Abigail Marsh

What enables people to care about and help each other, and what happens when care is missing? Being caring is not simply about empathy, says Georgetown University psychology professor Abigail Marsh, Ph.D. – it’s about giving people what they need, not just what they want. As her research shows, people who feel better will also be more pro-social. In this talk designed for leaders managing teams, Marsh illuminates the important and reciprocal relationship between helping others and well-being. She offers practical applications for building a pro-social organization and incorporating care into daily management practices. Through a psychology lens, Marsh provides strategies for giving feedback in constructive ways and mindfully experiencing the uncomfortable feelings that come with critiquing someone else. She offers organizations an avenue for strengthening individual well-being so team interactions are cooperative and supportive in service of achieving individual and organizational goals.

Natural disasters, global pandemics and social worries – there’s a lot to make people feel afraid these days. The good news, according to Georgetown University psychology professor Abigail Marsh Ph.D., is that anyone can learn to manage their fear, becoming a more courageous and kinder person in the process. Author of the award-winning book The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Links Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between, Marsh conducted hundreds of interviews with people who performed great acts of courage to discover they shared humility and honesty as key character traits, indicating how highly they value others. In this presentation, she shares tips, gratitude exercises and main points to consider when facing fearful situations. Her heartening suggestions for deliberately practicing fearful situations give teams a solid foundation of ground rules for proceeding in the face of risk, novelty, or anything that scares them. Ultimately, her strategies to keep fear from spiraling out of control, good habits for expanding the capacity for fearlessness and recommendations for restoring interconnectedness make fear work for any organization, instead of hampering it.

Why are some people capable of acting heroically in service of others, even total strangers, while other people are not? According to Georgetown University psychology professor Abigail Marsh, Ph.D., it’s because of the way the human brain reacts to fear. As the director of the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience, Marsh performs clinical investigations into the biological processes that occur when we feel afraid. By studying people who have performed heroic deeds, she’s learned that heroes aren’t fearless at all – in fact, they feel fear more strongly than the average person. Her moving presentations show audiences techniques derived from hundreds of interviews that decrease selfish behavior, improve self-focus and increase comfort with risk-taking. By unpacking the origins of selfless behavior, Marsh delivers an uplifting reflection on the nature of courage and how anyone has the potential to be a hero.

Every company wants to create a safe and innovative culture, but it can feel intimidating to disrupt the status quo. As the foremost expert on the psychology of courage, Georgetown University professor and director of the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience Abigail Marsh, Ph.D., has found that few people understand their own capacity for fearlessness – and that existing capacity can be raised. Drawing from research described in her award-winning book The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Links Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between (2017), Marsh details how altruistic and heroic behavior are connected. She then suggests best practices for identifying opportunities to help others, exercises for increasing comfort with risk-taking and fear-management strategies, helping individuals become better decision-makers and feel more comfortable taking risks. Refreshingly optimistic, Marsh and her techniques for raising an organization’s global courage build a culture of fearless innovation and psychological safety.