How kindness went viral with Catherine Barrett

The TED Interview

TED

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To get a free copy of the Infectious Generosity book, visit ted.com/generosity

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when misinformation and fear was spreading rampantly, one optimistic community was forming... on Facebook. Catherine Barrett started "The Kindness Pandemic" Facebook group as a way to combat the negativity and aggression she was seeing online. Members participated in campaigns where they engaged in kind acts — and then they posted about it. The group went from dozens of members in its first day to more than 50,000 members joining every day. In this episode, Chris and Catherine chat about bringing humanity back into our digital worlds, discuss what it takes to make kindness go viral, and make a case for being loud about generosity.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Ted Audio Collective.
0:02.0	Hello, welcome to the TED interview. I'm Chris Anderson. This series of the TED interview
0:17.7	is devoted to exploring infectious generosity in all of its aspects. I've come to believe that we're in an
0:25.6	existential battle right now in our culture between those spreading anger, mistrust,
0:31.4	and threat and those seeking to share a more uplifting view of humans and what
0:37.2	we're capable of.
0:39.4	Doing the latter is definitely harder because our human cognitive biases
0:44.3	draw us more naturally to danger but kindness can also spread online.
0:50.9	Those who do that and show that are in my view modern day heroes and today on the show
0:57.9	we have one of the greatest of those heroes her name is Catherine Barrett. She has devoted much of her life to campaigning against
1:06.7	ageism and the terrible way we tend to treat the elderly in our societies. But for a couple of years in her life during the pandemic she
1:16.0	had to put all that on hold for something else. She's an amazing woman and
1:21.5	this is an extraordinary story. Okay, so I'm here with Catherine Barrett, someone who I regard actually as an unsung global hero.
1:42.0	Catherine, welcome to the 10 interview.
1:44.4	Chris, it's wonderful to be here with you.
1:46.5	So I would love to hear your story kind of from the beginning.
1:51.1	Just how on earth you got to where you got to by March 2020.
1:56.0	What was the lead up to that?
1:58.0	I think a lead up if I actually go way back comes from my family. I come from a very big family, so a family of 14 children and 14 children in 16 years.
2:09.8	No kidding, what number were you in that?
2:11.8	14? I was number five.
2:13.0	So there wasn't a lot of individualism.
	...

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