When trying to understand human behavior, the temptation is to reduce everything down to selfish, rational transactions. But that’s only part of the story, of course.

The other part is that human beings are not mere machines, we’re hyper-social complex primates, and will always behave in complex ways. We need to love, we need to belong, we need part of something.

One of the most powerful ways we have to connect with others is through acts of kindness. Expressing kindness is one of our most important ways of building social bonds: it’s how we survive.

The question is, how do you cultivate kindness at the macro level? How do you create empathy at scale? You do it by inviting people to get personally involved, by creating a movement. You make it an integral part of your culture. Kindness is contagious and it’s one thing worth spreading.