The Science Behind Prosocial Behavior with Dr. Daniel Fessler

As we grow into our teenage years, life becomes fuller and more complicated. School and hobbies get harder. Expectations rise. Social dynamics shift. And sometimes, the small, natural acts of kindness that once felt easy begin to feel harder to prioritize. It’s not that we stop caring; it’s that life feels louder. In all, that made me wonder: Why does kindness sometimes feel more difficult during adolescence? And how can teenagers continue growing their compassion, even during stressful years? To help us explore these thoughts on a scientific level, I’m delighted to welcome Dr. Daniel Fessler.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi everybody and welcome to Growing Forward, a podcast by Positive World, Positive People. As always, I am your host, Sadie Sonaborn Maliki, a 15-year-old girl from Southern California, and I'm really glad you're here with me today. If you're new to the podcast, welcome. Growing Forward is a space where we discussed honestly about what it means to grow up. We hold discussions about social, emotional, and moral issues, and we bring in experts who help explain the experiences so many teens go through, but don't always understand. As we grow into our teenage years, life becomes fuller and more complicated. School gets harder, expectations rise, social dynamics shift, and sometimes the small natural acts of kindness that once felt easy begin to feel harder to prioritize. It's not that we stop caring, it's that life feels louder and more consuming, and we don't always know how to continue that kindness that we once knew as a kid into who we are as an adolescent member. In all, that made me wonder why does this kindness sometimes feel more difficult during our adolescent years and how can teenagers continue growing their compassion even during these stressful times? So, to help us explore this, I'm honored to welcome Dr. Daniel Fessler. Dr. Fessler is a professor of anthropology at UCLA whose research focuses on human moral psychology, cooperation, and the evolutionary foundations of altruism. His work helps us understand where kindness comes from and what influences whether it flourishes or so without wasting any more time, Dr. Fessler, thank you so much for being here today and joining us on Growing Forward.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

I'm happy to do so.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

So to start, what originally drew you to studying moral psychology and human cooperation? What made you interested in kindness as a scientific topic?

SPEAKER_02 1:50

So as a species, we're unusual in a number of ways. And obviously, we've been enormously successful, so much so that we endanger the entire planet with our success. And one of the things that really sets us apart from other living creatures on the planet is the extent to which we cooperate with unrelated individuals. So cooperation with family members is ubiquitous throughout the living world because family members share genes. So by helping one's family member, one is increasing the likelihood that one's own genes will be present in future generations, a key sort of uh you know, mathematical principle of Darwinian evolution. But helping an unrelated individual doesn't always pay off. And in the natural world, what we see is that reciprocity between two individuals that repeatedly interact over time does occur, right? So the proverbial, I scratch your back, you scratch mine, this is fairly common among complex social animals. But humans cooperate with large numbers of unrelated individuals and always have. This is really the key to our species' success in the past as well as the present. And key to that, really fundamentally is a willingness to incur costs in order to provide benefits. That's sort of the mathematical definition of altruism to individuals where we don't have any direct benefit from their welfare. It's only over longer periods of time that we may see benefit. So you can think about kindness in these terms as the kind of everyday conception of positive pro-social orientation towards others, which is the foundation for that kind of cooperation. And understanding how it is that our species became so cooperative and how we're so different from so many other animals is a long-standing important question in a variety of fields of research. And that's one of the things that led me to study kindness.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

That's awesome. I kind of think of kindness as this one-word thing that just kind of appears in our life day to day. We're told from day one to be kind, show kindness to others, no matter the zone or the environment. We're supposed to be welcoming and supposed to just feel that way. However, there's so much more to it, and naturally, yet, like you said, we're kind to our family members, but sometimes it doesn't always come to be kind to other people. So I like showing that kind of evolutionary status of wow, there's all of these different things that are kind of going against this motto of we're just gonna try to be kind to every single person there. And as you mentioned, in the world that we're currently in, that can feel really hard sometimes as well. But highlighting those things and being an altruistic person is so crucial. So just giving that overview of all of these different things and setting that baseline for our conversation is really important to our listeners to just show how crucial kindness actually is and how it roots from all of these different evolutionary factors.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

You can think about it this way, right? That we think a lot about diet and health, for example, right? And an important part of that is what things that are available for us to eat are part of our natural diet, right? So right now there's a lot of conversation, for example, about the dangers of ultra-processed foods, right, and chemical additives and so on, right? Those are things that our species didn't evolve to eat. Well, an important part of human psychology, the way our minds work, is that we have built within us, as part of the same evolutionary heritage that shaped our digestive tract, for example, we have built within us a system of rewards that make it feel good to be kind to others, right? But that also calibrate when we are kind to others. So it's very, very difficult to be indiscriminately altruistic, right? And if you think about it, you know, in the time that we're having this conversation, each of us could actually go out and be helping someone in need instead of having this conversation, right? You know, the the money that you have in your wallet or your bank account or whatever that you're spending on going to the movies, you could be giving that away, right? So no one is unconditionally altruistic all the time. And that's because in the world of our ancestors, there were benefits to kindness, and there were also limits to the benefits to kindness, such that part of our mind has built within it a reward system for being kindness and a system that calibrates when does it pay to be kind, when does it not? And the challenge for us in the contemporary world is to think about how we can maximize the benefit that we can provide to others, that is, reap the rewards to ourselves and the people around us of kindness, while in part counteracting a system that evolved to limit when we're kind to other people.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Wow. I think giving that perspective of rewards, maybe that's what it rooted from. Is that the overall purpose of where kindness started from? Or how did kindness become a thing? How are humans actually capable of altruism at all? What is the purpose behind the kindness that we serve in our species? Is it from that reward system?

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Well, so that's that's what makes us feel good at the what we would call the proximate level, the immediate level, right? Which is different than the ultimate or functional level. So you can think about, you know, why why does sugar taste good, right? Why are sweet things rewarding to us, right? And the answer is because that's a cue that there are a lot of calories in that food. And in the world of our ancestors, individuals who are attracted to foods that had a high calorie content would have done better than individuals who were less attracted to it, just because calories were scarce. Well, so it feels good to be kind to other people, but that's not the answer to the question of why that system exists, right? That question is the deeper question of what is the function, just like the function of the attraction to sweet things is to maximize calorie intake, right? Well, you know, we're not a particularly large animal, we're not especially fast, we don't have big teeth or strong claws. As a creature on the planet, we're not particularly imposing, and yet we're extremely successful because of our ability to cooperate. So our ancestors for 300,000 years or so were hunter-gatherers, meaning that they hunted wild animals and they gathered wild plants. And there are two important features of that, right? So one is that even the most skilled individuals will sometimes fail, right? So the best hunter, the best forager, you know, the best forager goes out, but she just has a bad day, right? The best hunter goes out and he just fails to find or catch any animals, right? So the way that we're able for hundreds of thousands of years to succeed in this way is by cooperating with others. Okay. So a group of hunters together can much more successfully catch animals. A group of foragers working together can ensure that if they share the results of their labor, no one goes hungry. So small-scale societies that even today make a living by hunting and gathering, they all have a rule, which is that you need to cooperate with other members of the group and you need to share what you produce. And this is a way of basically evening out the problem of sometimes you succeed and sometimes you fail. So the rewards to, you know, the rewards that we feel, it feels good to be altruistic towards others. We feel an emotional high, right? And it's physically good for us. It's good for our health, it lowers our blood pressure, has all kinds of positive physiological effects, right? Those are like sugar tastes good, right? That is, those are the immediate rewards. Favored that over human evolutionary history was the importance of relying on others and having them rely on us in order to make a living in a very uncertain world. Now, the limit there, of course, is that who are the people who are going to hunt and gather with you, as it were? Well, they're members of your group. In other words, they're people who are like you. And by like you, I mean they speak like you, they have the same cultural ideas about how to cooperate, how to work together, what their moral system is as you. On the other hand, somebody who speaks a different language, who uses different tools, who has different techniques and technologies and ways of organizing their society, it's going to be really hard to cooperate with them, right? And you can you can just think about this if you go to any international airport, okay? Well-designed international airport separates the passengers traveling in different directions in the hallway. And the reason it does that instead of just having one big hallway is because people tend to walk on the same side of the hallway as the cars drive on the road in their country. And of course, in different countries, people drive on different sides of the road. So if you have just one big hallway in an international airport, what you end up with is people doing that dance where they're like, I'm gonna go right up. Oh no, you're going right up. They can't coordinate. And of course, that's just a minor inconvenience in the airport. But if that's how you catch animals or gather food, you could starve.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

That's gonna be a whole nother thing, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Right. So, so our evolved minds, just like our evolved digestive systems, are a product of that ancestral past, they make it rewarding for us to be altruistic, but that we are inclined to limit our altruism to people who resemble ourselves, right? Whatever those dimensions are. Okay. And of course, you know, in the world of our ancestors, that worked well. But in the world that we live in today, cities of millions or tens of millions of people, right? Countries that are all interconnected economically through information networks, and of course, through migration and the flow of labor and goods, right? We live in a globally interconnected world that is nothing like the world of our ancestors, right? So just like you and I don't go out and hunt and gather to get our daily meals, our social world is entirely different. And the things that served us well in the past, hundreds of thousands of years ago, do not serve us well today. So the danger is that we are inclined to restrict our kindness, right? To pull our kindness in to closer and closer circles and to say those people, they're different from me. Okay. Those people who speak a different language or speak with a different accent, those people who eat different foods, those people who walk at a different speed than I do, they wear different clothes than I do, they worship a different god than I do. Whatever it is, they're different than me. I don't feel kind towards them. And the big challenge in adolescence, it seems to me, as a phase of life, what's happening in adolescence is that your social world is expanding. Okay, and it might not feel like that when you're in high school or middle school, right? And your social world might feel very small. But in reality, what's happening is you're meeting more and more people, you're interacting, right? You're becoming more and more independent, your social world is expanding. And as your social world expands, that evolved part of our mind that says, be kind, it feels good to be kind, but be kind towards the people who are your immediate allies.

SPEAKER_03 14:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:10

And at best be neutral towards other people, or even be hostile towards them because they're your competitors. That's the challenge. The challenge for us in the contemporary world is to overcome those parts of our mind that lead us to be indifferent or even hostile towards those who are in any way different from ourselves or whom we see as competitors. And that's that's critical, right? I mean, the the pandemic demonstrated just incredibly, you know, vividly to the expense of millions of lives, right? How we don't live in isolated islands of groups anymore. We're all basically one society around the globe.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

We're all connected, especially with the rise of social media. I think that yet again, we're bridging all of these different things together. And we have to realize that as a society, it's the same thing of like kindness is just one level of then discrimination and injustices towards other individuals. And it goes beyond adolescent years, but as you said, it does start when you're just a teenager and you're meeting new people every day and interacting. And that's when you yourself are developing your own values and your own beliefs on who you are, which is gonna transpire into your whole life. However, it all roots from this connection. We are, as you said, we connect with one another. We are a species that likes to interact. And having to fend for ourselves while also helping out those around us is just who we are naturally. But it goes into such a bigger perspective and such a bigger thing, but it does really root from adolescence and just developing yourself and you're developing your identity. However, if we're reeling it to adolescence in specific, sometimes I feel like there's this negative condensation that adolescence is often described as a period of self-focus and just your own identity formation. Does research actually suggest that teenagers are less altruistic, or is that just a misconception that some things in society have made?

SPEAKER_02 16:19

I don't know the answer to that. And I'm not sure that anyone has actually focused on adolescence as a life phase with regard to this. And the reason that I'm being cautious about what I say is that we need to be very careful when we talk about humans, okay, what we mean is all humans, not just the high school students in the big city where a university that has social scientists and psychologists happen to be, and they happen to study those people. In other words, no high school in the United States is representative of all adolescents in the United States, and adolescents in the United States are not representative of adolescents around the world. So so just to kind of put this in perspective, one of the characteristics of adolescence in the contemporary US today is basically our social maturation is quite delayed compared to that of what we can think of as would have been characteristic of humanity for hundreds of thousands of years, right? So um I think you said that you're 15, right? Um uh the chances are pretty good that um if you were uh a 15-year-old 100,000 years ago, um you would already be uh responsible for a substantial portion of the economic productivity of your household. And you might even already have a family of your own. Certainly you would have a lot of responsibilities in terms of caring for younger siblings if you didn't have a family of your own. It's fairly common now in the United States to find people in their early 20s who are still living with their parents and and economically dependent on them, right? That incredibly prolonged period of dependence slash lack of independence is quite new. And of course, the reason that that we have our society structured this way is that that allows for an enormous amount of education and allows people to acquire knowledge and skills that simply didn't exist in the past, right? But one of the things that has happened in part as a consequence of this, I think, is that we we've also delayed the emotional maturation of young people. And in part, the fault lies with the older generation, not with the young people themselves, because they're assumed to be often incapable of making wise choices, of being responsible, of being kind, right? And people rise to the expectations of others around them, right? So if you're if your cultural model of adolescence is that this is a period of incredibly irresponsible behavior and wild risk taking, that's probably what you're gonna get, right?

SPEAKER_03 19:26

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:27

Uh but if your expectation is no, it's time for you to grow up, right? You need to be a responsible member of society, you're gonna get more of that. It's not that that that um that adolescents in smaller scale societies do not also have some of that rambunctious behavior, shall we say? And we see that in in other mammals with complex social behavior. So adolescent elephants are kind of troublemakers sometimes, right? And adolescent chimpanzees can be pretty wild, right? Um uh and it is just a characteristic of sort of leaving the highly dependent phase behind and and becoming more independent. Establishing an adult identity requires risk taking. So it's not surprising that some of that happens. But you know, there were no text messages from mom and dad. There were no cell phones in the world of our ancestors, right? So the the uh the idea that parents need to be constantly monitoring and concerned about the safety and welfare of their adolescent children, that's a pretty new idea.

SPEAKER_01 20:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

And while it's understandable, it potentially has some pretty serious detrimental consequences in terms of people's ability to grow up. And as a consequence of that, how they interact with other people, right? So if we expect adolescents to be selfish, they will.

SPEAKER_01 20:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:46

And if we expect them to be kind and productive members of society, they will do that as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Exactly. It's rooting, like I said before, it's from all of these different components of our lives. And a lot of the times we see these expectations of who we're supposed to become, or we see that maybe my parent doesn't believe that I cannot be different than how I've acted during my two years of middle school. Let's say that I was a rambunctious teenager who didn't like hanging out with my family, only liked hanging out with my friends for two years of my life, and then all of a sudden they've given up. They don't want me to be a different person. So then I don't believe I can be a different person. And that just transpires into this not good equation where I won't be a good person and I'm gonna be a selfish person when in reality, if I believed in myself, if I had people around me who supported me and said, Hey, let's talk about this, let's work for this, let's show kindness in a different way and actually contribute it to our lives, maybe that could have been my reality. And as you said before, we can't quote unquote say that adolescents are come from one school in the middle of a city at a research. Study is focusing on. We are 8 billion people, and there is a large chunk of them that are adolescent members, and we cannot represent every single one. So actually, finding adequate information about overall adolescence is very difficult already from just research studies. So I like that you said that and put just that into reality, because it is true. We can't represent every single person, their beliefs, how they interact with others with one singular study. So I appreciate you saying that. However, I think that a lot of teenagers and adolescents can agree that during this part of our lives, it can become super stressful, either academically, socially, or emotionally. So how does that stress affect our willingness or ability to act kindly?

SPEAKER_02 22:48

Yeah, it's a challenge. Um uh so, you know, a sort of central function of adolescence is in an evolutionary sense, is the transition from childhood into adulthood, right? And what that means is that there's a lot of uncertainty because exactly who one is going to become is unclear. There's often a lot of competition, right? They're rivals within the immediate social group. And there can be friction between the goals of the individual and the goals of others, including parents and teachers and so on, right? Um and add to that sort of rapid physical changes, right? And of course, it's not just the body, but the brain itself is changing pretty rapidly as well. And the result is, yeah, it can be a pretty challenging time, right? And I don't want to downplay that at all. And I certainly don't want to suggest that, well, you know, if you were a hunter-gatherer 100,000 years ago, there wouldn't have been any stress in being an adolescent. No, there would have been plenty because, you know, there's there's a social hierarchy in a small-scale group just like there is in an American high school, right? And and you know, people are competing along a variety of dimensions, and there's a there's still uncertainty about what adulthood is going to be like and so on. So I think it has always been a somewhat stressful time, but I think that the combination of our prolonging it enormously in contemporary American society and our downplaying the capabilities and capacities of adolescents to mature themselves adds to that, right? As I said, I think people rise to the expectations of others around them. Now, in answer to your question, quite understandably, it's difficult to be kind when one is under a great deal of stress. You can think about again going back to sort of hunting and gathering as being the central component of a lot of our cooperation in the ancestral past. You know, if you're really hungry, it's pretty hard to share food, right?

unknown 24:49

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

And I don't mean, you know, you missed lunch. I mean you haven't eaten in four days or five days, right? It's it's now it gets pretty hard to start being really generous with the proceeds of your labor, right? So and that's understandable, right? Because ultimately, from an evolutionary perspective, the rewards of cooperation are all moot if you as an individual are unable to care for yourself, right? So it is certainly the case that anxiety, anger, frustration, sadness, all of those things, those experiences make it harder to be kind to others.

SPEAKER_03 25:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

But I think keeping in mind, right, that I mean, one of the one of the hallmarks of the human mind is that we can we can think ahead, right? We can we we aren't just stuck in the moment. And there's a lot of debate, by the way, in in the study of cognition across species, how much other animals can do that. Some seem to be able to do so to plan for the future, as it were, to think ahead. Well, you know, to the extent that you can set aside the immediate sensation, whatever it is, anger, hunger, frustration, sadness, anxiety, fear, right, and look ahead, you can recognize that being kind to others will make you feel better. Okay. And and it's a funny thing to say there's a selfish component to kindness, right? I mean, that seems kind of uh, you know, um paradoxical, right? But but that's there is, right? And that we have, as part of our evolved psychology, we have a reward system that makes it feel good, right? Because that's what kept us being kind to members of our group in the past, just like having sugar taste good keeps us kept us eating foods that were high in caloric content, right? So in those moments where where you are aware of yourself as experiencing unpleasant negative thoughts and feelings, to the extent that you can project past that and say, I know if I'm kind to other people, that's gonna make me feel better, then everybody's better off. Right? And it's hard, it's hard to do that in part because those emotions themselves, they're the product of our evolved psychology, right? So when we're in the midst of experiencing one of those emotions, they tend to push other ways of thinking and other ways of feeling out of the way. And that's especially true for anger and fear, and to a lesser extent, but for sadness and anxiety also, right? So the result of that is that it's hard to do, right, to to think beyond the way one is feeling right now.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

But it's possible to do. And here I would direct your viewers and listeners to mindfulness practices, right? So this isn't some, you know, crunchy, you know, LA wellness fad, right? Um definitely not. The the the modern practice of mindness is is based both on hundreds, even thousands of years of practice in a variety of traditions and on scientific research into meditation and how it works. And it shouldn't be intimidating. It's really, it's pretty simple.

SPEAKER_01 28:11

It takes centering yourself is wonderful. Just taking a moment with a deep breath.

SPEAKER_02 28:16

Right. And to and to ask, okay, how am I feeling right now? Why am I feeling this way? And to think I can, just like if I'm hungry right now, I can think about the future where I have food. If I'm angry right now, I can think about a future where I can be kind.

SPEAKER_03 28:33

You can work around.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

You know, just like you know, finding that, you know, finding that good thing to eat, right? Well, finding an opportunity to be kind to somebody, um, uh uh that's possible. So, you know, it takes a little practice. It it doesn't come easily. And there's a reason it doesn't come easily, right? Anger is part of our evolved psychology, it's there for a reason. It it's it's useful in some circumstances, but it's often not useful in the contemporary world. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

For sure. And I think that as adolescents are developing their own autonomy, and we mentioned earlier parents kind of hovering over and guiding kids in too many ways, especially in the society that we're in. We have to let go. We have to have parents let us develop ourselves. Because during that whole process, yes, we're gonna deal with emotions like anger, sadness, anxiety, stress is going to happen. It happens to every individual. Even back way back when, when somebody was a hunter and gatherer at age 15, they also dealt with stress. It is a natural thing that occurs. However, if we're not allowed to experience that and grow from it because other factors of our lives, whether it's parents or teachers or peers, whatever, are not letting us actually grow from it. As you said, we're never gonna know how to interact with it in the future. When we go off to college, when we go into the real world, we're not gonna carry that with us. And then we're not gonna make those decisions in the moment when you feel super angry to take a deep breath, center yourself, and choose kindness on the other side because we all have the ability to do it. It's whether we learn to do it at these early stages that's gonna contribute to later in our lives. So I love putting again, it's like this whole world, we are a world and our lives are like a circle. Every single thing is gonna connect at some point. And it starts when we're firstborn and it ends when we leave. At some point, we grow and we learn from these things along the way. And it's like a consistent path of learning and developing our sense of self. But if we don't have these external factors, allow ourselves to do it. We're never gonna choose that moment of kindness. We're never gonna choose to be altruistic when it is hard, even though we do have the capabilities to, which for adolescent members is so important because as we said earlier, it makes us feel better. Being kind to others, it makes us feel so happy and it's like a reward. Saying, oh my gosh, your hair looks so wonderful today to your friend, or commenting on someone's shirt, or maybe just noticing that someone switched up their makeup for the day. Any of those things make us feel better because we want that back at us. It's like filling up someone's bucket so they'll fill up yours. We want everyone to be kind to one another and accept one another, but it does root from that very beginning stages of just developing who we are.

SPEAKER_02 31:31

Yeah, I would say, I would say uh two things quickly, uh, because I know time is short. One is that everyday acts of kindness to the people in your immediate surroundings are are easy to do, and um the you know, the rewards that you get are commensurate with the price that you pay, as it were, right? So complimenting someone on their appearance doesn't cost you very much, very easy. It feels a little good, okay. You know, buying the unhoused person who looks hungry a sandwich from the shop and giving it to them, you're gonna find that feels a lot better than complimenting someone on their appearance, right?

SPEAKER_01 32:09

There's a baseline genius. Yeah, you can do more, there's always that chance to do more.

SPEAKER_02 32:14

Yeah, and the other thing is just before we go on this, uh yeah, I think helicopter parenting very bad for not just for adolescents, but for kids, okay. I you know, I think this is this is a plague in contemporary society. But let's have a little bit of sympathy for the parents and try and understand where the problem comes from.

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Yes, for the first time as well.

SPEAKER_02 32:33

The problem is that the parents are living in an information environment that our minds are not designed for, okay. So 100,000 years ago, if you saw or heard about from people that you knew or thought you knew well, really bad things happening, then the chances were pretty good that those bad things were in your immediate surroundings. Okay. So if you heard about, you know, a child who had been injured or killed, the chances were really good that your own children were potentially in danger, right? But now we live in this information world where where a bad thing happening somewhere else seems like it feels like it's happening in our immediate surroundings because our minds are not prepared for this information environment. But of course they're not, right? So, so you know, you your viewers can ask themselves, right, how many of your parents made you throw away Halloween candy that wasn't wrapped? Okay. Not to mention, you know, fruit or cookies or something like that, right? Because American adults uniformly believe that there are evil people out there who are putting razor blades and poison in in the treats they give out to children. First of all, this never happens. The FBI has one documented case, okay, one in a in a country of over 340 million people that the FBI has been keeping statistics on for the the last five or six decades at least, right? There's one case, okay. And the case wasn't random. It was actually a very disturbed criminal who was not just randomly giving out things, but was trying to hurt people he knew, okay? It doesn't happen, okay. And for that matter, if it did happen, would the cellophane wrapper on that little fun-size Snicker bar really protect your kid? No, of course not. Anybody, you know, could stick a needle in there and inject it with something. It's ridiculous, okay? So so why do people think that it happens? Yeah, they think that it happens because they hear urban legends about it happening. It's on social media. Oh, they, you know, my cousins, friends, neighbors, kid. Really? Okay. I I didn't see that.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

How does that relate to me? No clue, but I'm gonna make it my whole personality exactly.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

You know, look, it is a sad fact of life that terrible things happen to some children. Okay, we live in a big world and and and there are, you know, unfortunately, bad things happening to people. But the odds that it will happen to any one individual in, you know, the community of people who are likely to be watching this podcast are extremely small. Okay. But the parents are subject to an information flow that makes it feel like the world is really dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

Because we've curated it to be in that way and we've kind of made parents in that we've put parents in that position. It's just how we've routed society to be. It's like we put the wrong circuit connector in the wrong place, and that's kind of how it's how it's occurred. However, we have to realize to work from that and just grow from it and learn to work with it. Because there's at this point, how are we gonna reroute every single thing? We just have to learn to grow with it and take those moments of realization and continue on.

SPEAKER_02 35:57

Yeah, and you know, I I think most of your viewers and listeners are probably, you know, your age or so. And and, you know, it's not useful to go to your parents or or or guardians and say, you know, stop bubble wrapping me, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Like No.

SPEAKER_02 36:15

You're you're you're afraid of non-existent dangers, you know. This Professor Fesba guy says, you know, there's no poison Halloween candy out there, you know, you know, just let me go off and let me live, let me live. That's not going to be helpful, number one, because the dynamics of the relationship are, you know, have already gone on for a decade and a half or whatever, right? But but number two, you got to prove that you know you're you're mature and capable before you really have a right to say, you know, give me independence and and and and stop you know hovering over me, right? And even in our society, it's perfectly reasonable for for a 15 or 16-year-old, go out there and be independent, be responsible, show the people around you that you are, and then say, give me a little more leash here, right? Let's relax this a little bit. And an iterative process, right, of you demonstrating your capabilities and your, you know, your maturity, you can convince people to maybe relieve some of their anxiety about what you might do. And and and that, I would say that opens up opportunities for kindness and altruism beyond your immediate social circles. One of the real difficulties in American society today is that because we have kept adolescents from maturing for so long, we've kept their social circles much smaller than they need to be.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

Yeah, very clicky.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Get get out there, interact with people outside of your school, outside of your immediate neighborhood, outside of your community, right? Look for opportunities to be kind, and and you'll find it, you know, both personally rewarding and and and reassuring to the people who are concerned about your welfare.

SPEAKER_01 37:55

Yeah, I agree with everything you just said. And I think that overall, as a society, we've been kind of developed into this place where kindness isn't our first priority. When in reality, if all of us just take a moment to realize what is one thing I can do today to be kind, to show that I care for a person that maybe they're not in my direct friend group or they're not in my immediate family. However, by doing things like that, we all develop and we all grow and we make the world a better place overall. So, Dr. Fessler, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Understanding kindness through science and evolution helps remind all of us that compassion isn't weakness, it's part of who we are as humans, and it's literally rooted in all of our evolutionary history.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

It is indeed.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

It is indeed. So, to everyone listening, growing up doesn't have to mean growing colder. Even during stressful seasons, kindness can evolve alongside you. It might look different, quieter, more intentional, more mature, but it still can grow. So thank you again, Dr. Fessler, for being part of this episode of Growing Forward. I'm so grateful you're here for these conversations as we continued to learn how to grow, not just academically or socially, but morally and emotionally.

SPEAKER_02 39:14

You're very welcome. Get out there, grow up and be kind.

SPEAKER_01 39:19

I love that. So until next time, everyone, signing off with loads of positivity. This is your host, Sadie Sonoborn Malachy.

SPEAKER_02 39:27

Bye bye.