Daniel Goleman "emotional intelligence" did a good presentation on 'Why arent we all Good Samaritans?'

Where is talked about a very important study done a while ago at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help, we do sometimes, and we don't other times. A group of divinity students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic. Half of those students were given, as a topic, the parable of the Good Samaritan: the man who stopped the stranger in -- to help the stranger in need by the side of the road. Half were given random Bible topics. Then one by one, they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon. As they went from the first building to the second, each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning, clearly in need. The question is: Did they stop to help?

The more interesting question is: Did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the Good Samaritan? Answer: No, not at all. What turned out to determine whether someone would stop and help a stranger in need was how much of a hurry they thought they were in -- were they feeling they were late, or were they absorbed in what they were going to talk about. And this is, I think, the predicament of our lives.

I have been very inspired by recent research demonstrating that even as infants we are wired to be cooperative and helpful.

At the Max Planck Institute of Leipzig, Michael Tomasello and Felix Warneken have established that children from the age of one, who are just beginning to learn to walk and speak, spontaneously exhibit behavior of mutual aid and cooperation not taught to them by adults.

In a little known aspect of Darwin’s work he actually proposed that natural selection would favour the occurrence of compassion. He wrote

"those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best"

This is also reflected in one of the longest-running psychological studies of all time—the Harvard Men study. 268 men were followed from their entrance into college in the late 1930s all the way through to the present day. From this wealth of data, scientists identified the life circumstances and personal characteristics that distinguished the happiest, fullest lives from the least successful ones. George Vaillant, the psychologist who directed this study for the last 40 years, told the Atlantic Monthly that he could sum up the findings in one word: “love”.

There are 70 years of evidence that our relationships with other people matter, and matter more than anything else in the world.