Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence

and experience to the public health news of the day through informative interviews with scientists,

community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas

or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jh.h.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, producer of Public Health on Call.

Today, Colleen Berry, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, talks with Paul Slovak, a professor of psychology

at the University of Oregon, and Scott Slovak, a professor of literature at the University of Idaho.

They discuss the psychological obstacles to compassion and how cognitive biases can lead to

inaction in the face of the world's largest humanitarian challenges, including genocide, famine,

climate change, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. They also discuss what we can do to

overcome these obstacles.

Let's listen.

Paul Slovak and Scott Slovak.

Thank you both so much for joining me today.

You are leading scholars in your respective fields of psychology and literature,

and among your many accomplishments, you've published a book together, numbers and nerves,

and are joining forces on an effort you refer to as the arithmetic of compassion.

Paul, let's start with you.

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