.

A kinder society will require more than microkindness. It will require justice, patience, courage, forgiveness, strong institutions, and serious commitments to the common good. Still, the path toward such a society may be shaped, in part, by what people repeatedly communicate to one another in passing.

A smile. A greeting. A thank you. A moment of recognition.

Small acts may be bigger than we think.

Victor Counted is a psychological scientist whose research across 40 African countries offers a data-rich rethinking of flourishing on the continent. His findings challenge the dominant narrative that Africa is “lagging behind” in development by showing a more nuanced picture of what it means to live a good life. We asked him more.

The Conversation: What is flourishing?

Victor Counted: Flourishing is more than economic growth or individual happiness. It’s a multidimensional state of being that reflects how people feel about their lives and how well their lives are actually going. So it also measures people’s values within their community.

The idea of well-being often carries a Eurocentric emphasis on the individual—personal satisfaction, autonomy, achievement. Flourishing accounts for how whole a person is in relation to their environment.

It includes the social, spiritual, and ecological contexts in which one lives. So, it’s not just about how one feels, but how one lives—fully, meaningfully, and in a satisfying relationship with the world around us.

TC: What’s the Global Flourishing Study?

VC: The Global Flourishing Study tries to measure global patterns of human flourishing. It’s an ongoing five-year longitudinal study in over 200,000 participants across 22 countries.

I was one of the team of global scholars brought together to examine the trends on what it means to live well across cultures and life circumstances.

The study identifies six key dimensions of flourishing:

• Happiness and life satisfaction
• Mental and physical health
• Meaning and purpose
• Character and virtue
• Close social relationships
• Financial and material stability

Participants rate how they’re doing in each of these areas on a scale from 0 to 10. Further questions capture experiences related to trust, loneliness, hope, resilience, and other related well-being variables.

                     

Of the 22 nations, five were African: Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Egypt.

While these countries didn’t top the global rankings (Indonesia and Mexico did), Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt all reported relatively high flourishing scores, especially when well-being was considered apart from financial status.

Nigeria, for example, ranked fifth globally in flourishing scores that excluded financial indicators—ahead of many wealthier nations. Nigerians indicated strengths in social relationships, character, and virtues (like forgiveness or helping others). But potential areas of growth included financial well-being, housing, ethnic discrimination, and education.

Overall, this suggests that while material resources matter, they’re not the only thing that determines well-being. Kenya ranked seventh, Egypt 10th, Tanzania 11th, and South Africa 13th. Each showed unique strengths in areas like meaning, social connection, or mental health.

TC: You did a separate study on flourishing in Africa. What did you find?

VC: In a 2024 study, we analyzed data from the Gallup World Poll (2020–2022) to explore 38 indicators of well-being across 40 African countries.

This study offered a more detailed and culture-sensitive picture of how Africans experience and prioritize flourishing. The dimensions explored were derived from both local and universal sources, allowing for regionally relevant insights.

We found that African populations often score high in meaning, character, and social relationships—despite economic hardship. This offers an important corrective to Western assumptions about well-being.

Some of our key findings were:

• There is significant diversity between and within African countries. Mauritius consistently ranked highest in life evaluations (overall satisfaction with their lives), while countries like Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe scored lowest.
• East African countries such as Rwanda and Ethiopia showed strong performance in social well-being indicators (like feeling respected or learning new things daily) even when economic indicators were low.
• Countries in West Africa, such as Senegal and Ghana, scored high in emotional well-being, with many people reporting positive daily emotions like enjoyment and laughter.
• Southern African nations, despite challenges like income inequality, displayed resilience through strong community ties and cultural practices rooted in the philosophy of ubuntu.

The results reinforced that flourishing in Africa cannot only be reduced to gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (a measure of the average economic output per person in a country)—nor to Western norms of success.

TC: What can African countries focus on to flourish?

VC: In my view, the path to greater flourishing lies in embracing local knowledge and investing in culturally relevant development priorities. Instead of following Western pathways—centered on individual advancement—Africa can model alternative flourishing pathways that reflect what matters most to African people.

1. Prioritize local knowledge systems. African ideas about a connected society—like ubuntu (southern Africa), ujamaa (east Africa), teranga or wazobia (west Africa), and al-musawat wal tarahum (north Africa) teach people to care for each other and live in peace. These values help people live meaningful lives and can inform leadership and legislation.

2. Redefine development metrics. Western development models focus on individual achievement, economic output, and material consumption. GDP per capita fails to capture the everyday realities and aspirations of African communities. We should also measure things like how happy people are, how hopeful they feel about the future, how strong and resilient their communities are, and how clean, safe, and dignifying their living environments are.

This is not a new idea—for years development scholars have called for a shift away from narrow economic indicators toward a focus on human dignity, agency, and the real opportunities people have to pursue the lives they value. What’s new is the growing availability of data and the momentum to take these alternative metrics seriously in shaping national policies and priorities.

3. Invest in education for character development. Quality education is essential to unlocking the continent’s potential to flourish. But Africa needs more than just academic skills and workforce readiness—it needs a strategy for intentional development of values and habits that shape how a person thinks, feels, and acts with integrity.

Part of the problem lies in how the humanities—fields like history, literature, philosophy, and religious studies—are often undervalued or underfunded in education systems. But it is precisely these disciplines that nurture moral imagination, critical reflection, and civic responsibility. We need educational models that form not just workers, but whole persons—people who can think ethically, act responsibly, and lead with character in their communities.

TC: What does Africa offer the world in terms of flourishing?

VC: Africa is not waiting to be saved. Across the continent, people are building communities of care, cultivating joy amid hardship, and passing on values of unity, faith, and compassion. This is what development looks like when rooted in human dignity.

Africa’s flourishing goals offer an alternative vision for development—one that starts with what Africa already has, not what it lacks. These are locally emic aspirations for well-being. They are shaped by Africa’s indigenous knowledge systems, cultural values, and religious/spiritual traditions. Pursuing these goals means prioritizing wholeness over wealth, community over consumption, and resilience over rescue.

The continent has so much to offer the world: wisdom, strong community values, and ways of staying resilient and living fully even in hard times. But many of these local insights are missing in the global science of well-being.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

But as time passes, is it helpful to hold on to feelings of distress or ill will? While avoiding someone, stonewalling them, or plotting revenge can feel natural, are the feelings that drive these kinds of reactions good for health and well-being in the long run? 

Research suggests not. Letting go of anger and extending goodwill to the people who harmed us tends to restore our internal equilibrium and help us sleep better and live longer.

But why do some things still feel unforgivable—like holding a grudge is the right thing to do? 

Forgiveness and the nervous system

The human body is built with two main branches of the nervous system that are below the neck: the sympathetic branch (SNS) that mainly supports faster “fight or flight” drives and reflexes, and the parasympathetic branch (PNS) that is more involved in gradual “rest and digest” and “tend and befriend” motivations and behaviors. These systems are in constant dialogue, dynamically shifting physical resources like oxygen, glucose, and hormones back and forth to equip us to do whatever is best for our survival in any situation.

When we sense threat or are reminded of something hurtful, the SNS is dominant. When we feel safe and beloved, the PNS prevails. It feels right when these systems give us the energy, wherewithal, and focus to do the right thing, like hustling to catch a bus, train, or airplane when we’re late, or enjoying a deep, loving conversation with a friend after a nice meal.

Sometimes, though, there’s a mismatch, like late-night restless worrying even in the comfort of a safe and warm bed, or procrastinating on an important, time-sensitive task. Mismatches often involve miscalculating time, either focusing on the short term when a long-term view would be more helpful, or ignoring the present moment in favor of the unchangeable past or unknowable future. The “negativity bias,” which is our mental tendency to privilege information from the past, present, or future that could be threatening in any way, also feeds into this mismatch by getting us ready to escape or defend, even when we’re safe.

Without conscious deliberation, our first urge in many situations is to avoid what’s costly and gain what’s immediately desired, even at long-term loss or at the expense of lasting benefit. For example, we may refrain from waving another driver into a convenient parking space to avoid walking a relatively short distance ourselves, though the generosity would feel nice and the walk would be pleasant and better for our health. Or we might hold back from apologizing for an unintentional offense to avoid being vulnerable and go on with our day uninterrupted, though offering the apology would initiate reconciliation that could relieve stress and strengthen our relationship.

So what does this have to do with forgiveness and grudges? Studies of forgiveness and physical health suggest that unforgiveness (in other words, holding a grudge) may be one of these mismatches. Grudges may feel valid in the moment, but are problematic when held long-term; forgiveness feels unsteady and tender in the moment, but ultimately helps you feel better.

Why do we hold grudges?

According to forgiveness scholar Everett Worthington at Virginia Commonwealth University, forgiving means reducing negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors toward someone who committed harm and replacing them with positive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Forgiveness does not mean pardoning, condoning, excusing, or justifying harm, nor does it require reconciling with the person. This is an important distinction, because believing that forgiveness does mean “getting back together” can make it feel unfair, like it invalidates our pain and suffering, which can make holding a grudge feel more sensible and appealing.

Forgiving is also not a strategy for becoming complacent when we’re being treated poorly; it does not mean rationalizing or justifying harmful conduct so that we can continue to endure it. When we forgive, we honor and remember that we felt badly in order to move forward more wisely, while letting go of ongoing, unbidden anxious and unpleasant feelings. 

Unforgiveness can also feel like a better choice because it seems easier. It is uncomplicated and unequivocal: “I am right and the person who committed harm is wrong.” This view is simple and certain, and does not require additional consideration—in other words, it carries low cognitive cost. One of the costs some people perceive of forgiveness is losing face and the possibility of applying consequences. Deciding to surrender the certainty of “an eye for an eye” logic can be challenging because it feels asymmetrical and ambiguous.

Unforgiveness can also feel protective because it motivates absolute avoidance: no further encounters or contact with those who commit harm. No more bad feelings from being reminded of the harm. Forgiveness, on the other hand, requires emotional labor—or acknowledging the hard feelings linked to a past harm and working to shift them toward a gentler, more nurturing stance. Forgiving means being open to the possibility of remembering or even encountering a harm doer again and readying ourselves to offer ease and goodwill.

Finally, studies have documented that seeing a cheater or harm doer get punished activates reward pathways in our brain, the “altruistic punishment” or “schadenfreude” signal, a motivator of the basic human preference for restoring justice. When we anticipate satisfaction as we imagine holding someone accountable or exacting revenge, it may strengthen the urge to hold a grudge.

What is left out of all these mental justifications for grudge holding, however, is the long-term detrimental impact. While feeling mad, afraid, sad, or otherwise unpleasant or upset about being harmed are healthy emotional responses in the short term, they are naturally time-bound and fluctuating. Emotions emerge in real time to guide our responses to the current context and inform our long-term knowledge, and then subside. A grudge, on the other hand, keeps these feelings pervasive and enduring. They remain intense and they recur, sometimes unexpectedly, in response to associations and reminders in our life. Lingering, recurring negative emotions overactivate the SNS, which amounts to a type of chronic stress that can increase our blood pressure, impair our immune response, increase our cardiovascular risk, and disrupt our sleep.

“Forgiveness of others is associated with risk for all-cause mortality, and the mortality risk of [forgiving someone] may be conferred by its influences on physical health,” writes Laurent Toussaint.

Two ways forgiveness is good for your health

Embracing, labelling, disclosing, and accepting difficult and unpleasant feelings about past harms enable us to be resilient. Seeking social support, to process negative feelings—which can be part of forgiving if we involve a friend, ally, supportive person, or even the perpetrator of harm if it makes sense—helps us learn, grow, and find ease and meaning from them. A recent study by Marilyn Cornish reported that forgiveness helped medical patients adapt to life changes after suffering a spinal cord injury, suggesting that accepting ambiguity as part of forgiving may benefit our response to other unforeseen circumstances.

Forgiveness improves physical health by reducing and untethering our negative emotional reactions about a prior harm or any reminders of it from our day-to-day experiences. Reducing “hard feelings” about a past harm helps restore balance between the SNS and PNS, instead of keeping us in stress overdrive.

According to a systematic review of multiple studies on forgiveness in aging and advanced illness, “Forgiveness should be taken into account among holistic care professionals as a considerable contributor to the resolution of stress associated with conflicts over the lifespan to promote well-being and health outcomes.” 

Forgiving also frees up mental and emotional resources for us to be trusting, optimistic, and self-compassionate (i.e., kind toward our own inadequacies and flaws), and promotes friendlier behaviors like participating in social gatherings, activities, and community events.

While several large-scale studies have reported that people who are more forgiving are less likely to die of any cause, and attributed the lifespan gain to the benefits of forgiveness on physical health, correlation cannot be interpreted as causal. Are forgiving people healthier, or are healthier people more forgiving?

In a recent study led by Songzhi Wu at Columbia University, participants who forgave rated stimuli that reminded them of a past harm (like a photo of an unfaithful romantic partner’s favorite restaurant) as less unpleasant. These findings suggest that forgiving someone reduces the intensity of negative emotion linked to reminders of a past harm. Another 2020 study published in BMC Psychology measured forgiveness one year, and positive emotions, social integration, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, hopelessness, and loneliness five years later. Those who forgave more often fared better in all these areas, suggesting a more direct impact of forgiveness on health. A third study published in Psychology and Health revealed that people who are more forgiving of both themselves and other people sleep better:

Because forgiveness is associated with better sleep, it capitalizes on the powerful role that sleep plays in good health. If forgiveness of others and self-forgiveness can help people cope with the day’s psychological and emotional burdens in a way that frees one’s mind and promotes a more restful mental state for sleep, then they support the health-related process of sleep in meaningful ways.

When I teach the science of forgiveness, there is often a contingent of people who proudly refuse it—from a place of defiance and perceived empowerment. The rigidity, distrust, and emotional compartmentalizing that go into unforgiveness, however, amount to greater enduring cost mentally, socially, and physically than the lesser, yet significant, upfront effort that goes into deciding to forgive and emotionally shifting toward mercy and grace. Forgiving is not a gift to people for the hurt they have caused. Forgiveness is a physiologically balancing, resilience-building lifesaver for us.

Resilience is a skill set that combines emotional awareness, problem solving, and flexibility—qualities that help kids bounce back from stress and adapt to adversity. Parents can help cultivate it by equipping kids with tools to navigate hardships so they feel more confident, courageous, and capable.

Whether it’s helping your child handle disappointment, temper big emotions, or tackle something scary, opportunities to teach kids resilience arise every day.

Despite these growth-building opportunities, many kids are facing what psychotherapists and parenting experts Sissy Goff and David Thomas call a “crisis of capability.”

In their new book, Capable, Goff and Thomas draw on 30 years of clinical experience, providing a roadmap to help parents raise kids who stay steady in the face of struggle, believe in themselves, and take on healthy risks that stretch their abilities.

Juli Fraga: What inspired you to write this book, and why is it important now?

David Thomas: Youth mental health has been a crisis for several years. We’re seeing one in five kids dealing with anxiety, and 18% of kids between the ages of 12 and 17 dealing with symptoms of depression.

In our work, we’ve seen that this decline in mental health has been followed by a decline in kids’ capability. Now more than ever, our offices are filled with kids who feel incapable of doing things like reaching out to a new friend, trying out for a sport they might not do perfectly, or getting their driver’s license.

JF: I’m curious what role anxiety plays in shaping a child’s confidence. Can you share more?

Sissy Goff: When it comes to anxiety, research shows that two common parenting strategies are escape and avoidance. So, when a child feels anxious, we’re seeing more parents pull their kids out of scary situations than we ever did before.

I have written several books on anxiety, and the layperson’s definition that I came up with is that anxiety is an overestimation of the problem and an underestimation of what kids can do themselves. And so, when we rescue a child, we may send the message that kids need parents to always step in and that they can’t do hard things on their own.

JF: What does it mean to be a capable kid?

DT: Capable kids have practiced coping and developed competence to face life’s challenges. And here’s one thing we challenge parents to consider: Stress is guaranteed. No one is exempt. But here’s one thing we tend to forget: Stress can also be growth-giving. So, if we can camp out in that space and remember that when our kids experience stress, good growth can happen.

For example, my daughter tried out for cross-country in middle school, and she came in dead last for over three seasons. And so much growth happened in that season of her life. I just cheered her on as she finished a marathon. That milestone would have never happened if she hadn’t spent a lot of time running and coming in last.

To raise capable kids, we want to support them without standing in the way of growth-giving opportunities. This sends the message that competence is deeper than confidence. We put a lot of focus on praising kids and raising confident kids, which, of course, we all want. But we really believe that confidence is born of competence, and this is what happens when kids struggle with something hard and develop the skills to handle it.

JF: Research shows that flexibility and resilience can be learned. What are some small things parents can do to help their kids practice these skills?

DT: Remember that you are your kid’s hero. Even if they’re adolescents and rolling their eyes, kids hear what you say and see what you do. Practice flexibility together as a family, and let your kids know how challenging it can be for you, too.

For example, you might start every night at the dinner table by having each person move one seat to the left. Model what it’s like to mix it up. Send the beautiful lesson that you’re all figuring it out as you go.

JF: In this era of information overload and AI chatbots, what advice do you have for parents who may feel unsure about what advice to listen to?

SG: There’s so much information out there, and we find that parents are trusting experts more than they’re trusting themselves. Parents may ask AI how to troubleshoot a problem, and while AI provides information, it’s certainly not wisdom.

We advise finding two to three sources that really help parents to trust their gut.

JF: If a parent is reading your book and they want to learn skills to help build their child’s resilience, what can they do?

DT: In the book, there are five strengths, five skills, and five strategies that we believe are foundational to building capable kids.

One skill is dealing with disappointment and failure. We challenge parents to remind their kids that failure is the gateway to neuroplasticity—our brains literally grow when we fail. We love the acronym FAIL, which is a “first attempt in learning.” As parents, let’s flip failure on its head and see it as a tool for growth.

We also encourage parents to narrate the experience as they go. Talk about mess-up moments that have happened to you.

For example, I had a wonderful and funny conversation with a mom who decided to take up tennis in her 40s. She said to me, “David, I never played the sport growing up. Turns out, I am terrible at it. The instructor gave me some feedback in front of the entire class, and I found myself tearing up. But then I thought, This isn’t Wimbledon; this is mom tennis!”

This turned out to be a beautiful opportunity for this mom to talk with her kids. She shared what it felt like to have a coach give her feedback in front of others.

There’s incredible value in sharing our experiences with our kids. It shows that we are going to fail at different things, we aren’t going to have everything figured out, and we are going to feel overwhelmed.

I think these conversations have a lot of value.

“I’m not going to be your partner on the project unless you give me the treat from your lunch!”

These kinds of threats are tactics many school-age kids use to solve conflicts. Parents and teachers sometimes assume these common threats are basically harmless.

After all, are they so different from comments kids might hear from grownups in their lives? It’s a small step from “Daddy better get you to school on time or Mommy is going to be angry with him!” to “If you don’t give me that toy, you won’t be my best friend anymore!”

The adult and the kid versions are both signs of bullying behavior. I’m a child psychologist, and I know that kids imitate the behaviors they observe at home. Bullying is tied to poor outcomes not only for the child who is bullied but for the bullies themselves, who run a higher risk than their peers of experiencing depression when they become teens. Youth who are bullies also are more likely to engage in aggressive and rule-breaking behavior, have substance use problems, and hang out with other adolescents who share these tendencies.

The good news is that parents can change the ways they handle their own conflicts to demonstrate for children how to use healthier and more positive ways to interact with others.

Getting people to do what you want

Across cultures, regardless of temperament, most children act with two goals in mind: to get or do things they want and to avoid things that they don’t want.

Kids want things like hugs and affection, praise, cool toys, yummy food, and treats. They want to play, have fun, and spend time with family and friends. Alternatively, they don’t want to do things that seem tiring, stressful, scary, or boring, like cleaning up, doing chores, getting ready for bed, or completing difficult or tedious schoolwork.

Think about all the ways you can get someone to do something that’s undesirable to them, especially if you have power over them. You can use positive tactics, such as direct encouragement, incentives, and praise. You can try negative tactics, such as threats, manipulation, and force. Some—asking politely, saying please and thank you each time—work better than others, such as nagging or pleading.

Children learn which tactics work and are acceptable by seeing how adults, who hold power over them, employ them.

On one extreme, observing aggression between parents increases risk for children’s heightened aggression and violence in their own social relationships. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura’s seminal 1961 “Bobo Doll Study” found that preschool children who saw an adult hit and kick a life-size inflatable figure were more likely to be aggressive toward that figure when frustrated.

In my own research, I focused on children who were exposed to domestic violence between parents as early as in infancy. As adults, these now-grown children were more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of violence with their romantic partners. People were particularly likely to be violent as adults if they were exposed to domestic violence when they were in preschool, as opposed to later in childhood, suggesting early childhood is a particularly important time for parents to model healthy conflict resolution.

Many people don’t regularly use physical force on each other or on their kids to get what they want, so children also pay attention to how subtle tactics such as manipulation, threats, and exclusion work. If children constantly hear, “If you don’t do this, you’ll lose that, or I’ll do this to you,” they learn that threats are acceptable and effective at getting others to comply.

What about even more subtle behavior, such as parents criticizing each other or giving one another the silent treatment?

If children regularly hear adults pointing blame or diminishing others’ self-worth—for example, “Mommy is so disorganized, she can’t keep herself together!” or “Daddy is so lazy, Mommy always has to do all the cooking AND the cleaning”—they are more likely to use these strategies to gain social dominance.

For children, this becomes, “You can’t play with us because your dress is ugly” or “You aren’t smart enough to be my partner.” Kids can pick up on each other’s weaknesses and learn to exploit them to get what they want.

For older children who observe one parent giving the other parent the silent treatment, “freezing out,” “canceling,” or “ghosting” others now become potentially useful strategies.

Modeling kindness

But what about the flip side: If parents modeling aggression or disrespect is harmful for children, is modeling respect, kindness, and compassion helpful? The answer is yes.

Parents who make respectful requests of one another, thank and praise each other, and work as a team model healthy social strategies for their kids, and these patterns have long-term benefits. Armed with these positive skills, children are not only less likely to bully others to get what they want, but they are more likely to recognize—and resist—being bullied themselves.

For example, if Mom is more patient and empathic, whereas Dad is able to be more stern and “hold the line,” parents can work as a team and play to each other’s strengths. This might look like Mom making the morning routine happen with warm and directive encouragement, while Dad takes charge of enforcing bedtime routines.

Then, a key ingredient to make this noticeable to kids is that both parents praise each other’s strengths in front of the kids: One parent says, “Thanks to Mom for getting us out of the house on time!” The other says, “Thank goodness that Dad keeps us organized!” This subtle yet detectable respect goes a long way. It also demonstrates how to leverage relationships to further your own interests, but in a positive and healthy way.

Kids who are accustomed to using kindness and respect to get what they want are less likely to tolerate unkind, mean, or manipulative behavior from bullies. Kindness becomes internalized, and it empowers kids to walk away from a bully.

Kids watch grownups for signs of how to act. Parents hold power over what kids get done and how, but they also have the power to show kids how to treat one another and how to do difficult things while also feeling good about them. The key is modeling kindness, teamwork, and gratitude to get things done well—and to do this across your child’s life, ideally as early in their development as possible.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Liudmyla Herasymenko, an associate professor at the Ukrainian State Flight Academy in Kropyvnytskyi, Kirovohrad, Ukraine, is one of the millions of educators carrying the invisible weight of supporting her students’ social and emotional well-being despite the turmoil that surrounds them every day.

“Because of the existing threat, which is hanging, you cannot plan your day in advance,” Herasymenko says. “You can have some plans, but everything can be changed in one second, and you need to adapt to be flexible about it. We have alerts, so that means we need to go to the shelter, then schedules of electricity, which means you need to find power and Wi-Fi. So, it’s a lot of stress that we are experiencing.”

Herasymenko is not alone—a rising number of children and educators are currently facing unprecedented disruption and stress due to living in conflict-affected areas. More than 473 million children live in or are fleeing settings of conflict and crisis around the world, and approximately 204 million people worldwide live in areas controlled or contested by armed groups.

Educators in these spaces are navigating burnout, secondary trauma, and constant uncertainty, while they simultaneously hold space for students’ fear, grief, and hope. In these conditions, the question is not whether teachers and students need support, but rather what kinds of support are actually feasible, sustainable, and relevant to them.

Small practices that make the day possible

Despite years of disruption, Ukrainian educators have found creative ways to help students stay connected and engaged. They adapt lesson plans around air raid alerts, maintain routines that foster belonging, and cultivate community across distance and displacement. Social-emotional learning (SEL) practices have become one more tool in that effort, helping educators strengthen the care and support they were already providing.

According to a recent journal article, SEL Kernels—short activities and strategies that are used to support the growth and development of social and emotional skills and competencies—helped support teachers and students in wartime Ukraine. These include games, routines, and activities that target specific skills like emotional regulation, conflict resolution, and building relationships.

When SEL practices are not adjusted to be responsive and relevant to a particular culture, they’re less likely to have benefits. These SEL Kernels, developed by Harvard University’s Ecological Approaches to Social Emotional Learning Laboratory, were modified to fit the evolving needs of educators and teachers in Ukraine. How? Rebecca Bailey and her colleagues started with landscape research to identify what challenges students and educators in Ukraine were actually facing.

“Building on these findings, we engaged in a collaborative co-design process with Ukrainian teachers and a team of LEGO Foundation Ukraine Master Trainers to adapt and refine the Kernels for local relevance and usability,” they write.

They conducted a survey and organized focus groups for teachers to discuss their concerns about student well-being and mental health. Teachers identified areas where additional support could strengthen the work they were already doing, including helping students regulate emotions during air raid alerts, rebuild social connections, and navigate prolonged uncertainty.

Based on the survey and focus group discussions, the researchers identified five priorities for the Ukraine Kernels materials, including cooperation, mindfulness, cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, and teacher well-being.

“Finally, we piloted the adapted Kernels materials in diverse classroom settings, gathering data on implementation, feasibility, and relevance,” they write.

After the final revision of materials and rollout of the Kernels, Bailey and her colleagues found that teachers viewed the SEL Kernels as beneficial for both their own and students’ well-being. Teachers reported that the activities helped support emotional and psychological health, made learning more engaging and meaningful for children, and provided practical tools that eased the demands of teaching.

For example, Herasymenko has found that short mindful moments help ground both her and her students. Having students name their rose, thorn, and bud for the day—having them reflect on something positive, naming a challenge, and looking ahead to something they’re excited for—have helped them hold on to hope.

Additionally, she leads a five senses grounding practice with students to reconnect the mind and body without taking up a large amount of time during the learning day. In high-stress environments, practices like these work because they are small enough to hold, even on hard days.

“I cannot imagine my teaching being the same as it was before the war,” Herasymenko says. “Everything is different now. So, I prioritize my students’ well-being more than their academic achievements. I think that now it’s more important for them to be OK and to be without stress in my classes. This is my priority now.”

The impact of Ukrainian conflict in neighboring countries

Data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre show that internal displacements—people who have been forced to flee or leave their homeland to avoid the effects of armed conflict, violence, or violations of human rights—increased from 20 million in 2024 to 32 million in 2025.

Schools in Poland have been significantly shaped by the conflict in Ukraine, and many educators are experiencing new emotional and practical challenges while supporting students. Małgorzata Lidacka, an educator in Kraków who works with displaced Ukrainian students ages seven to 10, has had to approach teaching in a much different way to help her students acclimate to the new environment—often slowing down and reminding herself not to rush to solutions while navigating both lesson plans and emotional responsibilities.

“When you’re a subject teacher, no one tells you that you will then have to be a coach, or some kind of therapist,” Lidacka says. “You can make a mistake and then it can influence these kids. So I feel this burden that it’s a lot for one person to combine those roles.”

The cultural barriers have also made it difficult for her to connect with parents, and some students have fallen behind because they refused to learn Polish when they first arrived, thinking that the stay in a new country would have been over much faster. The anger, fear, and hopelessness that her students are experiencing make it increasingly difficult to focus on academics, and Lidacka empathizes.

To support herself and her students while carrying this increased mental load, Lidacka turned to social-emotional learning strategies. She now routinely advocates for play to promote shared joy beyond language barriers and encourages small acts of kindness—like lending a pencil or a book to a classmate. Additionally, when working with parents, she began asking open-ended questions and practicing mindful listening, which she found made a huge difference in connecting and finding common ground.

“During the workshops with parents, I just listen,” Lidacka says. “And they are creating such great ideas about the future—for them and for their families.”

Despite the challenges Lidacka has faced with her students, she has also seen how remarkably adaptable they are. Many have learned to transition between online and in-person learning at a moment’s notice, they support classmates navigating similar disruptions, and most really dove headfirst into learning the new language and culture.

“The best part is small acts of kindness on a daily basis, and also a huge determination from Ukrainian kids to learn Polish,” Lidacka says. “They really wanted to learn very fast. And we have some pupils in the first grade that are fluent in Polish, even though their parents aren’t. So I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ Of course, it was a requirement, but not everyone succeeds.”

Supporting the supporters: Teacher well-being in real time

While searching for additional support and resources for her classroom and her own well-being, Lidacka found the Greater Good Educators Community of Practice (CoP). The CoP offered a space for educators across the globe to connect with one another and learn science-based practices focused on purpose, awe, self-compassion, gratitude, and kindness and compassion for others.

For educators like Lidacka, who had already experimented with small, bite-sized SEL practices, the Greater Good Educators CoP created a space to expand on what she already knew. The practices emphasized that teacher sustainability begins with teacher well-being, and the community conversations helped her see she was not alone.

“After these three years, I see among my peers that we are exhausted,” Lidacka says. “More and more often, we are searching for places to debrief or to just sit and talk about how difficult it still is to manage this.”

Alongside learning SEL practices like mindful listening and self-compassion, the educators who joined the CoP were encouraged to practice the shared community invitations of curiosity, compassion, and respect with each other. These invitations helped create a supportive environment where teachers could connect across experiences and process challenges together.

Herasymenko is one of the many educators Lidacka was able to virtually connect with, and she shared similar sentiments about the importance of having an outlet to support her own mental well-being.

“It’s great to have some kind of community of teachers during all these hardships,” Herasymenko says. “Before the war, I didn’t pay so much attention to my well-being, and now I understand that this is an important part of a teacher’s job. To think about taking breaks, to think about how to recharge yourself.”

Educators like Lidacka and Herasymenko are not waiting for ideal conditions to create caring learning environments. They have continued teaching, adapting, and building community through years of uncertainty. SEL initiatives are not a one-size-fits-all cure for the challenges they face, but they offer additional support for work they are already doing. By investing in educators’ well-being, we help sustain the people who make learning, connection, and hope possible—even in the most difficult circumstances.

Scaling up large health programs, working through complex systems, is what we do in global health. Guided by the science of epidemiology, we study how and why disease is distributed. We ask, why does disease “cluster,” affecting certain people, at certain times, in certain places? Understanding these patterns can provide the information needed to reduce the risk of disease and promote human health. So naturally, while listening to Jinpa, we wondered: could the statistical tools and methods of epidemiology also be used to “scale up” compassion? 

Epidemiology is a latecomer to compassion science. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied compassion for decades. Spiritual traditions have taught compassion for centuries. Collectively, they have focused on cultivating the capacity for compassion in individuals. “Scaling up” requires broadening the field to include institutions, systems, and populations—which is precisely the strength of epidemiology. 

The novel idea that epidemiology might contribute to compassion science faced headwinds. Epidemiologists considered compassion to be too “soft,” too difficult to measure. Epidemiology is a quantitative science after all, for which precise measurement is crucial. On the other hand, compassion scholars and teachers warned that attempts to measure compassion would ruin it. Finding a “middle way” required innovative dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration. We started with two exploratory meetings at the Task Force for Global Health, a review of the compassion science literature through an epidemiologic lens, and, in March 2026, a special issue of the International Journal of Wellbeing, “Towards an Epidemiology of Compassion”. Our intent was to encourage scholars and thinkers from other disciplines to contribute their insights into how an epidemiologic approach could help to build a more compassionate world.

Challenging questions

While epidemiology has proven its value in public health, we found that applying it to compassion requires wrestling with several fundamental questions. First, do we have the right conceptual framing for compassion at a population level—are we thinking about it in the right way? Compassion educators who regard compassion as an individual human skill are doubtful. Only individuals, they say—not organizations or communities—have the capacity for warm-heartedness, which is necessary for compassion. However, they concede that organizations differ in their capacity to acknowledge suffering and respond with compassion, just as individuals do: Some are more compassionate than others. A reliable framework for understanding why compassion clusters in some organizations or systems more than others could provide clues for nurturing compassion in all organizations.

A second question is whether current epidemiologic and statistical methods are up to the task of analyzing the complexity of factors, interacting at multiple levels, that determine the extent to which compassion is present and how it is expressed. These factors include individual intent; physical, relational, historical, and emotional influences; and environmental and cultural determinants, among others.

Perhaps the most critical question for an epidemiology of compassion is that of measurement: What should be counted? Even at the individual level, measures of compassion rarely capture its essence. A recent scientific review by psychologist Cassandra Vieten and her colleagues found 503 measures of compassion and empathy—evidence that consensus is lacking. At the population level, outside the controlled environment of a laboratory, the challenge is even more complex. Measures of intention, empathic resonance, brain activity, or physiologic changes—which are useful in experimental contexts—are neither feasible nor reliable for studying compassion in populations. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva and Jennifer Mascaro have argued that, at the macro level, compassion can be measured by how well it is institutionalized through policies and actions. But are such policies and actions the same as compassion? Not according to those who insist that compassion is a skill or trait only of individuals, or that, for action to be considered compassionate, we must know that it is motivated by a positive intent. 

Gaining momentum

What began years ago as a vaguely defined notion among a small group of enthusiasts is gaining momentum. As an example, “Towards an Epidemiology of Compassion” featured 23 articles by more than 90 authors from a broad range of disciplines. Significantly, the articles provided much-needed perspective on conceptual frameworks, epidemiologic methods, and measurement. 

Conceptual frameworks. Working independently, several groups have proposed new conceptual frameworks to guide an epidemiology of compassion. Each of these frameworks or conceptual models emphasizes the need to understand how compassion manifests at multiple levels, including the individual, collective, and societal levels. Some of the frameworks describe how compassion “flows” across these levels, while others focus on determinants of compassion at different stages of life. Taken together, these conceptual models highlight the emerging understanding of compassion at the collective level and open new lines of inquiry into collective expressions of compassion—actions that are possible only through the shared intention and coordinated work of many people.

We have argued elsewhere, for example, that the field of global health, which seeks to alleviate and prevent suffering at a global level, is a manifestation of compassion. Exciting recent work on organizational compassion by Ace Simpson, Monica Worline, Jane Dutton, and others goes beyond these frameworks to describe the processes and features that characterize compassionate organizations. These include, for example, compassionate leadership; communication networks that alert staff to the presence of pain or suffering; roles, routines, and social networks that facilitate alleviation of suffering; and the use of physical space to increase staff accessibility and interaction.

Methods. The convenings at the Task Force for Global Health confirmed that epidemiologic methods are well-suited to studying compassion at the institutional and population levels. Methods used in chronic disease epidemiology, in particular, are designed to handle the extraordinary complexity of multiple “risk factors” interacting across different levels and time points. Other epidemiologic methods, such as geospatial analysis, can be used to map where and when specific forms of suffering (such as hunger) occur and whether resources (such as food pantries) have been put in place to address that suffering.

Measures. Although a single ideal measure of compassion remains elusive, significant progress has been made in refining and triangulating measures of compassion, particularly in health care systems. For example, Shane Sinclair and his colleagues have developed companion measures of compassion that take the perspectives of both patients and health care providers. Taking a systems approach, Anupama Jha and her colleagues developed a suite of measures to evaluate the impact of compassion training and health systems transformation in district hospitals in Bihar, India. Beverley Fehr and Susan Sprecher recently applied an epidemiologic lens to synthesize two decades of psychological research that used the same existing measure—the Compassionate Love Scale—and provided fresh insight into the clustering of compassion by time, place, and person.

Looking to the future

Since Jinpa’s keynote address in 2018, we’ve seen a global outpouring of interest in compassion and how it moves through human systems. Along with this interest has come a desire for a scientific approach that can guide research and inform practical efforts to nurture compassion in institutions and systems. Epidemiology contributes a population-level lens to compassion science that can help reveal and quantitatively describe the interplay of factors that enable compassion to arise in specific settings. So, what is needed now for compassion science to realize its potential through epidemiology?

Broaden the conversation. As Jinpa noted, we must reach beyond our own community to broaden the conversation. We must include voices from other disciplines—as well as voices of those who do not align themselves with any academic discipline. Progress on the central challenge of measurement can come only from a thorough understanding of compassion in different cultures and settings, incorporating perspectives across the breadth of human experience. We must learn particularly from Indigenous communities and colleagues in the global South. We need the perspectives of evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists, primate biologists, artists, peacebuilders, spiritual leaders, and theologians. And the conversation should extend more deeply within epidemiology itself, for example, to explore how the tools of infectious disease modeling and social epidemiology can help us understand how compassion is transmitted or spread across populations. 

Conceptual frameworks. There is much to be learned from in-depth exploration and comparison of the new conceptual models of collective compassion. Broadening and deepening the conversation to refine, apply, align, and learn from the new conceptual models can lead to an integrated framework, a conceptual scaffolding for further research and testing of ideas. 

Data. Epidemiology is a data-driven science. Advances in conceptual frameworks inevitably lead to new questions and stimulate the search for data to answer those questions. There is much to be gained from epidemiologic analysis of existing data, as shown by Fehr and Sprecher, as well as from including compassion-related questions in new research on human flourishing, happiness, and well-being. For example, analysis of compassion-related questions in the Global Flourishing Study by Julia Nakamura and her colleagues provides intriguing insight into the spatial distribution of compassion at a global level.

Systems perspective. Compassion science has largely focused on the giving of compassion by individuals. The recent increase in scholarship and interest in self-compassion and receiving compassion from others has opened a rich inquiry into how compassion “flows” across these dimensions, as well as the implications of such flow for well-being and mental health. In unpacking their multi-level framework, James Kirby and his colleagues argue that the systems in which humans live and work not only facilitate or constrain the flow of compassion among individuals, but these systems also serve as “active agents that can give and receive compassion.” While they may not be capable of warm-heartedness, organizations “possess the primary driver of compassion: intention,” and they can be sensitive to suffering and committed to its alleviation. This radical approach opens a new landscape for compassion science, for which epidemiology, with its systems perspective, is well-suited. 

Influence on epidemiology. Historically, epidemiology has overwhelmingly focused on disease and threats to human health. Tyler VanderWeele and his colleagues recently argued that the tools of epidemiology also should be applied to promote human flourishing. An epidemiology of compassion opens the field to a broader “positive epidemiology,” similar to developments in positive psychology. By inviting narratives and first-person accounts of the experience of compassion, epidemiology will be stretched in new ways—not unlike the field of contemplative neuroscience.

Compassion and social justice. The systems perspective of epidemiology, with its attention to populations, leads to the unavoidable question, rarely explored in individual compassion training, whose suffering is to be alleviated? In prompting this question and providing an analytic framework to address and monitor it, epidemiology brings compassion science into much-needed conversation with ethics and social justice. 

We live in a world that seems increasingly polarized. The need for compassion at the institutional and societal levels has never been greater. Applying the epidemiologic toolkit and its systems perspective to compassion science will not be a panacea, but we and others believe that it can make important contributions, just as it has in global health. We look forward to working with others who share this view—and to engaging in conversation with those who don’t. And we are eager to see more writing, thinking, and noticing of the ways that compassion manifests in communities and organizations. These real-world observations and reflections, combined with robust epidemiologic methods, hold the potential to bring us to the next frontier in compassion science—and to answering Jinpa’s question about how to “scale up” compassion.

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun follows three women whose experiences challenge familiar narratives about crime, punishment, and victimhood. Through years of dogged reporting, court records, and interviews, she traces how domestic violence, childhood trauma, poverty, and systemic failures shaped the choices these women made—and the harsh sentences many received.

I spoke with van der Leun over Zoom about criminalized survivors, the limits of self-defense law, and what it would take to create a more just system. Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: You set out to discover how many women in U.S. prisons fall in this category of “criminalized survivors.” What drove you to research this yourself?

Justine van der Leun: I was reading a report called The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline by an organization called The Human Rights Project for Girls, looking at the way that girls—in particular, Black girls—who were in the juvenile justice system had been sexually abused, often severely, before being incarcerated.

I was really interested in this idea of punishment, this further state punishment for this thing that had happened. But it was really hard to report on kids, to get permission—especially kids who don’t have parents. I abandoned that; I just didn’t know how to get in.

Then I learned about the idea of “survived and punished” from the group Survived and Punished. I ended up on Nikki’s case. And then I created this whole ridiculous project—in retrospect, what was I thinking?—to find how many criminalized survivors are there now.

HR: What did you learn? How many respondents reported experiencing abuse before entering the prison system?

JV: There’ve been studies that show that in certain facilities, up to 94% of women in prison have histories of domestic or sexual violence. And, anecdotally, I never really talked to somebody who didn’t—it’s almost everybody.

My research shows that 30% of respondents are criminalized survivors, and that’s probably like a vast undercount because I didn’t prime them. I didn’t ask specifically, “are you a criminalized survivor? Or “did you experience abuse or violence?”

One thing that I cannot know is how many women get off. How many times do prosecutors not charge? If you don’t get convicted, there’s no record of anything. So if a woman did, say, defend herself and they chose not to press charges—or try and they fail—then there’s really no way for me to find that person and then look at their characteristics and compare them. Everything is down to these individual DAs, for the most part.

HR: A recurring question, when it comes to these women and other victims of abuse, is “why didn’t she leave?” Can you address this?

JV: It’s a natural question that people who haven’t lived through this have. People think, “Well, if someone’s raping me, strangling me, putting me on Pornhub, or whatever, I would just go.”

Anyone who’s been through it knows that you can’t.

The simplest answer, looking at these situations, is that it’s not about if she decides to leave—it’s about if he lets her leave. So the decision is really not the survivor’s, the victim’s decision. It’s always the decision of the abuser.

We put the onus on her to leave, but in almost every single case that I’ve looked at, she wants to leave. But in domestic violence situations, the person being abused is so intricately aware of their abuser’s triggers and how they will react to everything. They know what will happen if they do. It’s not like you can make the free choice just to walk out.

Furthermore, as Nikki said to me once, “If he had thrown me on the ground and raped me the first date, I wouldn’t have been with him.” But the abuse is so gradual.

Also, when people have children and when people have lives together, it becomes so hard to disentangle yourself from these people—who’ve also convinced you that you’re worth nothing.

Gemma is one of the women in my book. She said it doesn’t matter how strong you are. It doesn’t matter what a badass you think you are. If somebody, day after day, isolates you and tells you that you’re a terrible mother, you’re going to lose your children, you’re worth nothing, nobody will want you—you start to believe it.

An abuser isolates you—or identifies someone who is already isolated—and gloms on to them. And when kids are involved, women wonder: How do I extract my child? Will he come for my child? Will the state come for my child? How do I remove my child from this life that they have with their dad?

Tanisha, she wanted to leave, but she would have been homeless if she did. So she stayed while trying to get her life together. And it’s not really a free choice, it’s like the other choices, like sleeping in your car, you know, are untenable.

For the other three women, everything that happened occurred when someone had left or was trying to leave. That’s the most dangerous time.

HR: Of children who have been abused, 77% face abuse in adulthood. Can you talk about how you observed this pattern in the women you wrote about?

JV: I haven’t been able to untangle it to the degree that I would like to. One expert said that the way they deal with trust is profoundly altered—they either trust too much or they don’t trust at all. The compass guiding them is a little broken.

Tanisha had been abused so much as a child, she almost took it as a given that a man would do this to her. She was abused in all of her relationships. I don’t know that she ever thought she was worth anything more, or knew that she was worth not getting abused—because that was her only experience in life.

Nikki’s childhood abuse—in all cases, actually—was never dealt with properly. So they couldn’t find healing. It was denied or like swept under the rug. And when you don’t heal from that, I don’t know how you can go forward and create healthy relationships when you have sexual trauma—stuff that you never got treatment for.

Even people who get treatment find it really hard to have healthy relationships later. So people who live on the margins have a lot of self-hate, shame, and worthlessness that they carry. Abusers are often really good at identifying that and coming into the lives of people like that, as well.

HR: And violence isn’t always registered by the person experiencing it. Gemma, for example, had been thrown against a glass coffee table that shattered—but she didn’t note it as abuse. Why do you think this happens?

JV: She told me, “That year was good.” Gemma would say that, first, she loved him and she got involved—and then he was abusive. The more I looked at it, the more I saw that he forced her into the relationship and the marriage—by strangulation and abuse, and by tracking her and stalking her. But because she felt that there was an inevitability to it, she may have tried to create, in her mind, a more pleasant reality in which she was choosing this and loved him.

Because the alternative was that she was being like forced and raped and strangled into a relationship. I think she wrote off a lot of things because she kind of had to, to live her life and to keep going. Including the coffee table incident. She had created a bit of an alternate reality.

HR: Beginning in the 1970s, lawyers defending or helping women with cases of criminalized survival advised them to plead insanity rather than self-defense. Why is self-defense so difficult to prove?

JV: I called the book Unreasonable Women because for a long time, the jury was tasked with deciding if a defendant acted as a hypothetical “reasonable man” would have acted. They were supposed to put themselves in the person’s shoes and answer, “Would a reasonable person have done the same, knowing the same things, having the same fears?”

There was never really a reasonable woman. Later it was turned to the “reasonable person standard.” So self-defense has typically been conceived of as the idea of like two men outside of a bar, equally sized, having a fight—would a reasonable man in that situation have reacted thusly?

A woman in a domestic violence situation—what is reasonable to her, knowing what she knows—is quite different.

Then there’s the issue of imminence in self-defense—the threat had to be so imminent that you had to react with force. It’s often required that it be in that exact second, in hand-to-hand combat. But if it were hand-to-hand combat, women would usually die. She won’t be able to defend herself. So imminence looks different for women—and that’s rarely considered historically and legally.

HR: How is Tanisha’s story a prime example of criminalized survival?

JV: Tanisha was dealing with not having housing. She ended up meeting a guy at a club, and he had a room, and she didn’t want to sleep in a car, and she didn’t want to impose on friends. She ended up going and moving in with him. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was just a roommate. But he abused her.

Quickly, he took over her life. She wanted to leave, but he also took over her finances, so she couldn’t leave very easily. So she decided she didn’t want to sleep in the car, so she would make it work while she stayed.

He then killed a man in their shared apartment. She was there at the time. She ran out. He put a gun to her head. He put a hand to her throat. And he basically told her to get with the program and do as he said—or he would kill her, as well.

She did as he said. She helped wrap the body of this young man that he had killed. Then she ran for years. She was really scared of him. She was scared of the police. Finally, her conscience got to her. She came forward to help solve this cold case and help the police so that his family would have closure.

HR: She’d had faith that the system would protect her. What actually happened?

JV: Alisa Bierria says something like, “Black women are used as pawns to demonstrate justice and then disposed of.” I certainly saw that. If we consider justice convictions—which I think prosecutors often do—these women are often used to testify.

Tanisha came forward—but she was promised immunity, according to her. She had a bad lawyer, and she didn’t get it. They needed to build their case. They said, to make her believable to a jury, she couldn’t have gotten any deal. They used her as a witness so that they could win their conviction. And so they threw her life away.

HR: Efforts such as New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act address criminalized survival. What would it take to overhaul the system?

JV: Survivor justice laws provide openings for people who are in prison to get their cases heard. Oklahoma, Illinois, New Jersey—and, more recently, Georgia—have passed such laws. The laws allow for a person who can show that abuse was a significant contributing factor, for the judge to have discretion on sentencing. They’re also retroactive. So if you’re in prison, you can have a chance of getting your case heard again.

Those laws are really important, but I can’t sugarcoat it: It’s a systemic issue. It’s generational, it’s enslaved people who came before these women were born, and these ideas that people learned about these communities, what they’ve been through.

It’s clear that the narratives we’re told about people, and the labels that are put on them—by the criminal legal system, prisons, even media—have nothing to do with who they are, the real context of their lives, or what really happened.

Some really remarkable people are locked up on murder convictions. It’s changed how I understand being a woman in America. This is baked into our culture and society; it’s what we all experience on some level. This is all by design.

My interest in the science of disappointment began more than 15 years ago as a workplace consultant. I was struck by how often clients described episodes that left them feeling disappointed as deeply personal and unsettling experiences—and by how little research there was to help me respond meaningfully. That prompted me to do a Ph.D. on the subject.

Disappointment often reflects a gap between expectation and reality. It can involve grieving a future we had already begun to live in our minds.

My subsequent research with colleagues revealed a telling pattern. In the workplace, disappointment is frequently generated at a systemic level by unrealistic targets—yet lands on individuals as a sense of personal failure.

In many walks of life, it is commonly dismissed as an unwanted and unhelpful emotion. But our research tells a different story. Disappointment can be an important fuel for creativity. It surfaces what we truly desire, clarifies what matters to us, and points us toward what we are not yet willing to accept.

Whether in our professional or personal lives, disappointment is a signal worth learning to read. Here are some ideas for when you next come up against it.

1. Don’t get ahead of yourself

When we are waiting on a significant decision—a job offer, test result, or relationship turning point—our emotional response is prepared long before the answer arrives. The same outcome can feel entirely different depending on what we anticipated would happen. The wider the gap between expectation and reality, the greater the disappointment.

In the workplace, severe disappointment in not getting a job or missing out on a promotion can stem from the loss of a working future we had already begun to imagine. If that future does not materialize, we grieve it—even if it never fully existed.

2. Beware the success trap

Success can quietly raise the bar for future failure. One of our respondents illustrated this dynamic neatly. Exceed your work target by 10% one year, they observed, and your manager is unlikely to reward you with a lighter load the next. Rather, the target is raised again, making falling short more likely—and the disappointment more acute because of your past success.

The same pattern can play out in social situations. Think of a friend who often picks up the bill. Over time, a generous gesture becomes expected behavior. Then, on the one occasion they don’t pay, this becomes a moment of disappointment that people notice and remember. That disappointment is not proportionate to what actually happened, but to the gap with what was expected.

3. Try not to blame yourself (or anyone else)

People rarely experience disappointment in a neutral way. Rather, they tend to interpret it through one of two familiar patterns.

The first is internal: “I am the problem.” This assumes they did not try hard enough or were simply not good enough. Disappointment is treated as a sign they are a flawed or bad person.

The second interpretation is external. The fault is with others who did not recognize the person’s value and did not live up to expectations. The instinct is to blame and get angry with them.

Our research on disappointment in organizations shows both responses miss the point. Blaming ourselves or others can be a way of avoiding something harder to confront: that expectations are unrealistic or based on inaccurate assumptions.

4. The Ikea effect

Environments shape expectations. In workplaces, many people are encouraged to aim high and improve continuously. Organizations often promote ideals of progress, achievement, and fulfillment.

These ideals can be motivating, but they can also create a perfect scenario that reality struggles to match. From this perspective, disappointment can be a structural feature of systems that rely on high expectations and idealized outcomes.

But there’s a personal aspect, too. Research on what psychologists call “the Ikea effect” shows the more effort we invest in something, the more we value it—rather like a flatpack piece of furniture that we have built ourselves. At work, we routinely pour time, energy, and identity into projects, roles, and relationships. So, when things don’t go as hoped, we are losing something very personal.

And because failure at work is often witnessed by colleagues and managers, the stakes feel higher. The loss can become entangled with how others see us, and how we see ourselves.

Left unexamined, such feelings can calcify into something more damaging than the original disappointment: a diminished appetite for risk, a reluctance to invest fully in what comes next, and a growing suspicion that doing so is simply not worth it.

5. Be realistic, not idealistic

Moving from trying to eliminate disappointment to tolerating it can make it less destabilizing and more informative. As a manager, this might mean developing the habit of noting, at the outset of a project, what a realistic rather than an ideal result would look like.

Similar patterns can appear in relationships too, where expecting things to feel perfect all the time can make an otherwise good relationship seem lacking.

Research consistently shows that naming difficult emotions reduces their intensity, and that workplaces where disappointment can be discussed honestly tend to be psychologically safer, more creative, and better at learning from setbacks than those where such feelings are expected to be quietly moved past.

6. Accept disappointment, don’t dismiss it

Disappointment is uncomfortable because it confronts us with limits: to what we can control, to what organizations can deliver, or to what relationships can provide. An understandable instinct is to try to move past this quickly.

But a more constructive approach is to reflect on where our expectations come from, how they are formed, and whether they can be moderated in ways that benefit us. If disappointment is a signal that our expectations and reality are out of alignment, then understanding this may be one of the most important forms of resilience we can develop.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Three months after a New York Times investigation detailed allegations of sexual violence against United Farm Workers movement cofounder Cesar E. Chavez, many Latinos are still grappling with that question. The revelations have sparked difficult conversations about accountability, memory, and what it means when someone whose legacy is woven into a community’s identity is accused of causing profound harm.

To understand why the allegations have resonated so deeply, it helps to understand Chavez’s place in American history. In the 1960s and 1970s, farmworkers across California endured grueling conditions, including low wages, job insecurity, exposure to pesticides, and few legal protections.

Alongside labor organizer Dolores Huerta, Chavez helped build the United Farm Workers into one of the country’s most influential labor movements, organizing strikes, leading nationwide boycotts, and advocating for better pay and working conditions. Their efforts helped bring national attention to the exploitation of agricultural workers and secured contracts that improved conditions for thousands of laborers.

Over time, Chavez became more than a labor movement leader. For many Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans, he came to symbolize perseverance, dignity, and the fight for civil rights. Schools, parks, streets, and public buildings bear his name.

His story has long been taught as an example of nonviolent activism and collective action. His image has become inseparable from the broader history of Latino political empowerment in the United States.

That is why the New York Times investigation landed with such force. Drawing on interviews and historical records, the investigation reported allegations from multiple women who said Chavez sexually assaulted or abused them over several decades. It also examined claims that people within his circle were aware of the alleged misconduct but failed to intervene.

Although Chavez died in 1993 and was never criminally charged or able to respond to the allegations, the reporting challenged a public legacy that had largely portrayed him as a moral leader and champion of justice. For many who grew up revering Chavez, the investigation has forced an agonizing question: How should communities remember a figure whose contributions to social justice are now being weighed against allegations of profound personal harm?

Psychologists suggest that revelations involving admired leaders can trigger a unique form of emotional conflict. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s research on institutional betrayal suggests that when harm is committed by someone closely tied to a person’s identity, community, or sense of belonging, people may experience grief, confusion, anger, and disbelief simultaneously. The challenge is not only processing the wrongdoing itself, but reconciling it with long-held beliefs about a person or institution once trusted. In these moments, the person being questioned is not merely a public figure but someone connected to collective memory, cultural pride, and a community’s understanding of its own history.

That tension raises yet another difficult question: How can communities acknowledge painful truths without abandoning the movements and values that shaped them?

Holding two truths at once

For Pablo Gonzalez, a first-generation Chicano scholar-activist and anthropologist who studies social movements, the allegations against Chavez forced a conversation that could no longer be avoided.

“There’s no way you can’t have this conversation in a Chicano studies class,” Gonzalez said.

When he addressed the topic with students, he found himself overcome with emotion. As someone whose generation benefited from educational opportunities created through the broader farmworker and Chicano movements, he understood both the movement’s significance and the pain of confronting its contradictions.

“I got emotional because it’s something that for us, we have not yet been able to have deep conversations about,” Gonzalez said. “What the broader movement, that includes the Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers struggle, [meant]—of how deeply important it was but also how deeply painful it was in regards to its internal contradictions and conflicts.”

His response reflects a challenge many communities face when confronting harm committed by influential figures. The conversation is often framed as a choice between honoring a movement’s achievements and acknowledging abuse.

Alexandra Barahona de Brito, a scholar of collective memory and reconciliation, explains that societies are often better served by simplified narratives. Furthermore, research on transitional justice suggests communities build a more honest understanding of the past when they acknowledge both the accomplishments and failures of historical figures, rather than reducing them to heroes or villains.

Acknowledging one reality does not require denying the other. Instead, confronting both can create a fuller and more honest understanding of the past.

The cost of hero worship

According to Gonzalez, part of the difficulty lies in how social movements often become centered on individual figures.

Over time, Chavez’s role within the farmworker movement became inseparable from the movement itself. Through public fasts, religious symbolism, and widespread media attention, he became more than an organizer. He became a symbol.

“Over time, you create this persona,” Gonzalez said. “History starts to write about Cesar, and he becomes central to the story.” As Chavez’s image became increasingly intertwined with the farmworker movement, criticism of the leader could feel like criticism of the movement itself.

Psychologists use the term “halo effect” to describe the tendency for positive impressions in one area to shape perceptions of a person’s overall character. In Chavez’s case, admiration for his leadership and the movement’s achievements may have made it more difficult for supporters to reconcile evidence that conflicted with his public image.

That psychological tendency was reinforced by Chavez’s symbolic role within the movement.

He had become its most recognizable public face; questioning Chavez could also feel, for many, like questioning the legitimacy of the farmworker struggle itself. While charismatic leadership can inspire collective action, it can also make criticism of a leader feel like an attack on the cause they represent.

Gonzalez said that dynamic often led difficult conversations about Chavez to be sidelined.

“You don’t talk about, for instance, his anti-undocumented labor stance,” Gonzalez said. “You don’t talk about how he ostracized Filipino labor leaders or other farmworkers that didn’t agree with him.”

Instead, protecting the image of the movement’s most recognizable leader frequently took priority.

The recent allegations challenge communities to reconsider what happens when social movements become attached to a single individual rather than the thousands of people who collectively made change possible.

What survivors make possible

At the center of the current conversation are the women who came forward to share their experiences.

For Gonzalez, their decision to speak publicly represents more than a need to reassess Chavez’s legacy. It offers an opportunity to address forms of harm that have long remained unspoken within Latino communities.

“It takes time for those voices that were silenced and suppressed to come out,” Gonzalez said. “But they’re there. They’re always there.”

Psychiatrist Judith Herman’s research on trauma and recovery suggests that healing often begins when survivors are able to speak about their experiences and have those experiences acknowledged. Naming harm does not weaken communities. Instead, creating conditions where survivors feel safe enough to come forward and be taken seriously can become an important first step toward accountability and repair.

Gonzalez pointed to Dolores Huerta’s willingness to publicly address the allegations as an example of breaking longstanding silence.

“When young girls— . . . girls of color—are looking for heroes and heroines and they look at Dolores Huerta, they’re not only going to see a labor leader and civil rights leader, but also a person who broke the silence,” he said.

“They’re going to see other women, whose names probably won’t be written in history books, break the silence.”

Creating space for difficult conversations

The revelations surrounding Chavez arrive at a moment when conversations about sexual violence are unfolding across many institutions, from universities and workplaces to religious organizations and immigrant detention centers.

For Gonzalez, the importance of this moment extends far beyond one individual.

“Breaking the silence around that is important,” he said. “It could be the place where we see mobilization. Sexual violence in detention centers. Sexual violence against young girls. Everything that, again, our community has not had a meaningful dialogue about.”

That dialogue, he argues, must begin by centering survivors rather than protecting legacies.

“There has to be a dialogue in our community around sexual violence,” Gonzalez said. “There has to be a dialogue around centering victims.”

Restorative justice scholars argue that accountability begins not with protecting reputations but with understanding harm. Rather than asking how a leader’s legacy should be preserved, restorative approaches encourage communities to ask who was harmed, what support survivors need, and what changes are necessary to prevent similar abuses in the future.

Beyond heroes

As communities continue to wrestle with Chavez’s legacy, Gonzalez believes the broader lesson is not simply about one leader but about how we define leadership itself.

“The solution here is not to create more pedestals,” he said.

While some have proposed replacing Chavez’s name with other figures, Gonzalez argues that doing so risks repeating the same pattern. Instead, he believes communities should shift their attention away from singular heroes and toward the countless individuals whose labor, courage, and sacrifices sustain social movements.

“We have to embrace the nameless—not the voiceless, but the nameless—people who make up everyday struggles, because that’s who we are.”

The challenge facing Latino communities today is not deciding whether Chavez was entirely good or entirely bad. It is learning how to tell a fuller story—one that honors collective achievements, acknowledges harm, centers survivors, and resists the temptation to place any individual beyond accountability.

Perhaps that is what collective healing ultimately requires: not the erasure of history, but the courage to face it honestly.

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As I moved from my early to late 40s, one feeling resonated: I felt great! My smartest, most confident, and healthiest version of myself. 

The disconnect between what I was expecting to feel and what I actually felt was so large that, at the end of last year, I started a Substack to talk about the notion that, yes, we can be Happier in the Middle. It turns out my hunch is beyond anecdotal and actually rooted in scientific research.

Primetime, by Margie Lachman, the director of the Lifespan Lab at Brandeis University, suggests that we are looking at both life and especially life in the middle the wrong way.

Instead of viewing life as one mountain to climb, the foundational perspective of the “downhill” metaphor, it’s more accurately a series of mountains and the middle a pivotal summit where we get to look back at where we’ve been and make decisions about where we want to go next.

Why do we believe in a midlife crisis?

Based on over 30 years of research, Lachman roughly defines the middle as age 40 to 60 (plus or minus 10 years).

She demystifies the origin story of the “midlife crisis,” tracing it to a 1965 article by a Canadian psychoanalyst who noted that the creativity of artists dipped in their mid- to late 30s, which he linked to feelings of a looming end of life. We also have him to thank for the notion that life after 40 goes “downhill.”

The idea of a midlife crisis was later fueled by a 2008 study showing a U-shape to happiness, with it dipping in midlife. However, when Lachman and her colleagues investigated the data driving this study, they found that “while visually compelling . . . the giant dip in the graph isn’t as significant as it appears from the image.” But the damage of a belief in a midlife dip in happiness had already been done. Add to that media uptake, and we have a full-blown cultural phenomenon that lives rent-free in most of our heads.

However, research by Lachman and her colleagues shows that only 10 to 20% of adults report having a midlife crisis. More importantly, what’s termed a crisis is closer to an introspective life challenge, and one of many inflection points experienced throughout the lifespan, not just in midlife.

Another challenge that amplifies concern about midlife is the belief that who we are is relatively stable by then, in terms of our self-concept (what we think of ourselves) and personality (how we show up in the world), both of which are key drivers to change. Self-concept and personality impact the realm of what we feel is possible for our lives: the goals we can achieve, lifestyle changes we believe we can make, and types of experiences we seek out.

Lachman offers scientific research that counters the belief of a stable and immutable self. Specifically: 1) Personality can change well into midlife and typically only begins to stabilize after the age of 50, and 2) the 50s is a pivotal decade marked by increased introspection and self-reflection. “One of the great opportunities of midlife is that we are in a stronger position than ever before to close the gap between who we are and who we want to be. Using personality change as an avenue for improving the way you think, feel, and behave is a new and underutilized tool,” she writes.

We can have what she calls in one section of the book “a midlife personality glow-up”!

What do we lose and gain in midlife?

A big challenge that I have with the popular midlife narrative is that it’s a deficit-only narrative. We only hear about what we may potentially lose in this phase of life and far less about what is available for us to gain or maintain. Primetime balances the scale in this area.

The book covers various tradeoffs in midlife focusing on potential losses and gains. I’ll share three such examples below.

Cognition. A big concern many of us have, me included, is: Will I be able to maintain my intelligence and memory as I age or not? Lachman helps us to reframe this black-and-white way of thinking about cognition through the lifespan by reminding us there are two components of intelligence, fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. “Fluid intelligence is about quick thinking and innovation. . . . Crystallized intelligence . . . is the epitome of wisdom . . . which relies on experience, semantic memory, knowledge, and the ability to synthesize them all and apply it to the current problem.”

Yes, fluid intelligence may gradually decline as we age, but our crystallized intelligence gets better as we age, through our 60s and 70s. This explains why I feel so confident now: It’s the culmination of life experience, learned knowledge, and my ability to map it on to new situations, all things that we acquire with time.

But if maintaining fluid intelligence is important to us, we are not powerless. Prioritizing activities that encourage neuroplasticity—like learning a new instrument or language, travel to a foreign country, or developing an artistic habit—can help us to preserve fluid intelligence as we age.

Inflammation. In addition to our cognition, another area that gets a lot of attention around midlife decline is our physical health. Everyone from your doctor to well-meaning friends and partners is likely warning you about the potential uptick in illnesses as you age. Their warnings not only are well-meaning, they can also be true. Research does support that as we age, we become susceptible to more physical health problems like cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurodegenerative issues.

A major driver of age-related health decline is inflammation. Inflammation is our immune system’s response to injury, infection, or harm. Lachman reminds us that a key driver of inflammation is chronic stress, something that many of us in the middle may experience due to managing child care, work, and aging parents.

Although we may not be able to control all of the stressors we face at this stage of life, we can mitigate them through our mindset, social support, and healthy behaviors. For example, a study Lachman worked on using Midlife in the United States survey data found that we can employ what she calls “psychosocial anti-inflammatories,” such as cultivating a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives, self-efficacy (believing we can impact change in our lives), optimism, and positive social connections—as well as adopting a regular exercise routine, which has been found to benefit both our physical and mental health as we age. 

Combined, psychosocial anti-inflammatories and exercise help reduce stress and the impact of stress-related inflammation.

Social network. Many of us are likely to have a robust social network by the time we reach middle age, largely due to all of the roles we hold during this period: parent, partner, adult child, friend, boss, coworker, community member, etc. In support of this pattern, Lachman shares data from Pew Research Center that shows that 54% of Americans in their 40s are caring for both children and an aging parent.

With our expanded network comes the potential for a rich and supportive tapestry of social support. But social networks can also add strain and stress stemming from the relationship. Our goal should be to minimize this to the extent possible and capitalize on the social support aspects of relationships. Social support can reduce the impact of life stress and positively contribute to our overall well-being.

An interesting turn that midlife presents for our connection to others is generativity. “Research shows that one of the biggest gains we make in midlife is in the realm of generativity, the way we positively contribute to the world through care and concern for others,” Lachman writes. For example, this might include volunteering, community activism, or mentoring.

It’s in this area that our lived experiences pay in dividends, not just for us but for others. While the concept of generativity places a premium on helping younger generations, this form of support can also be extended to peers and those older than you, as well. A good example is an organization highlighted in the book, Seniors Helping Seniors, where older adults help other older adults across a variety of needs.

The biggest takeaways from Primetime are, first, that our mindset is one of our best assets as we age. It can determine the type of life we will live in midlife and beyond. Second, it’s never too late to start making changes to positively impact our health and well-being. I’m living proof of that, having only recently regained a consistent physical fitness routine in the past couple of years, which has contributed to how good I feel right now, with my 50s around the corner.

We have the capacity to shape how our midlife years and beyond look through the right mindset, decisions, and support; we are not powerless.

He’d earned that nickname after spending 14 years collecting definitions of the word “compassion” from passersby in a notebook or on video. This grew out of a personal awakening he had in 2009, when he gave away all of his possessions to devote his life to a higher purpose, one that included living without stable housing, approaching each day without expectation, and embracing simplicity and minimalism.

It seemed a cruel irony that someone who lived and breathed peace and compassion lost his life in such a tragic way. I was devastated, to say the least. Even further: During the early days of my grieving process, I rediscovered a message David had sent me, one he felt he needed to write as he was becoming more of a public figure in Davis: “If I’m ever harmed or unable to speak for myself, forgive the perpetrator and help others forgive that person.”

Not long after, I found myself sitting in a courtroom, yards away from the young man who took David’s life. How could I possibly live up to David’s wish, this close, this personal, still deeply embedded in the grieving process?

I had to try to practice forgiveness. In real time.

I kept coming back to that word: “practice.” I knew I couldn’t expect anyone else to feel the same way as me—this was my own journey.

But there were others I could learn from, people who’d gone through incredibly difficult experiences but still managed to somehow tap into a place of empathy and mercy. I studied the work of Holocaust survivor Eva Kor, who forgave the people who killed her family. I listened to stories by Jack Kornfield, including his 12 Principles of Forgiveness. I learned from Fred Luskin that I had to “be at peace with the vulnerability inherent in human life.”

These were lessons I absorbed, integrated, and put into practice. At first, it was easier said than done. But I had these examples and David’s words to guide me. I also discovered things about the young man who killed David—and found unexpected common ground in our life stories. 

It may sound ludicrous that someone would be open to identifying a common humanity with someone who’s taken the life of a loved one. But that’s exactly what I found myself doing during the course of the trial in May and June of 2025.

Our mother had schizophrenia. So did the person who took David’s life, Carlos Reales Dominguez. However, Carlos had never been diagnosed as schizophrenic—that happened as a result of receiving a psychiatric evaluation during the trial.

There’s more. My mother was from Jamaica, and Carlos was from El Salvador—we all shared immigrant roots, and all grew up in lower-middle-class families in dangerous neighborhoods. David, Carlos, and I had all been honors students. All of us, in our own ways, were survivors. We’d been accepted into college, with Carlos and me both being first-generation attendees.

We’d overcome so much. It made me view Carlos not only through the same lens as David and me, but also that of many of the kids I’d grown up with, where domestic abuse, sexual abuse, food insecurity, and more accumulated into multiple adverse childhood experiences. These, in turn, can increase the likelihood of negative outcomes in adulthood.

Not only did these shared stories deeply move me—I found myself noticing what it took to reach a place of openness to hearing them. It was, once again, practices, including active listening (granted, potentially inherent in a process that involves testimony and evidence), mindfulness, and deep self-reflection, that helped me navigate pain and reckon not only with my humanity but also with someone else’s.

I had to notice my emotions without judgment, recognize biases, and listen, to not only testimony but also the deeper context of suffering in general.

It didn’t interrupt the grieving process. That wasn’t my goal, anyway, and my therapist told me this wasn’t particularly healthy. But what it did do is help me heal a little faster, grieve a little less, and empathize a lot more.

We all play roles and bring our identities, biases, hurts, wants, and needs to painful situations. Because I was primed for it by David’s request to “forgive the perpetrator,” by the work I’d done to learn more about how to practice forgiveness, and by my understanding of severe mental illness because of my mother, perhaps forgiveness came more easily to me.

But I think anyone’s capable, given the time and space, to reach the same place of openness and empathy. It may not happen overnight. But the possibility, I believe, is there, if one looks for it.

The first trial for Carlos resulted in a hung jury. The retrial is now underway. I’m further along in my grieving process. I’ve even started partnering with transformative justice organizations that believe in fair chances for those who’ve committed crimes, as I believe. As civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson writes in his book, Just Mercy, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

I’m in a good place, still healing, finding purpose. Still, to take care of myself, I’m limiting my involvement with the trial this time around. Come what may, I’m going to be approaching everything with the resources I’ve gained and integrated—and with clear-eyed compassion.