Beyond Good and Bad: Dr. Zane Maroney on What Makes Us Human.

The Santa Fe psychiatrist explores how attachment, empathy, and belonging shape our capacity for kindness—and why understanding begins with asking what happened.

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Are people innately good? For Santa Fe psychiatrist Dr. Zane Maroney, the most honest answer is also the most human: it depends.

In this episode of Doing Good, Dr. Maroney challenges the tidy division between “good people” and “bad people.” Human beings, he argues, are shaped by temperament, childhood, culture, security, trauma, and the relationships that teach us who we are. The moral compass begins forming early, when children absorb not only what caregivers say, but what they model. Labels that seem harmless—good, bad, lazy, clumsy—can become part of a child’s identity.

Dr. Maroney’s own path to psychiatry joined science with the humanities. Inspired by his father’s work at the Santa Fe Indian Hospital and his own experience at Albuquerque’s Casa de Salud, he came to see medicine as a universal language—and healing as an art grounded in people’s stories.

That understanding guides his work today. Therapy, he says, begins by walking “shoulder to shoulder” with another person, building trust and bearing witness to experiences often hidden by guilt or shame. “It’s the relationship that heals.”

The same principle reaches beyond the therapy room. Beneath anger, he often finds fear. Beneath harmful behavior, there may be injury, deprivation, or a need that was never met. Asking “What happened to you?” instead of “What’s wrong with you?” does not erase accountability; it opens a path toward empathy, forgiveness, and change.

Kindness, in this view, is rooted in connection. People need biological support, skills, and—most importantly—other people. An act of care reminds both giver and receiver: I belong here. I can affect another life.

Perhaps goodness is not perfection at all. Sometimes it is helping a stranger. Sometimes it is reducing harm. And sometimes it is simply refusing to pass our hurt on to someone else.