A team of psychologists looked at the warm, positive feelings we get when we see someone help another person or perform a good deed—what they call “elevation”—and how these feelings then affect our own behavior. It turns out that volunteers who watched uplifting clips of The Oprah Winfrey Show (in which musicians thanked their mentors) later spent almost twice as much time helping a researcher with a boring, tedious task than did volunteers who watched less uplifting TV clips or snippets of a British comedy show. This suggests, of course, that we do pay it forward—and that we may be able to make people more altruistic by having them watch another person do something good.