The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people's psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer..

We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods.….

I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from..

Over the last few years, I've been focusing on questions having to do with the self, and questions having to do with morality. I'm very interested in….

Stories turn anonymous strangers into people who matter..

Something as important and central and encompassing as empathy can't be all bad. I think empathy plays a role in intimate relationships, where you mi….

Because of empathy, we care more for, and devote far more resources to, someone who is familiar, from our country or our group, than a stranger..

You might argue on utilitarian grounds that the best way for the world to work is for everybody to take care of themselves first. And people have mad….

Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only a….

I draw a lot from Buddhism, which focuses on compassion and kindness, loving kindness, as they call it, but rejects empathy because it's a poor moral….

A religion such as Judaism or Catholicism might survive even if it comes to reject a literal account of God creating man and animals. But it cannot s….

I think if we could turn the dial a bit, and try to take what the philosopher Henry Sidgwick called "the point of view of the universe", and look fro….

Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats..

This enthusiasm [for empathy] may be misplaced. Empathy has some unfortunate features – it is parochial, narrow-minded and innumerate. We’re often at….

My brother is severely autistic, so when I was a kid I spent a lot of time as a teenager in camps and programs for autistic kids. When I went to McGi….

I argue that we should be kind, we should be compassionate, and we should definitely be reasonable and rational, but that empathy leads us astray..

When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy..

I think we're going to care more about Americans than Africans. I don't think that's ever going to go away, and I don't think it's ever going to go a….

I think there's some evidence that we're empathic by nature. There is some evidence from studies of babies and young children that they resonate with….

I think empathy is really important for pleasure..

It's hard to pull apart empathy from compassion. What is really clear is that we innately care for other people at least to some extent..