Sublime

She truly enjoys meeting and talking to people. She asks probing questions that encourage people to reveal themselves. She projects a nonthreatening image that says it’s safe to talk. She seems to have an intuitive sense of how to mine stories that unearth epiphanies into human behavior.

Why did Marx do this for this strange boy, who most people found vaguely unpleasant? He liked Sam. He had spent his childhood among rich and supposedly interesting people, and he knew that truly unusual minds were rare. He felt that when Harvard had assigned them to be roommates, Sam had become his responsibility. So, he protected Sam, and he made

age five showed the most reliable indicators of true giftedness in a young person: structured curiosity, empathy for others, compassion, and a fierce sense of fair play.

One of Borkenau’s most surprising findings is that soft facial lineaments (that is, the contours of the face) are a key to spotting agreeableness; consistent with this result and with some earlier research from the 1980s, he found that a “baby face” look (a round face, large eyes, small nose, high forehead, and small chin) is associated with agreea

“Not being super close to that many particular people made it more natural to care not about anyone in particular but about everyone,” he said. “The default wiring I had was, ‘Yeah, there’s not anyone who doesn’t matter. So I guess I should care the same amount about everyone.’

Highly empathic people, on the other hand, enjoy deeper relationships, exhibit more charitable behavior toward those around them, and, according to some studies, show higher degrees of nonconformity and social self-confidence. High empaths can perform world-class social skills, such as knowing which child needs kindness when she misbehaves and whic

Dr. Thalia Wheatley, one of the foremost neuroscientists researching how humans connect with one another.

a matter of morals or ethics. Anything negative you say could at the very least ruin someone’s day, or worse, break someone’s heart, or simply change someone from being a future ally of yours to someone who will never forget that you were unkind or unfairly critical. It’s so common today to complain or criticize others’ work on social media, or dog

He would ask questions designed to assess their emotional expressiveness: When had they been happiest? Had they ever been depressed? He would pay close attention to their body language and facial expressions as they responded, note when their postures seemed to tense up or relax. Did it seem like they were inviting him in? Were they showing him the