32: The Psychology of Good and Evil: Raising Active Bystanders with Prof. Ervin Staub
Here’s your chance to listen to a firsthand account of one of the most horrible parts of our recent human history, and how we stop it from happening again. This episode features a conversation with a psychologist whose life's work sits at the intersection of two of humanity's most extreme capacities: the capacity for cruelty, and the capacity for courage.
A survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary, hiding in Budapest as a six-year-old, he became a leading researcher on the psychology of genocide, group violence, and altruism - work that has shaped police training programs on "active bystandership," informed reconciliation efforts in Rwanda, and produced decades of research on what leads ordinary people to help others, even at personal risk.
What to Listen for:
Small early experiences compound. How children are raised - with warmth, responsiveness, and consistent values - can shape whether they grow toward caring or toward hostility, on both an individual and societal level.
Responsibility, not just empathy, drives action. Empathy alone doesn't reliably produce helping behavior - a felt sense of responsibility for someone else's welfare, paired with a belief that you can actually make a difference, is what moves people to act.
Bystanders can be trained to become "active bystanders." This isn't just theory - it's the basis of real police and school training programs designed to help people intervene safely when they see harm happening.
"Blind patriotism" vs. "constructive patriotism" is a useful lens for understanding how loyalty to a group, a leader, or a country can either enable harm or serve as a check against it.
Violence - and caring - escalate gradually. Small unaddressed moments of hostility or dehumanization tend to compound over time, in families, institutions, and nations alike.
Personal history and professional work aren't separate. The guest's own childhood experience of hiding from persecution, and the people who risked their lives to protect his family, directly shaped decades of research into what makes rescuers different from bystanders.
About Ervin Staub
Professor Emeritus of Psychology and founding director of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A survivor of the Holocaust in Hungary as a young child, he has spent his career researching the roots of genocide, mass violence, and altruism — including fieldwork in Rwanda, expert witness work related to the Abu Ghraib trials, and the design of active-bystandership training programs now used by police departments across the country.