I’ve been thinking a lot about altruism ever since the horrible devastation in Haiti. In the aftermath, the world contributed millions of dollars of aid. From the US alone, $220 million was raised in the first week.
The first week!
And this at a time when our national unemployment rate was in double-digits. While pondering this generosity, I came across a new study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers James Fowler, PhD from UC San Diego and Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD from Harvard have provided the first laboratory evidence that altruistic behavior can be influenced and spread.
They gathered together groups of strangers to play a series of games. In each game, individuals were given a set amount of money they could either keep or contribute toward a group or “public good” project.
Each game started with a new mix of total strangers. Because subjects never played more than one game with each other, the results were not tainted by familiarity or possible reciprocity between participants.
Drs. Fowler and Christakis found that players were influenced by the generosity of the others around them.
Even more exciting, they also found that observing altruistic behavior from one game led to the adoption of generous behavior in subsequent games by a significant number of players.
And, this positive influence ended up working exponentially, spreading to three stages of separation from person to person to person.
I have to admit, this study left me with tantalizing dreams – what could we end up achieving if only we could harness an epidemic of kindness and cooperation?
These experiments show the extent to which cooperation can work, but where does this cooperative spirit come from?
We are nearing the end of our series on The New Brain Science but can’t finish without hearing from Louis Cozolino, PhD. My talk with him helped me to understand how brain structures and processes affect our ability to become emotionally and spiritually connected.
We’ve put together a brief video of his work on the neuroscience of relationships:
Intrigued?
You might also like our 6-part teleseminar series on The New Brain Science.
Come join us. You can sign up here.
There is noticeably big funds to comprehend this. I assume you’ve got produced certain good points in capabilities also.
, altruism is not riatonal. People make riatonal decisions to receive the most gains. With no self-interests in altruism, altruism would not be reasonable and can not be justified. A decision that would result in no benefits but loss is definitely not sound judgment.1.Quite a few social and economic incentives are used by schools to alter the students’ opportunity costs. The social incentives include teachers encouraging students to use their time properly and setting the right priorities and teaching with a regular schedule so that to opportunity costs for the students to miss classes are not being accepted into the class community and the learning environment like everyone else. Schools generally use more economic incentives to try to change student behavior such as humiliating the students when they are late, holding detentions, calling home and giving pop quizzes. In those cases, the opportunity cost of students missing school would be receiving lower marks, getting punished and losing self pride. However, because those incentives are mostly negative incentives, a combination of too many negative incentives may decrease the opportunity cost of students to miss school compared to the opportunity cost of students if they were focusing on school work. I believe the school should have more positive incentives that encourage students to participate actively in class such as creating a fun learning environment and rewarding punctuated students from time to time. Positive incentives would lower the opportunity cost of students participating in school and more students would chose school work. 2.In my opinion, positive incentives would be a better way to encourage positive group behavior. Social incentives that can be used are to show fun clips or have fun group activities at the beginning of a class and to give priority to the groups if all the members arrive on time so that the opportunity cost of students for missing class would be missing out on fun all the other students are having and the guilt of letting down on their group. The economic incentive that can be used is to have really easy pop quizzes from time to time and to give zeros to the students who miss the pop quizzes. In this case, the opportunity cost of missing the class would be missing a chance to boost up one’s marks. Nevertheless, there is a still a chance that the incentives will backfire. Since most of the incentives I have come up with are positive incentives, to some students the opportunities missed are still not very important to them. Therefore, it is possible to some students that taking away the negative incentives would make missing class an easier option for them. However, I still believe that positive incentives will work very well as to encouraging the majority of the class.
I love this discussion and was reminded from another source recently just how generous the folks in this wonderful country are:
“After Hurrican Katrina the incredible outpouring of private generosity amounted to $6 billion. And what we collectively haven’t been aware of is that Americans routinely give that much to charity every week. Last year Americans gave $300 billion to charity. To put this in perspective, that is almost twice what we spent on consumer electronics equipment–equipment including cell phones, iPods and DVD players. Americans gave three times as much to charity last year as we spent on gambling and ten times as much as we spent on professional sports. America is by far the most charitable country in the world. There is no other country that comes close.”
When I read this, I felt my heart fill up with the joy of living in this country with so many amazing folks….sat down and wrote 2 more checks to 2 of our favorite charities!
It is my deepest hope that one day the sensationalism of media will instead be devoted to altruism rather than drama, fear and money. It all starts at home, as we must have it in our conscious awareness first before we can give it away! I would encourage all interested in altrusim, hope and peace, to check out Ten Million Clicks for Peace. This is a place where altruism is brought to a whole new level! We all get the privilege of donating everything from time, love, meditations, writing, teleconference calls, books, our specific skills, money for refugees displaced by war, along with doing the ‘pay it forward’ thing! Fellow Canadian Rick Beneteau and American Julian Kalmar of ‘The Happiness Formula’ are the founders of this magnificent effort to bring peace to the world, one person at a time.
Hi Kathryn, unfortunately fear is contagious also.
Ruth
What an incredible study demonstrating the power of compassion. During the 50+ inches of snow we experienced along the east coast this winter, neighbors and even strangers came together in new ways through acts of kindness and support. We’re learning! I believe we’re approaching the “hundredth monkey” as we interact with compassion toward loved ones and even strangers on the other side of the globe. We are all in this together. Although we are many, we are one!