Photo credit: kutaytanir – Left: Exterior view from a Walmart store on February 19, 2024, in Secaucus New Jersey. Walmart is scheduled to report its 2024 fourth-quarter fiscal results on February 20th. (Photo by VIEWpress/Getty Images) Right: Getty Images
Random acts of kindness go beyond feeding people or making donations to charities. Even the smallest gestures can make a big difference in someone’s life. A woman from North Carolina experienced such kindness in the least expected place—on the floor of a Walmart store. On November 13, 2017, which happened to be “World Kindness Day,” a stranger left behind a heartwarming surprise for Julia Stultz, her family, and the store’s workers by leaving an envelope of cash to spark a chain of goodwill.
“It’s uncommon nowadays,” some customers said in disbelief, according to Fox News affiliate WJZY. It happened when Julia and her family were sauntering through the shelves stocked with groceries at the big-box retail center in Charlotte. When they made their way into the clothing section, Julia’s son pointed out something. He had spotted an envelope lying on the floor. They picked up the envelope to see if they might find its owner.
Representative Image Source: People walk near the entrance to a Walmart store on May 14, 2024 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Both sides of the envelope had handwritten messages scrawled into it. One flap read “With Love, Amen,” and the message on the other said, “If this card has found you, open it. It’s yours.” Julia slipped her hand inside the envelope and from it, she pulled out a crisp $100 note along with a card that had an important instruction written on it. According to this instruction, the finder of the card was supposed to “pay it forward.”
Signing their name as “a friend,” the stranger had written, “May this gift bring you a little peace today. One day, please pay it forward. May the blessings of God be on you always!” Julia regretted not being able to thank the generous human in person. Meanwhile, the news outlet reached out to her fellow customers who were as surprised by this unusual act of kindness, as she was.
“I’ve always wondered if there was stuff like that in the world and I’ve always said if I have the chance to pay it forward, I would absolutely do it,” said Akilli Omari, another Walmart customer, before adding, “It’s uplifting and inspiring.” This random event energized Omari’s spirits so much that he said he would start his own “pay it forward” chain of kindness. “Maybe we should all consider doing one ourselves. I think I will.” One more fellow customer, Lamar McLaughlin, said, “I think people should be more kind to each other. It’s just, I will say it’s not hard to do, but it’s uncommon nowadays.”
On social media, people are singing praises for the anonymous person who stepped forward to initiate this whole kindness chain. “Restored my faith in humanity,” said Rose Schreyer. Roxy Price said, “Good to hear nice things in this sad & crazy world. God bless the person who did that. Praying the lady who got it was able to pay it forward. You never know when someone needs it.” Gerry Johnson commented, “There are still amazing and thoughtful people left in this screwed-up world!”
Chances are, you think you do. It’s ubiquitous and iconic. How could you not know it?
But when tested, it turns out very few people can remember all the features of the logo. One study of 85 people found that only about half could pick the correct logo out of a lineup of similar ones. And only one person could correctly draw it.
This isn’t an isolated example. A classic study from 1979 found that people similarly couldn’t draw a penny accurately or pick out a correctly drawn penny from incorrect ones.
People aren’t just bad at remembering things they see all the time, but also in actually knowing how they work. In a 2006 study, many people made significant errors when drawing a bicycle, like putting the chain around the front wheel as well as the back wheel. More than just a forgotten detail, putting the chain around both wheels shows a deeper misunderstanding of how a bicycle works. A bicycle with a chain around both wheels wouldn’t be able to turn.
It turns out people’s knowledge of how the world works is often fragmented and sketchy at best. They systematically overestimate their understanding of everyday devices and natural phenomena. People will tend to give themselves high ratings on how well they understand something, such as how bicycles or zippers work. But when they’re asked to actually explain the mechanics of these objects, their ratings of their understanding typically drop.
Just like how your knowledge of the world around you is imperfect, your knowledge about your own knowledge – also called metaknowledge – is often flawed. My field of cognitive science has been uncovering various gaps in human metaknowledge for decades.
If people are systematically overconfident about how well they understand things, why don’t they notice when they don’t understand something? And what can people do to better recognize the limits of their own knowledge?
Why you think you know more than you do
Researchers have identified several factors behind people’s overconfidence in their knowledge.
One is that people confuse environmental support with understanding: The information is out in the world but not actually in your head. With a bicycle or a zipper, all of the parts are visible to you, and you may confuse this transparency for an internal understanding of how they work. But until you go to use that knowledge by attempting to explain how they work, you may not recognize that you don’t understand how those parts interact.
A second factor is confusing different levels of analysis. People can often describe how something works at a very high level. You know that the engine of a car makes the car go, and the brakes slow and stop the vehicle. But confidence in your high-level understanding of the car may bias you to think you also have a good grasp of the finer details, like how the engine pistons and brake pads work.
Additionally, people can be blind to the ways their knowledge shapes their own perception. In one study, researchers had participants tap out the tune to a popular song. On average, the tappers thought listeners would be able to identify the song about 50% of the time. But when listeners had to identify the tapped song, they actually could identify it only 2.5% of the time. The tappers didn’t realize how much their knowledge was making identifying the song seem easy to them.
This disconnect has consequences beyond whether someone else can understand your Morse code version of a song. When teaching people, whether in formal classroom settings or through casual mentorship, you can sometimes have an expert blind spot: the inability to recognize the difficulties beginners face when learning something you have expertise in.
Building expertise often involves internalizing knowledge to the point where it becomes invisible to you. You draw on knowledge you don’t realize you have, making it hard to relate to learners who lack this knowledge – and, of course, hard for learners to relate to your teaching. You might have experienced this when you’ve gotten partway through explaining something, only to realize you’ve been using jargon you forgot isn’t common knowledge and lost your listener.
How to address metaknowledge failures
Your metaknowledge can fail in two directions: You can think you know more than you do, and you can be blind to how much you’re relying on knowledge you do have. Each calls for a different response to correct it.
When you’re overconfident in your knowledge, the remedy is using that knowledge. You’ll quickly realize how much you actually understand and dial down your confidence. Challenging yourself to actually try to walk through how something works is a great exercise in intellectual humility – that is, recognizing that you may be wrong – and can keep you from getting out over your skis.
Building a greater appreciation for what you know is more difficult. You can’t simply unlearn what you’ve internalized. But what this challenge shows is that, to some extent, knowing a subject and knowing how to teach it are two separate skills. Some experts are great teachers, but not simply by virtue of being experts. Recognizing that you have to approach teaching with humility, and that your expertise doesn’t automatically make you a skilled teacher, can go a long way toward making you a better teacher and mentor.
These aren’t easy and quick fixes to failures of metaknowledge. Both require ongoing intellectual humility and a willingness to distrust your own confidence. But acknowledging the fallibility of your own metaknowledge is a good place to start.
Picture Gigi, having a chat with her boss, when the meeting takes a sharp turn. Gigi’s boss tells her that her work has been lacking recently and that maybe she needs to stay late a couple of evenings to make it up. Surprised by her boss’s remarks, she feels the rumblings of anxiety rising in her mind and body. Psychology research suggests that Gigi feels anxious because she interpreted her boss’s remarks as something threatening that perhaps she can’t handle.
Just as Gigi starts frantically looking online for new jobs, she spies the “employee of the month” plaque on her desk from last year. She thinks to herself that maybe she can get back to her old form. She has changed her initial view of the situation (need to run away from a threat) to a new one (let’s rise to the challenge), causing her anxiety to subside. Psychologists call this process reappraisal.
Studies show that reappraising emotional situations is a powerful way to change how you feel. When you find the silver linings in bad situations or give others and yourself the benefit of the doubt, it can help you feel better.
I’m a psychology researcher who’s interested in how people change their emotions. Gigi may feel a little less anxious in the moment, but does she truly believe that she can make up the work on time and regain her former glory? My colleagues and I set out to investigate whether it’s possible to start the process of reappraisal without going all the way through with it. Are people getting the full benefit from trying to think differently about their emotions?
Reappraisal has multiple steps
When my colleague Kateri McRae and I first started thinking about what it means to fully reappraise emotional experiences, we were struck by something we saw in the emotion regulation research. Almost all of the studies treated reappraisal as a one-step process. Researchers would ask participants to “reappraise this to make yourself feel better” and then measure the effects.
Intentionally finding a new way to think about how you’re feeling can help you start changing your emotions. Maskot via Getty Images
When you want to change how you’re feeling, you first generate a reappraisal. You bend and stretch your mind to come up with some alternative way to look at the situation. For Gigi, seeing the employee of the month plaque helped. She could have also thought of her boss’s previous compliments or how it felt to get projects done early.
After you generate a reappraisal, it might seem like you’re done, but you’re not. That alternative interpretation is fragile and must compete with your original take that’s driving your emotion. Somehow you need to strengthen that reappraisal so it can stick.
We call this implementation – when you focus and elaborate on that reappraisal to really change your mind about the situation. For Gigi, she may continue to think about all the ways that she can be a great employee so that it lodges firmly in her mind and makes her anxiety truly disappear.
We tested this idea in a study. We showed 89 undergraduate participants images of negative situations and asked them to first just generate a reappraisal of the image that could help them feel better about it. For example, they might see a picture of a frail man in a hospital bed and tell themselves that the man is getting good treatment and will be better soon. Then, we showed them the image again and asked them to focus and elaborate in their mind on their reappraisal.
So we experimentally showed that people reappraise their feelings in two steps. So what? That’s probably what everyone does naturally, anyway, right?
This was the next question we sought to answer. We conducted a study with 52 undergraduate participants like the earlier one, but with a twist. This time, after participants generated a reappraisal, we gave them a choice to continue the reappraisal process by implementing it or to stop the process by distracting themselves.
Participants chose to continue reappraising their emotions only about half the time. Even though reappraisal made participants feel better about the emotional images, there were still many times when they stopped the process prematurely and did not enjoy its full benefits.
These studies showing the benefits of fully following through on emotional reappraisals are lab experiments, but they have implications for how people try to help themselves feel better in real life.
First, it’s hard to intentionally change how you think about something, and people tend to dislike continuing to do hard things. Indeed, in our choice study, people opted to give up on reappraising when they weren’t feeling its benefits early on. Knowing this human tendency might give you the best chance of continuing reappraisal even when it doesn’t feel like it’s working or is hard.
Second, people often get reappraisals from others, and it’s tempting to think that hearing a new perspective is all you need. Indeed, we have unpublished data that shows that participants feel pretty good when receiving a reappraisal from someone else about their own situation. But other people cannot change your mind for you. You must do that yourself if you want to truly feel better.
Next time you’re in an unpleasant situation like Gigi’s, don’t just cursorily think that you can rise to the challenge. Really think through the situation and let your new perspective become your only one.
There’s a way depression affects people that often goes unspoken because it doesn’t look exactly like sadness. For some, depression isn’t about overwhelming emotion. It’s the baffling, painful absence of feeling anything at all.
Anhedonia affects up to 90% of people suffering from severe depression. This inability to feel pleasure, along with a basic lack of interest in life, is closely linked to chronic mental illness and suicide risk.
Most depression treatments understandably focus on reducing pain, calming anxiety, and interrupting spiraling thoughts. This approach has helped millions of people and remains important.
But the researchers behind PAT started asking different questions: What if recovery isn’t about feeling less bad? What if it’s also about relearning how to feel good again?
A treatment that targets the brain’s reward system
The therapy is designed to target the brain’s reward system. By retraining attention to focus more on positive experiences, researchers saw greater improvements than with traditional therapies that focused mainly on reducing negative emotions.
Culminating more than a decade of research, psychologist Alicia E. Meuret, who co-led the study, believes targeting positive emotions is a more powerful treatment.
“When people feel hopeless, they don’t believe anything will change. That’s what anhedonia can look like, and taking away negative emotions doesn’t fix it,” Meuret said in a story on the university’s website.
“Treatment needs to ask: Is this activity meaningful to you? Will it give you joy or a sense of accomplishment? Does it foster connection?” Meuret added.
Participants who received PAT treatment showed greater improvements and reported feeling interested in life again.
A couple on an afternoon walk. Photo credit: Canva
Depression is on the rise
The National Center for Health Statistics reported in 2025 that there has been a sharp increase in the prevalence of depression over the past decade. The COVID-19 pandemic, worsening socioeconomic conditions, social isolation, and increased feelings of loneliness are likely key contributors to America’s growing depression crisis. The demographics most affected are younger adults, women, and financially vulnerable groups.
In 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released youth mental health statistics showing that 40% of high school students in the United States experience persistent sadness and hopelessness. Depression rates among Americans have increased by nearly 60%. Modern lifestyles have left many people feeling stuck, mindlessly doomscrolling, and isolating themselves.
That’s part of what makes this therapy feel so unexpectedly hopeful. Joy, wonder, and excitement may be skills the brain can rebuild. Teaching people to look forward positively and find gratitude by noticing little things, like sunlight through a window, may seem small. However, the study suggests this simple practice can feel revolutionary.
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