Active bystanders

The roots of goodness

Many of us want to make the world a better place. It would be hard to find someone more invested in how to go about it than the Hungarian American psychologist Ervin Staub. He has spent his life examining a simple question with vast consequences: how to be good in bad times and encourage altruism in the face of evil. Unusually, he has studied the subject as an academic while also living it close at hand. As a boy in Hungary during the Second World War, he experienced greater extremes of depravity and heroism than most of us face in a lifetime. ….[READ]