Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black. It is such a pleasure to welcome Amher's psychology professor, Dr. Catherine Sanderson, back to the show. She was with us a while back talking about her fabulous book, The Positive Shift, Mastering Mindset to Improve Happiness, Health, and Longevity.

And Professor Sanderson has written a new book about another fascinating topic. It's called Why We Act, turning bystanders into moral rebels.

Professor, thank you so much for joining us again. Thank you so much for the invitation.

I enjoyed our conversation last year, and I'm looking forward to this one as well.

Well, we are, too, and we wondered why you decided to do an in-depth exploration of why good people so often do nothing

in situations where maybe even a small intervention could make a big difference.

So what's interesting, of course, is that you referenced the prior conversation we had in my

first book, The Positive Shift. So that book came out about a year ago, and I had finished

writing it, and something happened to my oldest son. He was a freshman in college, and about two

weeks into his freshman year, he called me and said, a student died in my dorm yesterday.

And as a mom, I just couldn't stop thinking about the situation, which is all too familiar

for many of us, which was a student was drinking.

He hit his head one evening.

And a lot of people were concerned about him. His friends,

his roommates, you know, watched over him, you know, tried to keep him safe by making sure he

didn't roll onto his back and choking his own vomit. But what they didn't do for 19 hours

was actually call 911. And so I just really felt as a mom, as a psychology professor,

I wanted to understand what led these, you know, healthy, nice, good kids to fail to take action.

And that really led me to shift pretty dramatically from what I had been writing about,

you know, happiness and health, to start

examining this issue of why people fail to step up.

So what did you find out? Was it peer pressure that made it so that these kids were saying,

...