UCLA’s David Myers on how the public university can address society’s ‘kindness deficit’

In 2019, UCLA established the Bedari Kindness Institute through the visionary philanthropic support of Jennifer and Matthew Harris, a UCLA alumnus. The institute, a rising global force in the field, approaches the study of kindness through evolutionary, biological, psychological, economic, cultural and sociological perspectives.

Housed in the division of social sciences, the institute also creates opportunities that translate its research into real-world applications, with the goal of becoming a global platform that educates and communicates around kindness-related breakthroughs.

In 2024, David N. Myers, UCLA's Sady and Ludwig Kahn Professor of Jewish History, became the institute's director. Myers brought two initiatives with him he had begun cultivating years prior: the Initiative to Study Hate, a project started in 2022 that focused on understanding and mitigating individual- and group-based hate, and Dialogue across Difference, a campus initiative started in 2023 that aims to model and promote curiosity, empathy and active listening to engage in sensitive topics that drive social division. Both now have a home at the Bedari Kindness Institute under Myers' leadership.

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While studying kindness at a time of toxic polarization may not seem an intuitive path, Myers says that cultivating a deeper understanding now is ever more urgent.

"To paraphrase Thomas Paine, 'The times have found us,'" said Myers. "If you observe American society long enough, you'll see there's a kindness deficit. We think that our job, as citizens of a great public university, is to address this deficit."

During a fraught moment both nationally and for UCLA, we sat down with Myers to discuss the Bedari Kindness Institute's current mission and challenges as well as his vision for its future.

How did you become involved in the type of work the institute is advancing?

The portal through which I entered this work has been very formative. I spent a lot of time studying and invested in peacemaking efforts in Israel and Palestine. One of my areas of scholarly expertise is the history of Israel, Zionism and, by extension, Palestine - it's the source of such profound heartache and, oftentimes, hopelessness that one struggles to find ways to emerge out of the abyss of despair.

So, I come to the work at the Bedari Kindness Institute through a very big, difficult issue that has led me to a very local set of tasks at UCLA. And now the question is: Can we build up the skills so that we can export that praxis to the big questions in society?

A year now into your role as the institute's director, and at the start of a new chapter for its initiatives, can you talk about your vision or key goals for the future?

Goal number one is to effect an ever more nuanced and productive harmony among our three components - the Bedari Kindness Institute, the Initiative to Study Hate and Dialogue across Difference - to marshal the synergies, maximize the overlap and continue to generate a larger research community. At the same we're big believers in the application of knowledge to address real problems in the here and now. So we want to apply the knowledge we're gaining to the major social and political maladies of our time, of which there are many, and hate is one of them, and the kindness deficit is a closely related one. Ultimately, we want to create a major, internationally recognized research center, and then get out there and effect change.

Can you explain more about the synergy between the institute's three initiatives: the study of kindness, the Initiative to Study Hate and Dialogue across Difference?

There are very profound linkages among the three components of what we think of as the "Bedari triangle." The study of hate and the study of kindness - under which we can include empathy and altruism - are closely related, and there's a lot of work in psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology and other fields that grasps intuitively the connection between these two. And we also saw dialogue as a potential delivery system for the results that arise from the research on both kindness and hate.

The Bedari Kindness Institute has partnered with Jamil Zaki at Stanford, author of the book "The War for Kindness," which presents an argument against the notion that empathy is innate. Can you talk about the importance of this collaboration?

Zaki, who was a participant in our Compassionate Conversation speaker series, reminds us that kindness can be developed through practice, moving beyond the belief in the fixity of kindness or its lack thereof. This is a very important insight for us to internalize. Zaki tells us: We're fluid, we're malleable, we're not fixed in our ways. Just as we can develop greater capacities for mindfulness through practice and engage in various spiritual practices that allow us to achieve a greater state of tranquility, so too we can engage in greater acts of kindness through practice.

Why is UCLA uniquely positioned to advance kindness?

We think we have a fantastic laboratory in which to experiment with applied methods within our own campus community. And we have an urgent need, since a good deal of trust has been shattered after the spring of 2024.

There is a saying that crisis begets opportunity. I don't want to minimize for a second the sense of grief and lack of trust that so many on our campus feel. But we have an opportunity to come together around the response to the January wildfires, around the threats to democracy in American society, and we will be significantly advanced in that mission if we are animated by kindness. And if our efforts work at UCLA, we'll be more emboldened to take our model beyond campus walls and effect change in society as well.

What is your approach toward engaging UCLA's campus community in supporting these efforts?

I'm a believer in a theory of change that emphasizes bottom-up, grassroots, people-to-people work.I know that we alone aren't going to revolutionize the world. Hosting one Compassionate Conversation that draws 1,500 people to Royce Hall won't solve our problems simply by modeling how people can talk across differences and manifest kindness. This is important work, of course, but I think the more important work is building up the infrastructure and the muscle from the bottom up, and that work takes time. So, we're thinking not in terms of months or a year, but five years as a horizon toward which we aspire.

Take the Dialogue across Difference initiative as one example. We had 16 faculty fellows this year; if we have 16 faculty fellows over the course of five years, we'll have 80 faculty fellows who will be reaching thousands of students. That's a critical mass, and then we can begin to assess if we have moved the needle.

What are the biggest challenges facing the Bedari Kindness Institute's mission and the advancement of kindness now?

The challenges are the ongoing tensions on campus, the sense of broken trust, the sense that people are not being heard, not being cared for, that their trauma has not been addressed. And it pains me, frankly, as someone who's devoted his professional career to this institution.

There's a lot of secondary and tertiary effects of the Israel-Palestine conflict on campus, including antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian prejudice. I'm glad that through the work of the institute and through the Initiative to Study Hate and Dialogue across Difference, we can attend to these problems as they manifest on our own campus, because they're urgent problems and we can't ignore them.

What is providing you with hope amid the challenges?

I am a situational pessimist and a congenital optimist - so today's bad, but tomorrow is going to be better. That's just the way I operate.

I realize it's a heavy lift to do what we want to do, but it's also exciting to see if we can realize our potential. We have the foundations, and we have great people associated with the Bedari triangle to bring positive change to campus and then, from that point, to society at large. We also have clarity of mission, particularly in light of the challenges to the university and the institutions of democracy in the United States at this moment, which I think, ironically, can be a source of unity.

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