Transcriber: Gia Hwang Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I want to take you back to 1989.
It was my eighth-grade year, and it was lunchtime.
I came from a very small community in Wisconsin, very rural,
so we had a very small class,
and basically, all the girls in my class could sit at one table in the lunchroom.
(Laughing) And on this particular day,
I had gotten my lunch, my tray of food,
and I sat down at the table.
And I quickly noticed there was this odd energy around me
as if there was some kind of inside joke I wasn’t aware of.
As soon as my best friend, Therese, walked up to the table
and went to sit down,
in a snap, all the girls spread out and sat elbow to elbow,
so my friend couldn’t sit down.
And when I looked at my friend, her face turned beet red,
her eyes started to well up with tears,
and I frantically tried to ask the girls, “Please just make a spot.
Let her sit down, please.”
And nobody would make eye contact with me.
And my friend turned, walked across the cafeteria,
and sat down alone.
Laughter erupted around me,
and I immediately felt anger rage through me,
and I stood up with my tray.
And as I did that, some of the girls said to me,
“No Wendy, you don’t have to go.
You can stay.”
And all I could think to say was, “Why would I want to?”
and I walked across the cafeteria, and I sat with my friend.
But I have to admit something to you.
Before I stood up, I paused.
Even though in every fabric of my being I knew it was the right thing to do,
I paused.
Why?
Fear.
Fear of not knowing what was going to happen when I stood up.
Fear of being embarrassed.
Fear of that all these girls would now turn on me,
and I would be the one they bullied.
Now, was it some big, heroic thing that I did walking across the cafeteria?
No, of course not.
But I can tell you,
walking across the cafeteria that day felt like a mile in slow motion.
And the moment I sat down in front of my friend and saw the look on her face,
I knew I did exactly the right thing.
So why is this so difficult?
Why would we know deep down what the right thing is to do?
Why is this so difficult?
I want to talk to you about something called the “bystander effect.”
The bystander effect tells us
that the more people there are that are witnessing something terrible going on,
the less likely it is that you will stand up and do the right thing.
So let me give you an example.
So you and I are walking down the road together,
and we see an elderly person fall down.
One, if not both of us, are going to go over and help that person
without even giving it a second thought.
But now, say we’re in a group of 10 to 20 people,
and we see that same person fall down,
something happens.
We have to take pause.
We have this internal dialogue with ourselves:
“Are we qualified?
Maybe somebody else more qualified will go over and help.”
We kind of let ourselves off the hook, thinking somebody else will do it;
there’s a diffusion of responsibility.
Columbia University did a study in the 1960s
where they invited students to come and give their thoughts
on the problems of urban life.
Students that were interested in providing their input
were told to come into a waiting room where they would fill out some paperwork.
But the interesting thing is the problems of urban life was just a cover story;
it was what happened in the waiting room that was the study.
So in the first scenario,
they would bring in lone students by themselves.
And as the students were filling out their paperwork,
suddenly smoke would billow in under the door,
and the lone students would notice the smoke,
go over, and investigate,
and then go and report the smoke out in the hallway.
In the second scenario, they brought in multiple students,
although this time all but one student would know about the study,
and they were instructed to act like they didn’t see the smoke.
So when the students come into the waiting room,
and the smoke starts to billow in,
that lone student, the test subject,
sees the smoke,
they start to look around, but they don’t get up.
So out of 10 test subjects,
only one person got up and actually reported the smoke -
went out to the hallway and reported it.
The other nine sat there for an additional six minutes,
waving smoke out of their faces, coughing,
and some even went as far as opening up the window.
That’s the power a group can have on an individual
who would otherwise intervene.
Sadly I’ve seen this also happen on social media.
Not only are people not stepping up and doing what's right,
but some of them are jumping on the bandwagon,
and also adding hateful, hurtful comments.
There’s something
about being behind that screen or that keyboard,
that we feel safe and we can say whatever we want.
And in August 2019,
I was scrolling social media, and I came across this post -
it was on a buy-sell trade group -
and there was a lot of comments,
and I was trying to see what’s going on -
there’s a lot of comments - like most of us do,
and the main poster was just simply asking for a ride to the store.
The problem was she didn't have money to offer for gas.
People took to the comments section
to leave the most hateful, hurtful comments,
telling her to get a job and quit begging for things,
one after the other.
And then one comment stood out - it was a friend of mine.
She simply commented with kindness, compassionate understanding:
“I see you; I understand what you’re going through,”
and just left a kind comment.
And in that moment, I thought, “Man, if more people could do this,
maybe we could drown out the hate that’s on Facebook and all social media.”
My friend didn’t address the haters
because just as we can’t fight hate with hate,
we can’t fight fire with fire.
So I thought for a moment, “How can we do this?
How can we bring more people to this post to add their kind comments?”
And I thought, “What if I started a group?
Maybe if I start a group and invite my friends in,
we could all agree that if we saw some bullying comments on social media,
we would leave a nice comment,
we would tag in somebody from the group,
they would then also come and comment, tag another person,
and we would create this bucket brigade of kindness
to drown out all of that hate.”
And so I thought, “OK, I’m going to try that.”
So I started inviting my friends to this group.
And what was so fascinating about this is I had this goal in mind.
I thought, “What would be a good number where I feel like I made a bit of impact
that we could actually try and stop some of the bullying on social media?”
And I thought, “100.”
If you’ve tried to start a group on social media,
it’s like pulling teeth to get people to join,
so that was a big number to me,
and to my surprise, in two hours, I had 100 people in that group.
By the next day, there were 400 members in the group.
At the fourth day, we hit 1,000 members,
and I ugly cried in the live video within the group -
(Gasping) I was so touched that so many people wanted to join me.
Now there’s over 7,200 people worldwide in the Kindness Bucket Brigade.
The mission of the Kindness Bucket Brigade was to reverse the bystander effect,
allowing people to stand up to leave that first comment,
knowing that there are reinforcements because we encourage,
when you tag a person, that when you’re tagged,
you come in and you give them support.
And that was just the premise behind the Kindness Bucket Brigade.
So I want to do a little experiment with you.
if you want to close your eyes, you’re welcome to.
I want you to imagine sitting in an audience of 100 to 200 people.
And now I call on you to stand up, all by yourself.
How might you feel?
Probably terrified,
(Laughing) anxious, nervous, right?
But now imagine I had you high-five the person next to you
to stand up alongside you.
How might you feel then?
Maybe still nervous,
but a little bit better, there’s somebody standing up alongside you.
Now imagine that person high-fives the person next to them,
and the one next to them, and pretty soon
it goes all the way around the room till the entire audiences standing with you.
Imagine how that might feel.
You’d probably feel very empowered.
That’s the power behind numbers,
when all it takes is that one person, and everybody else stands up with them.
So the Kindness Bucket Brigade
became something more than an anti-bullying group.
It was a place where people told me they felt safe
because all the members were putting in all these kind, and compassionate,
and random acts of kindness, posts, and memes,
and people just felt safe inside of this group.
The American Psychological Association
did a study on those that are low on agreeableness,
which basically just means it’s people who have a tendency towards conflict,
who tend to put themselves above others,
and I think we all probably know somebody in our lives like this.
They found that during the three-week study
that these people had a significant reduction in depression
by providing them prompts
to do random acts of kindness and to be more supportive and empathetic
to the people that they spent the most time with.
They also used a practice called LKM,
which is loving, kindness, meditation.
LKM incorporates mindfulness,
which helps participants nurture feelings of compassion and loving kindness
towards themselves and others.
This can lead to increased positive emotions and improved social functioning.
They also used compassion training, or compassion intentions,
with phrases such as “may you be free,” “may you be safe,” and “may you be happy.”
This led to a decrease in hostile cognitive cycles
in those low on agreeableness.
So in this study, the ones that were low on agreeableness,
they had the most dramatic decrease in depression
and increase in life satisfaction.
So something interesting happened once I started this group:
I started getting messages
from people saying “Hey, that person that’s in your group,
they have a history of bullying.
I think it’s hypocritical that they’re in your group.”
I got several of these messages,
and in my mind, they were exactly where they needed to be
because just in that study,
we can learn to be more compassionate and more kind to ourselves and others.
The people that are low in agreeableness likely never learned those key behaviors
when they were younger.
And I believe when we know better, we can absolutely do better.
All it takes is that one person.
They have the courage to stand up, and do the right thing -
to walk away from that table of hate,
to start the Kindness Bucket Brigade,
or to stand in unity with our friends, our families, and our neighbors,
knowing reinforcements will come.
You might be thinking
“But Wendy, I’m only one person. Can I really have that big of an impact?”
Even the smallest pebble
can create a ripple effect in an entire body of water.
So yes, you can be that pebble,
and together, we can create a ripple effect of kindness.
Thank you.
(Applause)