Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens. Joining us on this episode is Dr. Abigail Marsh, author of the book The Fear Factor, How One Emotion

Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone in Between. It's been called an important book

about the things that make some of us angels, some of us devils, and all of us human.

Welcome to the show. We are so, so excited to talk to you in large part because it's great to see so much

positive research being done on this topic.

You always think of people being a little bit cynical about other people, and it seems

like your work has proven that people can be good to each other.

Absolutely.

That's one of my favorite parts of my work, too.

So talk to us about your own story and how you saw the best and the worst in people as a young

adult and how that changed your path in life.

So my interest in this topic was really kicked off by a pair of incidents that sort of

bookended my early adulthood.

In one of them, my life was saved by a stranger, and then the other I was injured,

somewhat seriously, by a stranger.

And it really gave me a deep personal knowledge of the extremes of human nature.

In the first incident, I was 19 years old when a stranger saved my life.

It happened when I was driving from Seattle back to my hometown of Tacoma down the major freeway,

linking the two cities, which is Interstate 5. And it was late at night. And as I was crossing an

overpass back into Tacoma, a very small dog ran out in

front of my car. And I am a dog lover like many people. And my instinct, like a lot of people's

instincts, was to swerve to avoid the dog. And you should never do that. I now know. Because the swerve sent

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