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 ...

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 ...

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).

Having one's research ideas scooped is part of academic life. Today, for instance, I'd like to talk about some research quite similar in spirit to work I intended to do as part of my dissertation (but ...

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 ...

Fifty years ago this month, evolutionary biologist William Donald Hamilton published a solution to one of biology’s most enduring mysteries: why does altruism exist? Altruistic behaviours are those ...

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” ...

If we zoom out of the mundane and take a bird’s eye view on life, it is simple. We are born, we grow, we reproduce, we take care of our young while gradually declining, and then we die of a long and ...

DONORS to charities rarely make the sort of cost-benefit calculations investors, for example, would think obligatory. So charities attract donations with pictures of smiling gap-toothed children, ...

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.