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The Boston Bombings and the Cognitive Limits of Empathy

From Situationist friend and Harvard Law School 3L, Kate Epstein, an essay about Monday’s tragedy:

As I hear reactions to the bombings at the marathon on Monday, I find myself agreeing with Glenn Greenwald’s column in The Guardian, titled “The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions: As usual, the limits of selective empathy, the rush to blame Muslims, and the exploitation of fear all instantly emerge.” Particularly interesting to me are our cognitive limits, as humans, when it comes to empathy. Greenwald writes:

The widespread compassion for yesterday’s victims and the intense anger over the attacks was obviously authentic and thus good to witness. But it was really hard not to find oneself wishing that just a fraction of that compassion and anger be devoted to attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers. These are exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over again for the last decade, with very little attention paid.

I felt the same way in the aftermath of Monday’s events, but I can also empathize with those who do care more–or at least feel it in a more real way–when the victims of a random act of violence are white, close to home, and so obviously innocent. “They, unlike the countless non-white, non-American casualties of the War on Terror, are– for me and many around me–part of our in-group, and our minds actually function in a way that makes us much more easily empathize with them.”

Studies have shown that parts of our brain associated with empathy and emotion are more likely to be activated when we observe someone of our own race, as opposed to an out-group member, in pain. This makes sense given research on unconscious bias using implicit association tests, which have been shown to predict real-life behavior outside of the lab.

The good news is that our automatic attitudes are sometimes malleable. Awareness of the differences between our egalitarian values and our implicit attitudes can induce emotional reactions that can motivate behavioral changes and help us be the empathetic and altruistic people we hope to be. On the other hand, lack of awareness combined with an inundation of negative images and stereotypes from commercial media and popular culture can reinforce implicit biases, underscoring the need for education and self-awareness.

In a world with so much violence and pain, it makes sense that we simply could not feel deeply empathetic every time a human being is injured or killed. We rightly feel intense moral outrage that someone would senselessly harm innocent people gathered in Boston yesterday, and yet we do not so easily empathize with victims of drone strikes in Pakistan, most of whom see the bombings as just as random and senseless, against victims just as innocent.

We should forgive ourselves for exhibiting these cognitive limits–after all, we are only human. But we should recognize, in these moments when we do so easily feel sorrow, anger, and compassion, those events which do not normally elicit those emotions, and force ourselves to grapple with the consequences of that fact. When we read dry, mundane news reports about human suffering, when we (rarely) hear body counts of the War on Terror (such as the estimated 122,000 violent, civilian deaths in Iraq thus far), when we are made aware of the latest unnamed drone victims in North Waziristan, let’s try to channel the empathy events like this make us feel, and then let’s turn that empathy into action.

Related Situationist posts:

• 25 Mil­lion Years of Us vs. Them
• Attributing Blame — from the Baseball Diamond to the War on Terror
• The Situation of Being “(un)American”
• Patricia Devine on Resisting Implicit Associations
• The Situation of Prejudice: Us vs. Them? or Them Is Us?
• Laurie Santos on the Evolutionary Situation of Cognitive Biases
• Michael McCullough on the Situation of Revenge and Forgiveness
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy
• The Endowment Effect in Chimpanzees – Abstract
• The ‘Turban Effect’
• The Situation of Racial Profiling
• Jim Sidanius “Terror, Intergroup Violence, and the Law“
• Even monkeys know when they’re being treated unfairly
• Monkey Fairness
• Perceptions of Racial Divide.”

The Situationist has a series of posts devoted to highlighting some of situational sources of war. Part I and Part II of the series included portions of an article co-authored by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon, titled “Why Hawks Win.” Part III reproduced an op-ed written by Situationist friend Dan Gilbert on July 24, 2006. Part IV and Part V in this series contained the two halves of an essay written by Situationist Contributor, Jon Hanson within the week following 9/11. Part VI contains an op-ed written by Situationist Contributor John Jost on October 1, 2001, “Legitimate Responses to Illegitimate Acts,” which gives special emphasis to the role of system justification. Part VII includes a video entitled “Resisting the Drums of War.” The film was created and narrated by psychologist Roy J. Eidelson, Executive Director of the Solomon Asch Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

To review a larger sample of posts on the causes and consequences of human conflict, click here.

Witnessing a Murder?: What Would You Do?

Related Situationist posts:

• The Bystander Effect at Penn State
• Bystanders in Child Abductions
• The Situation of Bystanders,
• The Situation of Gang Rape,
• The Situation of Helping,
• The Situational Effect of Groups,
• The Positive Situation of Crowds,
• The Situation of Helping,
• The Situation of Hazing, Torture, Gender, and Tears, and
  
• Journalists as Social Psychologists & Social Psychologists as Entertainers

The Implicit Party of “Independent” Voters

This post,  written by Carlee Beth Hawkins about her work with Situationist Contributor Brian Nosek, was recently published on the SPSP Blog.

Voters sometimes cross party lines, but not very often:  In U.S. elections, for example, people who label themselves Democrats usually vote for the Democratic candidate and Republicans vote Republican. The recent 2012 election  illustrated the power of political affiliation: the Republican candidate Governor Mitt Romney won Wyoming, where Republicans far outnumber Democrats, but President Obama won in places like Vermont, where Democrats are more plentiful than Republicans.

Given the salience and influence of partisanship in the United States, the following fact might surprise some Americans: Democrats and Republicans are the minority in the U.S. According to the 2008 American National Election Studies, the majority of Americans identify as politically Independent. Political independence implies objectivity in political decision making, and a seemingly noble ability to resist partisan influence. Given how influential party membership can be, how do Independents avoid the strong arm of partisan influence? This is the question my collaborator Brian Nosek (http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/) and I sought to understand, the results of which have recently been published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Political scientists have a long history of empirical investigation of political independence, and this research has revealed that most Independents, when pressed, will admit that they lean toward the Democratic or Republicans parties, and this ‘leaning’ party membership predicts their voting patterns quite well (Keith et al., 1992). Independents who lean toward the Democratic Party behave similarly to Democrats and Independents who lean toward the Republican Party behave similarly to Republicans. However, a full third of Independents, who are termed ‘Pure’ Independents, do not report leaning toward either party – even when pressed, they maintain their Independent identity.

Recent social psychological research utilizing implicit measurement, which uses reaction time to gauge the strength of associations between concepts in the mind without requiring direct report of these associations, has shown that undecided voters demonstrate implicit preferences for candidates or political parties. Even though these undecided voters are unable – or unwilling – to report their explicit political preferences, these implicit measures reveal a preference that predicts their later voting patterns (e.g., Arcuri, Castelli, Galdi, Zogmaister, & Amadori, 2008).

Given this evidence from political science and social psychology, we wondered whether Independents might implicitly identify with Democrats or Republicans, even if they aren’t willing or able to report that they lean toward either party. On our virtual laboratory Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.edu/), we administered a political party Implicit Association Test, which required participants to quickly sort words representing ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans’ and words representing ‘Self’ and ‘Other.’ Participants who sort ‘Democrats’ with ‘Self’ faster than they sort ‘Republicans’ with ‘Self’ are termed ‘implicitly Democratic,’ whereas participants who sort ‘Republicans’ and ‘Self’ faster are termed ‘implicitly Republican.’ Independents were distributed across the spectrum – some implicitly identified as Democratic, some as Republican, and some showed no differences in implicit self-association between the parties.

Demonstrating that Independents implicitly identify as Democratic or Republican when they do not report this information is of value to basic science. It illustrates that people may have group allegiances with related preferences and beliefs that they either do not know they have, or are not readily willing to admit that they have. However, the real interesting – and practical – question is whether these implicit identities predict actual political decisions. To test this, we had participants read about two welfare policies – one stringent and one generous – and manipulated what party proposed what policy (Cohen, 2003). Half the participants saw Democrats propose the generous policy and Republicans propose the stringent policy, and the other half saw Democrats propose the stringent policy and Republicans propose the generous policy. Partisans preferred the policy that was proposed by their party, and for the most part, Independents resembled partisans – Independents who demonstrated implicit Democratic identities liked the plan proposed by Democrats and Independents who demonstrated implicit Republican identities liked the plan proposed by Republicans. Though Independents report nonpartisan political identities, many demonstrate implicit party identities, and these predict their political judgments along party lines.

Given that many Independents seem to fall into the Democratic or Republican camp and are influenced by these party inclinations, why identify as Independent? To find out, we simply asked. We formulated a list of 35 reasons why someone might identify as Independent, and asked Independents who visited Project Implicit how much they agreed with each reason. The most commonly endorsed reasons centered around a theme of self-objectivity, and included items such as “I prefer to think for myself rather than feel like I need to support a party line” and “I say ‘independent’ because I come to my political positions by thinking objectively.” From this, we gather that Independents may choose these political identities because they think of themselves as objective political decision makers, or perhaps want to think of themselves in this way. However, their implicit party identities and party-influenced political judgments tell a different story. In politics, as in so many areas of our lives, who we are and who we say we are is not necessarily the same thing.

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References

The American National Election Studies Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior. (2010).  Party identification 7-point scale 1952-2004. Stanford University and the University of Michigan [producers and distributors]. Available from http://www.electionstudies.org

Arcuri, L., Castelli, L., Galdi, S., Zogmaister, C., & Amadori, A. (2008). Predicting the vote: Implicit attitudes as predictors of the future behavior of decided and undecided voters. Political Psychology, 29, 369-387.

Cohen, G. L. (2003). Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 808-822.

Keith, B. E., Magleby, D. B., Nelson, C. J., Orr, E., Westlye, M. C., & Wolfinger, R. E. (1992). The myth of the independent voter. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Related Situationist posts:

• Stereotyping Political Ideology
• Voting for a Face
• The Facial Situation of Presidential Candidates
• The Exaggerated Situation of Polarization
• The Situation of Political Ideology
• Random Assignments
• Jon Hanson on Law and Mind Sciences
• The Imagined Ideological Divide
• Ideology is Back
• Ideology Shaping Situation of Vice Versa
• Motivated Skepticism
• Naive Cynicism
• The Situation of Polarization
• Biased? I know you are but what am I?
• I’m Objective, You’re Biased
• Ideology, Psychology, and Law – Introduction
• The Origins of Sports Team Fandom
• Heart, Brain, or Wallet . . . How Do You Vote?
• Your Brain on Politics
• Irrelevant Third Options in Presidential Campaigns

Recent Research on Well-Being, Giving, Getting, and Gratitude

From SPSP Press Release:

Giving away money to feel wealthy

New research shows that people all around the world – from Canada to Uganda, from South Africa to India – derive more happiness from spending money on others than they do on themselves.

For the first time, we show that giving away money or spending it on others confers the ironic psychological benefit of increasing the giver’s sense of wealth,” says Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and co-author with Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia of the upcoming book Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending. In a suite of new, not-yet published, studies, Norton and colleagues showed that charitable giving makes people feel wealthier.

This research follows on other recent work published in Psychological Science by Norton and colleagues that shows that giving time to others – from helping with homework to shoveling a neighbors’ driveway – actually makes people feel that they have more time. “In fact, giving time away alleviates people’s sense of time famine even more than receiving unexpected windfalls of free time.”

That people feel wealthier from spending money on others may explain why poor individuals tend to give away a higher fraction of their income than members of the middle class do. In one study, researchers reported that Americans earning less than $20,000 a year give a higher percentage of their income to charity than others earning up to $300,000 a year.

“Our results suggest when the poor give money away, that very act might mitigate their feelings of poverty,” Norton says. “More broadly than this specific benefit, our investigation contributes to the growing body of research documenting the benefits of prosocial behavior, which include greater happiness, reduced mortality, and better immune function.”

Buying experiences to feel happy

In related research, psychologists are finding that spending money on experiential purchases, such as vacations, concerts, and meals out, tends to bring us more happiness than material purchases, such as clothing, jewelry, or electronic gadgets. Amit Kumar and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University are investigating one potential explanation for this difference: that experiences prompt storytelling more than possessions do.

In new research, they asked participants to recall either a significant experiential purchase or a significant material purchase. They then asked them how much they had talked about the purchase they recalled, and questions related to the satisfaction they derived from their purchase. Participants rated a higher satisfaction for experiences than for possessions, which was because they were more likely to talk about the experiences with other people.

In another experiment, the researchers measured what happens when people cannot talk about their purchases. They asked participants if they would be willing to pay a price to be able to talk about a beach vacation (experiential purchase) or an electronic good (material purchase). “Participants were more likely to switch from a better purchase that they could not talk about to a lesser purchase that they could talk about in the experiential condition than in the material one,” Kumar says.

“Well-being is likely to be enhanced by shifting the balance of spending in our consumer society away from material goods and towards experiential ones,” Kumar says. “This research also suggests that there are benefits to be had not only by nudging people to choose experiences over possessions, but also by encouraging people to share stories about their experiences.”

Knowing what is best to help others

The roots for how we give to others form at a very young age. Children, it turns out, are very sophisticated givers – not only coming to someone’s aid when needed but also coming up with the best strategy for doing so, often independent of an adult’s instruction.

In new research, Kristina Olson of Yale University and Alia Martin have found that children often will act, thinking they know better than others what is best for them or others. In a series of experiments, the researchers investigate whether 3-year-old children will help someone by ignoring the specific request and instead offering a better alternative.

In one study, for example, when an experimenter asks the child for a specific marker, but the child knows that marker does not work, the child will instead offer up a better marker. In another study, a pre-recorded child asks the child participant to give her a piece of chocolate via a tube that supposedly connects them. If the participant knows that chocolate makes the other child sick, the participant will decide to give her fruit snacks instead.

“Perhaps most provocatively, children will selectively decide not to help in this way if they don’t like the person,” Olson says. “For example, if an experimenter has previously been mean, children won’t warn the adult of a potential harm – such as something sharp in the container they are reaching in – but will if the experimenter was not mean.”

“These results suggest that children are able to help adults and peers already by the preschool years in rather complex ways, even when the beneficiary is misguided about what he or she wants,” Olson says. “Children don’t just blindly do as they are requested, but rather consider a person’s goal and consider alternative possible ways to achieve that goal.”

Read the entire press release here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Money-Based Happiness
• Adult Well Being and Social Connection
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy
• On Money and Motivation
• The Situation of High Marginal Income Tax Rates and Motivation
• Money and the Situation of Happiness
• The Situation of Money and Happiness
• Receiving by Giving
  
• Something to Smile About
• Resisting Materialism
• Redirect
• Money Priming
• Body Image and Materialism
• Law, Competition, Self-Interest
• The Situation of Being Green
• The Situation of Objectification
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Shocking for Money
• Kristina Olson on the Psychology of Inequality

Trust and Reciprocity Situations Promote Social Common Goods

In the emerging field of tax psychology, the focus on regulation and overcoming tax evasion recently shifted towards searching for situational cues that elicit common goals compliance. Following this innovative behavioral economics quest, Situationist Contributor Julia M. Puaschunder found evidence (download paper here) for trust and reciprocity steering social common goods contributions.

In experiments at the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, the same participants played an economic trust game followed by a common goods game. The more trust and reciprocity were practiced and experienced by player duos, the stronger they supported common goals together.

The findings portray trust and reciprocity as interesting tax ethics antecedents and hold widespread implications for governmental-citizen relations. Shifting attention from prevailing ‘cops-and-robbers’ attempts to fight tax fraud, new public policy managers are advised to establish a service-oriented client atmosphere. In a socially-favorable societal climate breeding trust and reciprocity, common goals are likely to be reached.

Download the full paper ‘Trust and Reciprocity Drive Social Common Goods Contribution Norms’ for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Intergenerational Equity
• Social Status Loss Situations Drive Ethicality
• The Rewards of Cooperation
• Michael Norton on Pro-Social Spending
• Selfishness versus Altruism
• The Situation of High Marginal Income Tax Rates and Motivation
• What Can a Robot Teach Us about the Situation of Trust?
• The Rewards of Cooperation
• The Situation of Cooperation
• The Situation of Trust

Image from Flickr.

Why a Gift Card May Be Better than Cash

If you find yourself, as many do, out of time to purchase thoughtful gifts, perhaps you are now contemplating giving a gift card or perhaps some cash. From CNN (summarizing recent research by Dan Ariely, among others), here’s a reason to opt for former option:

In our daily lives, a lot of purchases have the element of guilt along with them, Ariely said. If you give cash or a credit-card-sponsored gift card that can be used anywhere, your friend may be tempted to use it on groceries or gas or some other necessity that doesn’t make it feel very “present”-like anymore.

Ariely’s intuition is that if you give a gift card that must be used at a particular store, restaurant or entertainment venue, it may eliminate the guilt a person would feel about spending money to treat herself or himself. In fact, you’re essentially creating an experience for the person by coaxing them into going to a particular place that they might not otherwise go.

A spa gift certificate is a popular example, Ariely said. “If you can only spend it on things that you would otherwise not allow yourself to buy, then it’s more valuable,” he said.

Read the entire article here.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Situation of Giving
• Receiving by Giving
• Giving Is Receiving
• The Situation of Kindness
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy
• Well-Being Is a Walk in the Park
• Some Situational Sources of Longer Life

The Situation of Intergenerational Equity

In another outstanding study, Situationist Contributor Julia M. Puaschunder (with her collaborator Gary Schwarz at the University of Nottingham) suggests ways to implement intergenerational equity on a global scale. 

An international survey presented respondents with public policy choices and asked to allocate tax units to different policies in the domains of culture, economics, education, foreign aid, infrastructure and environment.

Evaluating two policies with different outcome times – one more imminently and one that would benefit future generations – at once elicited more intergenerationally equitable outcomes than when deciding over bills with different impact times one at a time. When individuals judge alternative choices, presenting the viewpoints of two generations concurrently balanced intergenerational contributions.

Finding this intergenerational equilibrium pattern in Asia and the U.S. leverages the joint decision making advantage into a human-imbued nudge to overcome global common goods dilemmas. Based on the results, policy makers are advised to consider a multi-faceted decision schema and set up age-differentiated global governance consortia.

Download the full paper ‘The Future is Now: How Joint Decision Making Curbs Hyperbolic Discounting but Blurs Social Responsibility in The Intergenerational Equity Public Policy Domain” for free here.

Situationist Contributor Julia M. Puaschunder  is an Associate of the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for the Environment working on intergenerational equity constraints in the domains of environmental sustainability, overindebtedness and social welfare reform of an aging Western world population.

Related Situationist posts:

• Baumeister on the Situation of Self-Regulation
• Warming World or Just World?
• The Situation of Self-Regulation
• The Situation of Fairness – 2
• The Situation of Fairness
• The Situation of Climate Change
• Jeffrey Sachs on the Situation of Global Poverty
• Changing Choices by Changing Situations

Image from Flickr (by Will Barnet – Four Generations – Modern Art Galley of Vatican Museums)

Social Status Loss Situations Drive Ethicality

In two recent, fascinating field experiments, Situationist Contributor Julia M. Puaschunder demonstrated how social conscientiousness can be “nudged” by social forces: Social status drops trigger social responsibility. 

In a field experiment in Harvard dormitories, social identity insignia (in the form of Harvard logo posters) connected to social norm cues (Sustainability at Harvard posters) promoting environmentalism fostered recycling compliance – once prior social status endowments were taken away.  Building on prospect theory, the paper argues looming social status losses are compensated with socially-favored ethicality.  Social status downs combined with social norm cues steer social responsibility.

A second study on energy conservation in Harvard libraries found a similar effect.  Tent card signage, featuring the Harvard logo, was placed in Harvard Law School’s Langdell Library in combination with social norm instructions asking students to turn off their task-light when finished studying.  When the social status endowing cards were removed, energy light consumption conscientiousness improved.  Situational social status losses related to social norm reminders nudged library visitors towards pro-social environmentalism.

Based on these findings, the Harvard Law School installed similar tent cards in Langdell Library study areas.  The results have attracted attention of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s Cabinet Team on Behavioral Insights.  The U.S. Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education distributed the learning.  Follow-up studies in the organizational context have been inspired by the unprecedented idea to use social status endowments to gain social responsibility.

Here’s the abstract to the paper titled ‘Ethical Decision Making under Social Uncertainty’:

Decision making research has been revolutionized by prospect theory. In laboratory experiments, prospect theory captures human to code outcome perspectives as gains or losses relative to an individual reference point, by which decisions are anchored. Prospect theory’s core finding that monetary losses loom larger than gains has been generalized in many domains; yet not been tested for social status changes. Social status striving has been subject to social sciences’ research for a long time but until today we have no clear picture of how social status prospects relative to an individual reference point may influence our decision making and action. Understanding human cognition in the light of social status perspectives, however, could allow turning social status experiences into ethicality nudges. The perceived endowment through social status may drive social responsibility. Ethicality as a socially-appreciated, noble societal contribution offers the prospect of social status gains given the societal respect for altruism and pro-social acts. An Überethical filling of current legal gaps or outperforming legal regulations grant additional social status elevation opportunities. Building on prospect theory, two field observations of environmentally conscientious recycling behavior and sustainable energy consumption tested if social status losses are more likely to be answered with ethicality than social status gains. Social status losses are found as significant drivers of socially responsible environmental conscientiousness. Testing prospect theory for social status striving advances socio-economics and helps understanding the underlying mechanisms of social identity theories. Pegging social status to ethicality is an unprecedented approach to use social forces as a means for accomplishing positive societal change. Future studies may target at elucidating if ethicality in the wake of social status losses is more a cognitive, rational strategy or emotional compensation for feelings of unworthiness after social status drops.

Download the full paper, ‘Ethical Decision Making under Social Uncertainty,’ for free here.

Situationist Contributor Julia M. Puaschunder  is an Associate of the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Center for the Environment working on intergenerational equity constraints in the domains of environmental sustainability, overindebtedness and social welfare reform of an aging Western world population.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Rewards of Cooperation
• The Situationist Overwhelmed with Visitors, Return Later if Necessary
• The Situation of the Self
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Phil Zimbardo at HLS “We Need Heroes”
• The Situation of Conformity
• The Situation of Good Habits
• John Bargh on Situational Behavioral Influences
• The Situation of Heroism
• Group Influence
• The Psychological Situation of Climate Change
• The Situation of Being Green
• The Situation of Cooperation
• Value-Affirmation, and the Situation of Climate Change Beliefs
• The Situation of Climate Change
• The Situational Effect of Groups
• The Interior Situation of Intergenerational Poverty
• Jeffrey Sachs on the Situation of Global Poverty
• Peer Effects – Abstract
• History of Groupthink
• The Situation of Group Membership
• The Situation of Political Yard Signage

The Good, the Bad, and the Baby

►

From 60 Minutes:

The above video is from “The Baby Lab” which aired on Nov. 18, 2012.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Neuro-Situation of Altruism
• Selfishness versus Altruism
• The Situation of Altruism
• The Situation of Altruism – Part 2
• The Situation of “Who We Help”
• The Situation of Altruism
• Psychology of Inequality
• The Interior Situational Reaction to Inequality
• The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity
• The Financial Situation of Empathy
• Racial bias clouds ability to feel others’ pain
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• It’s Hard to Step into Someone Else’s Shoes
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy

The Rewards of Cooperation

From the Harvard Gazette:

It turns out nice guys can finish first, and David Rand has the evidence to show it.

Rand, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Department of Psychology and a lecturer in human evolutionary biology, is the lead author of a new paper, which found that dynamic, complex social networks encourage their members to be friendlier and more cooperative, with the possible payoff coming in an expanded social sphere, while selfish behavior can lead to an individual being shunned from the group and left — literally — on his or her own.

As described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the research is among the first studies to examine social interaction as a fluid, ever-changing process. Previous studies of complex social networks largely used static snapshots of groups to examine how members were or were not connected. This new approach, Rand said, is the closest scientists have yet come to describing the way the planet’s 7 billion inhabitants interact daily.

“This model is closer to real life; thus the results are closer to real life,” Rand said. “What this is showing is that a key aspect of real-world social networks is the dynamic component. The point of this paper is to say that those networks are always shifting, and they’re not shifting in random ways.

“There are many nasty things that happen between people, but for the most part we are fantastically cooperative,” Rand said. “We do an amazing job of having thousands or even millions of people living in very close quarters in cities all over the world. In a functioning society, things like trade, friendship, even democracy itself require high levels of cooperation, and when everyone does it, you get good collective outcomes.”

“Cooperation is a fascinating topic,” said Sociology Professor and Pforzheimer House Master Nicholas Christakis. “We see cooperation everywhere in the biological and sociological worlds, but it’s actually very hard to explain. Why do creatures, including ourselves, cooperate?

“What our paper shows is that there is a deep relationship between cooperation and social networks. In particular, we found that if you allow people to rewire their social networks, cooperation persists in the population. I believe this paper is the first to show, empirically, how that relationship works. As humans, we do two unique things: We re-shape the social world around us, and in so doing, we create a better place for ourselves by being nice to each other.”

To demonstrate how groups reach those good collective outcomes, the scientists, including Sam Arbesman, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, recruited nearly 800 volunteers, who, in groups of between 20 and 30, took part in the study by playing a simple game.

At the outset, Rand said, each player begins with an equal number of points, and is randomly connected with one or more players. As the game progresses, players have the opportunity to be either generous, and pay to give points to each player they are connected with, or be selfish, and do nothing. Following each round, some players are randomly given the opportunity to update their connections, based on whether other players have been generous or selfish.

The findings, Rand said, showed that players re-wired their social networks in intriguing ways that helped both themselves and the group they were in.  They were more willing to make new connections or maintain existing connections with those who acted generously, and break connections with those who behaved selfishly.

“Because people have control over who they are interacting with, people are more likely to form connections with people who are cooperative, and much more likely to break those links with people who are not,” Rand said. “Basically, what it boils down to is that you’d better be a nice guy, or else you’re going to get cut off.”

Intriguingly, the study also uncovered a correction mechanism inherent to social groups. Those who were initially noncooperative, Rand said, were found to be twice as likely to become cooperative after being shunned, suggesting that being cut off from the group acts as a sort of internal discipline, ensuring that cooperation remains high within a social network.

“As a result, when you have a network that’s dynamic, you see stable, high levels of cooperation, whereas in a static network you see a steady breakdown of cooperation,” Rand said.

Read the rest of the article here.

• Related Situationist posts:
• The Situation of Cooperation
• The Situation of Kindness
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy
• Monkey Fairness
• Merit and Fairness

Image from Flickr.

Merit and Fairness

From Harvard Gazette:

Most parents like to believe that their children are more intelligent and insightful than the average person realizes. When it comes to concepts of fairness, they might be right, according to Harvard researchers.

A new study, conducted by Patricia Kanngiesser, a visiting graduate student from the University of Bristol, U.K., together with Felix Warneken, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard, suggests that children may have a far more advanced concept of fairness than previously thought. The study, described in a paper recently published in PLoS ONE, shows that children as young as 3 consider merit — a key part of more-advanced ideas of fairness — when distributing resources. Earlier studies had suggested that the use of merit didn’t emerge until a few years later.

“What this finding demonstrates, I think, is that merit seems to be an essential part of the earliest forms of fairness that children display,” Warneken said. “That challenges the idea that young children only have a very egocentric notion that everything should go to them, and shows that from a very early age they are sensitive to the work contributions partners make. Going forward, I think we can begin to rule out some of the earlier theories about merit — that it required a great deal of socialization or sophisticated cognitive skills to emerge.”

Importantly, the study shows that the notion of merit isn’t simply an abstract concept that children endorse, but one that they actually put into practice, even at a cost.

“It’s one thing to say that those who work harder should get more,” Warneken said. “But to be in that situation yourself and have to give something up to make it so, that’s something different. What we have shown is that very young children are not only sensitive to that concept, but that it guides their behavior.”

In the case of this new study, that behavior involved handing out stickers.

In the lab, children played what researchers called the “fishing game” alongside a puppet, using poles with hooks to lift containers filled with coins from a bucket. In some instances, Warneken said, the child collected more coins, in others the puppet did. Following each game, the child was given six stickers and was asked to decide how many to give to the puppet, and how many to keep.

To his surprise, Warneken said, the results showed that children used merit to decide how to distribute the stickers. The children always kept more stickers when they did more “work,” or collected more coins. However, if the puppet collected more, about a quarter of the children gave the puppet more stickers, while most others distributed them evenly.

Those findings run counter to earlier studies, which suggested that children’s concept of fairness evolves over time, with the idea of merit — that a person should be rewarded based on how much work he or she does — appearing by around age 7 or 8.

“The traditional model in psychology has been that children go through different stages of fairness,” Warneken said. “Initially, they are selfish. By a few years old, they develop the idea of equality, that we should each get half, regardless of [whether] you worked harder than I did, or you need more resources than I do. Finally, somewhere around school age, they develop the idea of equity or merit.”

The problem, Warneken said, is that the studies undergirding the traditional model were flawed.

Most relied on a similar structure — researchers would read clues to how children thought about cooperation by gauging their reaction to different stories. Such experiments, however, relied on increasingly complex stories to understand whether children understood concepts like merit, and most only tested what children thought about fairness.

“We thought that approach was too complex,” Warneken said. “We were more interested in what children actually do. We can’t say where it comes from, but I think we can conclude that for 3- to 5-year-old children, they are already paying attention to this principle.”

Related Situationist posts:

• Kristina Olson on the Psychology of Inequality
• The Situation of Inequality
• Psychology of Inequality
• Laura Kubzansky on Stress and Resilience
• Ichiro Kawachi on Income Inequality and Population Health
• Malcolm Gladwell on the Situation of Equality Discourse
• John Palfrey’s PLMS Conference Reflections
• SALMS Liveblogs PLMS Conference
• Harvard Law Record on Tomorrow’s PLMS Conference
• Fifth PLMS Conference Agenda
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Perceptions of Income Distribution and Preferences for Redistribution,
• Even monkeys know when they’re being treated unfairly
• A Discussion about (In)Equality
• The Interior Situational Reaction to Inequality
• The Young and the Lucky

Kathleen Vohs on Money’s Situational Effects

From Stanford Business:

Money changes people’s motivations — increasing their sense of self sufficiency and even making them keep a greater physical distance from others. After focusing on money, individuals work longer before asking for help, are less helpful to others, and prefer to play and work alone. Kathleen D. Vohs presented at the “Small Steps, Big Leaps: The Science of Getting People to Do the Right Thing” research briefing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, co-sponsored by the Center for Social Innovation.

Related Situationist posts:

• Materialism, Consumerism, and Happiness
• The Situation of Money-Based Happiness
• Adult Well Being and Social Connection
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy
• On Money and Motivation
• The Situation of High Marginal Income Tax Rates and Motivation
• Money and the Situation of Happiness
• The Situation of Money and Happiness
• Receiving by Giving
  
• Something to Smile About
• Resisting Materialism
• Redirect
• Money Priming
• Body Image and Materialism
• Law, Competition, Self-Interest
• The Situation of Being Green
• The Situation of Objectification
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Shocking for Money

Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Religious Beliefs

From TED:

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative answer.

Jonathan Haidt studies how — and why — we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and open-minded.

A small sample of related Situationist posts:

• Jonathan Haidt on the Situation of Moral Reasoning
• Jonathan Haidt Changes His Situation
• The Situation of Morality
• Jonathan Haidt – 5 Moral Values Behind Political Choices
• Haidt on “The Righteous Mind”
• The Interior Situation of Belief in God
• The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity
• God’s Situational Effects
• Atheism-ism
• The Fundamental(ist) Attribution Error
• With God on Our Side . . .
• The Situation of Political and Religious Beliefs?
• The Stressful Situation of Religious Zealotry
• Holier Than Thou
• Think Progress or Die
  
• The Situation of Faith in God or Science
• Group Influence
• 25 Mil­lion Years of Us vs. Them
• The Situational Effect of Groups
• Racism Meets Groupism and Teamism
• ‘Us’ and ‘Them‘
• Four Failures of Deliberating Groups - Abstract
• Team-Interested Decision Making
• Some (Interior) Situational Sources War – Part I
• March Madness
• The ‘Turban Effect’,”
• Terror, Intergroup Violence, and the Law

The Situation of Money-Based Happiness

An excerpt from a recent, terrific New York Times piece by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton:

The notion that money can’t buy happiness has been around a long time — even before yoga came into vogue. But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty.

The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis — but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark.

Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy? One reason is that our ideas about the relationship between money and happiness are misguided. In research we conducted with a national sample of Americans, people thought that their life satisfaction would double if they made $55,000 instead of $25,000: more than twice as much money, twice as much happiness. But our data showed that people who earned $55,000 were just 9 percent more satisfied than those making $25,000. Nine percent beats zero percent, but it’s still kind of a letdown when you were expecting a 100 percent return.

Interestingly, and usefully, it turns out that what we do with our money plays a far more important role than how much money we make. Imagine three people each win $1 million in the lottery. Suppose one person attempts to buy every single thing he has ever wanted; one puts it all in the bank and uses the money only sparingly, for special occasions; and one gives it all to charity. At the end of the year, they all would report an additional $1 million of income. Many of us would follow the first person’s strategy, but the latter two winners are likely to get the bigger happiness bang for their buck.

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

Read the entire article, including their discussion of value of “underindulgence.”

Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending (Simon & Schuster), co-authored by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, is due out in the spring of 2013!

Pre-order it on Amazon here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Adult Well Being and Social Connection
• Dan Gilbert on the Situation of Happy
• On Money and Motivation
• The Situation of High Marginal Income Tax Rates and Motivation
• Money and the Situation of Happiness
• The Situation of Money and Happiness
• Receiving by Giving
  
• Something to Smile About
• Resisting Materialism
• Redirect
• Money Priming
• Body Image and Materialism
• Law, Competition, Self-Interest
• The Situation of Being Green
• The Situation of Objectification
• The Situational Effects of Wealth and Status
• Shocking for Money

The Neuro-Situation of Altruism

Situationist friend David Berreby has a post this week on a recent study suggesting a possible link between the brain and altruistic behavior. Here’s how it starts:

In pursuit of the biological basis of morality, researchers are interested in an area of the brain at the boundary of the right temporal lobe and the right parietal lobe (very roughly, it’s located maybe 2 inches above the midpoint of a line between your right eyebrow and your right ear, not that I recommend digging around for it). This right temporoparietal junction has been linked in various ways to moral judgments about the self and others. Now this paper, out today in the journal Neuron, supplies some striking new evidence for this area’s importance. In lab experiments, people with more brain cells in this region were more altruistic than people with fewer.

Yosuke Morishima and his co-authors ran a functional MRI scan of their volunteers at the University of Zurich as they allocated a sum of money between themselves and an anonymous second person. (By the way, “Yosuke,” for an altruism researcher, is an aptonym. It’s a name that means “to give help” or “great support.”) Some of the participants were quite selfish, while others were much more altruistic, giving up a meaningful amount of cash for another person whom they did not know. And it turned out the volunteer’s degree of altruism correlated with the amount of gray matter they possessed at the right temporoparietal junction (“gray matter” consists of neurons (the cells whose activity makes brains brains) as well as the glial cells that support them and their blood supply).

Read the entire post here.

Related Situationist  posts:

• Selfishness versus Altruism
• The Situation of Altruism
• The Situation of Altruism – Part 2
• The Situation of “Who We Help”
• The Situation of Altruism
• Psychology of Inequality
• The Interior Situational Reaction to Inequality
• The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity
• The Financial Situation of Empathy
• Racial bias clouds ability to feel others’ pain
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• It’s Hard to Step into Someone Else’s Shoes
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy

Image from Flickr.

The Situation of “Who We Help”

Michaela Huber, Leaf  Van Boven, Peter McGraw, and Laura Johnson-Graham recently posted their intriguing article “Whom to Help? Immediacy Bias in Judgments and Decisions About Humanitarian Aid” (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 115, pp. 283-293, 2011) on SSRN.

People exhibit an immediacy bias when making judgments and decisions about humanitarian aid, perceiving as more deserving and donating disproportionately to humanitarian crises that happen to arouse immediate emotion. The immediacy bias produced different serial position effects, contingent on decision timing (Experiment 1). When making allocation decisions directly after viewing to four emotionally evocative films about four different humanitarian crises, participants donated disproportionately more to the final, immediate crisis, in contrast, when making donation decisions sequentially, after viewing each of the four crises, participants donated disproportionately to the immediate crisis. The immediacy bias was associated with “scope neglect.” causing people to take action against relatively less deadly crises (Experiments 2 and 3). The immediacy bias emerged even when participants were warned about emotional manipulation (Experiment 3). The immediacy bias diminished over time, as immediate emotions presumably subsided (Experiment 2). Implications for charitable giving, serial position effects, and the influence of emotion on choice are discussed.

Download the article for free here.

Related Situationist posts:

• Psychic Numbing
• Too Many To Care
• Numbed By Numbers
• Heart, Brain, or Wallet…How Do You Vote?
• An Apathy Epidemic
• The Situation of Altruism
• Psychology of Inequality
• The Interior Situational Reaction to Inequality
• The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity
• The Financial Situation of Empathy
• Can Meditation Make Us More Compassionate?
• God’s Situational Effects
• Do Doctors Lack Empathy?
• Racial bias clouds ability to feel others’ pain
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• It’s Hard to Step into Someone Else’s Shoes
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy

The Religious Situation of Compassion and Generosity

From UC Berkeley:

“Love thy neighbor” is preached from many a pulpit. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that the highly religious are less motivated by compassion when helping a stranger than are atheists, agnostics and less religious people.

In three experiments, social scientists found that compassion consistently drove less religious people to be more generous. For highly religious people, however, compassion was largely unrelated to how generous they were, according to the findings which are published in the most recent online issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The results challenge a widespread assumption that acts of generosity and charity are largely driven by feelings of empathy and compassion, researchers said. In the study, the link between compassion and generosity was found to be stronger for those who identified as being non-religious or less religious.

“Overall, we find that for less religious people, the strength of their emotional connection to another person is critical to whether they will help that person or not,” said UC Berkeley social psychologist Robb Willer, a co-author of the study. “The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion, and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.”

Compassion is defined in the study as an emotion felt when people see the suffering of others which then motivates them to help, often at a personal risk or cost.

While the study examined the link between religion, compassion and generosity, it did not directly examine the reasons for why highly religious people are less compelled by compassion to help others. However, researchers hypothesize that deeply religious people may be more strongly guided by a sense of moral obligation than their more non-religious counterparts.

“We hypothesized that religion would change how compassion impacts generous behavior,” said study lead author Laura Saslow, who conducted the research as a doctoral student at UC Berkeley.

Saslow, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Francisco, said she was inspired to examine this question after an altruistic, nonreligious friend lamented that he had only donated to earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti after watching an emotionally stirring video of a woman being saved from the rubble, not because of a logical understanding that help was needed.

“I was interested to find that this experience – an atheist being strongly influenced by his emotions to show generosity to strangers – was replicated in three large, systematic studies,” Saslow said.

In the first experiment, researchers analyzed data from a 2004 national survey of more than 1,300 American adults. Those who agreed with such statements as “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them” were also more inclined to show generosity in random acts of kindness, such as loaning out belongings and offering a seat on a crowded bus or train, researchers found.

When they looked into how much compassion motivated participants to be charitable in such ways as giving money or food to a homeless person, non-believers and those who rated low in religiosity came out ahead: “These findings indicate that although compassion is associated with pro-sociality among both less religious and more religious individuals, this relationship is particularly robust for less religious individuals,” the study found.

In the second experiment, 101 American adults watched one of two brief videos, a neutral video or a heartrending one, which showed portraits of children afflicted by poverty. Next, they were each given 10 “lab dollars” and directed to give any amount of that money to a stranger. The least religious participants appeared to be motivated by the emotionally charged video to give more of their money to a stranger.

“The compassion-inducing video had a big effect on their generosity,” Willer said. “But it did not significantly change the generosity of more religious participants.”

In the final experiment, more than 200 college students were asked to report how compassionate they felt at that moment. They then played “economic trust games” in which they were given money to share – or not – with a stranger. In one round, they were told that another person playing the game had given a portion of their money to them, and that they were free to reward them by giving back some of the money, which had since doubled in amount.

Those who scored low on the religiosity scale, and high on momentary compassion, were more inclined to share their winnings with strangers than other participants in the study.

“Overall, this research suggests that although less religious people tend to be less trusted in the U.S., when feeling compassionate, they may actually be more inclined to help their fellow citizens than more religious people,” Willer said.

More.

Related Situationist posts:

• The Financial Situation of Empathy
• Can Meditation Make Us More Compassionate?
• God’s Situational Effects
• Do Doctors Lack Empathy?
• Racial bias clouds ability to feel others’ pain
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• The Interior Situation of Complex Human Feelings
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• It’s Hard to Step into Someone Else’s Shoes
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy
• Atheism-ism
• The Fundamental(ist) Attribution Error
• With God on Our Side . . .
• The Situation of Political and Religious Beliefs?
• Seeing Faces,
• Self-Fulfilling Doomsday Prophecies
• The Stressful Situation of Religious Zealotry
• Holier Than Thou,
• Think Progress or Die
  
• The Situation of Faith in God or Science,.

Some Upsides to Terror Management

From Science Daily:

Past research suggests that thinking about death is destructive and dangerous, fueling everything from prejudice and greed to violence. Such studies related to terror management theory (TMT), which posits that we uphold certain cultural beliefs to manage our feelings of mortality, have rarely explored the potential benefits of death awareness.

“This tendency for TMT research to primarily deal with negative attitudes and harmful behaviors has become so deeply entrenched in our field that some have recently suggested that death awareness is simply a bleak force of social destruction,” says Kenneth Vail of the University of Missouri, lead author of the new study in the online edition of Personality and Social Psychology Review this month. “There has been very little integrative understanding of how subtle, day-to-day, death awareness might be capable of motivating attitudes and behaviors that can minimize harm to oneself and others, and can promote well-being.”

In constructing a new model for how we think about our own mortality, Vail and colleagues performed an extensive review of recent studies on the topic. They found numerous examples of experiments both in the lab and field that suggest a positive side to natural reminders about mortality.

For example, Vail points to a study by Matthew Gailliot and colleagues in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2008 that tested how just being physically near a cemetery affects how willing people are to help a stranger. “Researchers hypothesized that if the cultural value of helping was made important to people, then the heightened awareness of death would motivate an increase in helping behaviors,” Vail says.

The researchers observed people who were either passing through a cemetery or were one block away, out of sight of the cemetery. Actors at each location talked near the participants about either the value of helping others or a control topic, and then some moments later, another actor dropped her notebook. The researchers then tested in each condition how many people helped the stranger.

“When the value of helping was made salient, the number of participants who helped the second confederate with her notebook was 40% greater at the cemetery than a block away from the cemetery,” Vail says. “Other field experiments and tightly controlled laboratory experiments have replicated these and similar findings, showing that the awareness of death can motivate increased expressions of tolerance, egalitarianism, compassion, empathy, and pacifism.”

For example, a 2010 study by Immo Fritsche of the University of Leipzig and co-authors revealed how increased death awareness can motivate sustainable behaviors when pro-environmental norms are made salient. And a study by Zachary Rothschild of the University of Kansas and co-workers in 2009 showed how an increased awareness of death can motivate American and Iranian religious fundamentalists to display peaceful compassion toward members of other groups when religious texts make such values more important.

Thinking about death can also promote better health. Recent studies have shown that when reminded of death people may opt for better health choices, such as using more sunscreen, smoking less, or increasing levels of exercise. A 2011 study by D.P. Cooper and co-authors found that death reminders increased intentions to perform breast self-exams when women were exposed to information that linked the behavior to self-empowerment.

One major implication of this body of work, Vail says, is that we should “turn attention and research efforts toward better understanding of how the motivations triggered by death awareness can actually improve people’s lives, rather than how it can cause malady and social strife.” Write the authors: “The dance with death can be a delicate but potentially elegant stride toward living the good life.”

Related Situationist posts:

• Sheldon Solomon on Ernest Becker and Terror Management
• Sheldon Solomon (Briefly) on Terror Management
• Edward P. Schwartz at Harvard Law Tomorrow (Tuesday)
• Trampling People While Whistling Rights: Normative Visions, Judicial Realities in Times of Terror
• The Situation of Attiudes about Progress
• Think Progress or Die
• Terror Management Theory Goes Mainstream 
• The Situation of Ideology – Part II

Humility and Helpfulness

From the University of Maine Press Office:

Helping one another in times of need is a cornerstone of quality human relationships, according to a University of Maine psychology researcher who has determined that humility trumps arrogance when it comes to offering assistance.

In a three-part research project involving 310 students at Baylor University in Texas, UMaine psychology lecturer Jordan LaBouff and colleagues found that people determined to be humble were more willing to donate time and resources to a hypothetical student in need. The results held true even when researchers controlled the study for potential influencers like empathy, agreeableness and other personality traits.

“The finding is particularly surprising since nearly 30 years of research on helping have demonstrated that the situation, not the person, tends to predict whether someone in need will receive help,” says LaBouff, who also is a UMaine Honors College preceptor.

“This research builds upon a growing body of evidence that humility is an important trait that results in a variety of pro-social and positive outcomes,” says LaBouff, the lead author of an article on the study with Baylor researchers Wade Rowatt, Megan Johnson and Jo-Ann Tsang in Texas. “It also suggests that if we can encourage humility in our communities, people may be more helpful to those in need.”

The researchers believe the study is one of the first laboratory studies to document a correlation between a personality dimension like humility or narcissism with willingness to help others. Humility could be a personality trait that is linked with altruistically motivated acts of helping, according to LaBouff.

Researchers reached their conclusions by measuring participant humility through self-reporting, or answering questions about their perceived sense of humility, in addition to gauging reaction time on tasks designed to measure implicit humility, LaBouff says. Participants were then introduced to a fictitious classmate who had suffered a personal tragedy and was requesting help to overcome the tragedy with time and resources from each participant.

“Participants who were more humble were most likely to help their peers, even when social pressure to do so was lowest,” says LaBouff. “That is, humble people were most likely to help even when they had the fewest external pressures to do so.”

The study results are reported in the January 2012 issue of The Journal of Positive Psychology.

More.

Related Situationist post:

• Holier Than Thou
• Students’ Situations Leave Them Less Empathetic (Situationist)
• Racial bias clouds ability to feel others’ pain
• The Neuro-Situation of Violence and Empathy
• The Situation of Morality and Empathy
• The Situation of Caring
• New Study Looks at the Roots of Empathy