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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

Altruism, originating from the French word 'altruisme' coined by Auguste Comte, signifies selfless concern for others' welfare. This philosophy emphasizes kindness and empathy, encouraging individuals ...

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).

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” ...

Mainstream economics has long struggled to model ethical behaviour, including what is perhaps its simplest type, altruism. The standard assumption of homo economicus, an agent who maximizes his ...

Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? The man across the aisle on the flight home spent thousands of dollars on a ...

How to do more good with one’s time and money is a question that tantalises idealistic minds. Yet few approach the question armed with thorough evidence and reason. “Effective altruism” (ea), a ...