Your heart may be in the right place, but are your good deeds wreaking havoc? (Photo: Nadeen Nakib for Yahoo Health/Getty Images) Laurie Feldman used to be that mother — the one who redid her children ...

Effective altruism, which started as a small movement at Oxford University over a decade ago, is an influential and controversial philosophy backed by billionaires—including Facebook co-founder Dustin ...

On the Thursday, November 13, 2025 episode of The Excerpt podcast: In honor of World Kindness Day — we’ve partnered with the Humankind team at USA TODAY for a deeper exploration on the topic of ...

There’s a great value in being precise when it comes to communication (if you want your message to be understood as you intended it, anyway; when clarity isn’t the goal, by all means, be imprecise).

Researchers have examined the personality traits, the brain circuits, and the learnings that lead to children's heroic acts of courage.

Though we don’t live in zoos, we often behave like animals. So many of our instincts are derived from our animal counterparts. Take the various forms of altruism as an example. In the animal kingdom, ...

David Sloan Wilson opens his new book, Does Altruism Exist?, with an old conundrum that has animated many late-night dormitory debates: If helping someone gives you pleasure, gains you points for an ...

Experimental evidence reveals that chimpanzees will help other unrelated humans and conspecifics without a reward, showing that they share crucial aspects of altruism with humans. The evolutionary ...

If you believe there is no such thing as altruism, you are in good company. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins writes that we must “try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish” ...

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Parasites are among nature’s most skillful manipulators — and one of their specialties is making hosts perform reckless acts of irrational self-harm.