In today’s Big Story Podcast, before we break for the holidays, The Big Story team decided to try to end our year on a positive note with a week of good news stories. We hope this week brings you hope, light and laughter. It might be our job to often deliver bad news, but that doesn’t mean that’s all the world is.

Today: You might have thought — based on everything you’ve seen and heard in the media and through your social channels — that the pandemic turned us all into angry people, yelling at one another and throwing tantrums. We’re delighted to inform you that’s simply not remotely true, and we have the data to prove it.

Dr. John Helliwell is a professor emeritus at The Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, and a founding editor of The World Happiness report. “The most dramatic evidence we found on that was […] all over the world, people dramatically increased relative to pre-pandemic levels, the frequency which they had helped strangers.,” said Helliwell.

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