Science of the Greater Good

New and improved Greater Good blog!

2007-10-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

The UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center has re-launched its website and added a new and improved blog--this one is now obsolete. Thanks so much for visiting, and we'll see you at our new cyber-home: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/index.html

Is Violence on the Decline?

2007-10-04T21:56:00.000-07:00

Last March, noted psychologist Steven Pinker delivered a talk in which he argued that violence is, and for long has been, declining in human societies. Presenting archaeological, ethnographic, and historical evidence that the "ancestors [of modern humans] were far more violent" than their descendants, Pinker vigorously concluded that "today we are living in one of the most peaceful times in our species' existence."

He offered multiple hypotheses as to how such a situation might have arisen. Notably, Pinker presents the argument set forth by philosopher Peter Singer in his book The Expanding Circle that perhaps, evolution itself has

"bequeath[ed] humans with a sense of empathy - an ability to treat other people's interests as comparable to one's own. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family. People outside that circle were treated as subhuman and can be exploited with impunity. But over history the circle has expanded . . . from village to the clan to the tribe to the nation to other races to other sexes and . . . other species."

If this line of argument were validated and if the process it describes would continue, surely we might be led to believe that world is a much better place than it was just a couple of centuries ago. Although that observation is probably true, Pinker may be over-stating the case - although severe physical punishment in Medieval Europe could often result from crimes that would in modern times merit no more than an infraction (as Pinker points out,) is it truly the case that such violence was characteristic of day-to-day life in Medieval Europe for the majority of its population? And what about other cultures? Has violence declined in non-Western societies? Pinker does not offer an explicit answer to that question in this talk.

Nevertheless, Pinker is entirely correct in encouraging us to focus not only on what we are "doing wrong but also on what we are doing right." In spite of the seemingly endless series of misfortunes in this world, much is right and for us to ignore what is right is undoubtedly wrong.

Arguing from the Heart

2007-10-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

According to some new research, it seems that the way married couples argue is more important than the content of those arguments. In today’s New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope reports on a few studies that have found a link between the way spouses argue and their risk for coronary heart disease (CHD) and other illnesses.

Parker-Pope cites a recent study led by Elaine D. Eaker, an epidemiologist in Maryland, who surveyed nearly 4,000 men and women about how they act when they argue with their spouse. Did they vent their feelings or keep them bottled up (known as self-silencing)? Thirty-two percent of the men reported bottling up their feelings in a fight, while only 23 percent of women reported the same.

Then Eaker and her colleagues monitored the study participants for the next ten years. They found that women who self-silenced were four times as likely to die during that period than their more verbal counterparts. Keeping quiet for men, however, showed no apparent connection to their health.

Parker-Pope also mentions a similar study conducted by Timothy W. Smith and his colleagues at the University of Utah. In that study, the researchers videotaped married couples’ interactions in order to see how the emotional tone of their discussions was associated with their risk of coronary heart disease. After being given stressful topics to discuss, such as finances, the couples’ remarks were coded according to how warm or hostile they were. The results showed that among both men and women, arguing style proved to be a strong predictor of their risk for heart disease—even more than cholesterol levels or smoking.

Even more interesting is the way different arguing styles affected men and women differently. Parker-Pope explains:

The level of warmth or hostility had no effect on a man’s heart health. For a man, heart risk increased if disagreements with his wife involved a battle for control. And it didn’t matter whether he or his wife was the one making the controlling comments. An example of a controlling argument style showed up in one video of a man arguing with his wife about money. “You really should just listen to me on this,” he told her.

Also notable is that both studies found that responses about personal satisfaction with the marriage did not correlate with any health risks. So that makes me wonder: Can these unhealthy habits be changed if spouses don’t even recognize that something’s wrong?

The Happiness Gap

2007-09-27T17:00:00.000-07:00

A column by David Leonhardt in yesterday's New York Times reports on two new studies that have reached the same finding: Men today say they're happier than women do. This is the opposite of what research found in the 1970s.

Drawing on studies by Alan Krueger at Princeton University and Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers at the University of Pennsylvania, Leonhardt offers this explanation for the gender role reversal:

Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more. Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

He notes that women aren't actually working more than they did 30 or 40 years ago; they're doing different kinds of work. They're spending more time on paid work, yet they still have most of the same responsibilities they did a generation ago: cooking, cleaning, caring for their kids and (more and more)
their parents. As Leonhardt writes,

What has changed — and what seems to be the most likely explanation for the happiness trends — is that women now have a much longer to-do list than they once did (including helping their aging parents). They can’t possibly get it all done, and many end up feeling as if they are somehow falling short. ...
[These findings] show just how incomplete the gender revolution has been. Although women have flooded into the work force, American society hasn't fully come to grips with the change. The United States still doesn't have universal preschool, and, in contrast to other industrialized countries, there is no guaranteed paid leave for new parents.

Historian Stephanie Coontz makes a very similar argument in her essay in the new issue of Greater Good, which features a series of essays on "The 21st Century Family." Subscribers have received this issue and it's currently on newsstands; some articles from it will be on our website soon. You can also receive a no-risk sample copy when you start a subscription to Greater Good here.

(Same-sex) marriage and families

2007-09-26T16:44:00.000-07:00

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders had made a point in his election campaign that he would veto any City Council resolutions backing a constitutional challenge to California's 2000 voter initiative making marriage possible only between a man and a woman. The Republican ex-cop had long said he believed civil unions were sufficient for gays, but when the resolution came to his desk, he recently had a change of heart that reflects his concerns, not only for his own family members and staff who are gay or lesbian, but also about the state of marriage in the U.S. of A.

Click here for a link to the YouTube video.

Moral Intuition

2007-09-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reported yesterday on some of Jonathan Haidt's work on the evolutionary roots of human morality. Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, wrote about some of his research in the Spring/Summer 2005 issue of Greater Good.

The Times piece discusses Haidt's interest in "the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding--when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why."

Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong.

In exploring our moral intuitions, Haidt has identified five components of morality that are common to most cultures. Two--preventing harm to others and reciprocity/fairness--concern treatment of individuals. The other three promote behaviors geared toward strengthening one's group: loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity. The article goes on to explain the political dimension of some of the research Haidt has conducted with a grad student, Jesse Graham:

They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity. Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective
of individuals.

Haidt makes some pretty provocative claims about the relationship between moral intuitions and political beliefs. I'd be curious to see how he gauged people's opinions of these different moral systems. It seems to me there's a chance that liberals might actually "attach greater weight to moral systems protective of individuals," and assign less importance to group interests like respect for authority, simply because they self-identify as liberals. That is, as liberals, they know they're supposed to demonstrate a preference for individual rights and have a knee-jerk reaction against words or concepts (like "loyalty" and "authority" ) that are associated with conservatives, especially with the current administration). Real-world political allegiences might bias their responses and misrepresent these people's true moral beliefs and behaviors.

Either way, the Times piece, and Haidt's website, are worth checking out. For more on the evolutionary basis of our moral judgments, check out the work of Joshua Greene at Harvard, which I blogged about a few months back.

Winning and Losing

2007-09-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

Cnn.com's story on Jack Whittaker, 2002 Powerball jackpot winner, is another example of the truism that "money doesn't buy happiness." Described as "bad luck", Whittaker recounts his post-jackpot days to the AP, highlighting how his wife left him, his 17-year-old granddaughter died battling a drug addiction, and over 400 legal actions have been taken against him since he won big.

Whittaker was relatively affluent before even winning the lottery. He describes his and his family's life as "lavish", living off his prospering $17-million pipeline company. What seems to stand out in Whittaker's story, however, is the way his interactions with others have changed.

"I don't have any friends," says the multi-millionaire. "Every friend that I've had, practically, has wanted to borrow money or something and of course, once they borrow money from you, you can't be friends anymore." There was also mention on how cautious he had to be when meeting women and straying from those interested in his wallet, not him.

So Whittaker's case is unique in the sense that he seemingly had everything before striking it rich(er). According to past research, money seems to buy happiness when the individual is getting the financial boost out of poverty. For others, there seems to be no effect. Whittaker didn't need any more money for material things; his winnings instead resulted in a loss of social capital. From this particular story, we are limited to say how much of Whittaker's unfortunate outcomes can be attributed to him, but the story is telling of how impactful others can become in reacting to large sums of money. Where does one strike the balance between accumulating social versus financial capital?

Imaginary Friends

2007-09-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

Marjorie Taylor is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and an expert on imaginary friends. She read my August 27 post at the blog Daddy Dialectic on my son's imaginary characters, in which I describe how he adopts roles that range from Frank Lloyd Wright to Spider-Man to the Wicked Witch of the West.

"Mostly what your son is doing is not having an imaginary friend," she told me in an interview. "It’s having a pretend identity. There’s usually a gender difference there. Boys and girls are similar in that they create imaginary characters, but there is a gender difference in what they tend to do with those characters. So, the little boys tend to put on superhero capes and run around. They take on the characteristics of the character and act it out. Whereas little girls, at least during the preschool period, are more likely to invent this other person that they’re interacting with. By the time they get to be about seven or eight, though, little boys are just as likely as little girls to have an imaginary friend rather than a pretend identity."

Taylor's research into imagination and pretend play is fascinating--and I found that it illuminated quite a lot about my son's behavior and propensities. Liko--who has imaginary friends as well as pretend identities--is a very sociable, verbal, empathic little boy who is prone to flights of elaborate fantasy. (Incidentally, in the photo above, Liko is pretending to be a fireman in a real-life fire engine.) In her research, Taylor has found a strong correlation between those qualities and the prevalence of imaginary companions.

"Children who have imaginary friends are better able to take the perspective of another person," she said. "We’ve been able to show that in our work." But she cautions us against believing that one causes the other: researchers still don't know if empathic instincts cause kids to make up imaginary friends or if imaginary friends help kids to learn to take another person's perspective.

Whatever triggers these qualities, it appears early in life. "Children who go on to develop imaginary friends really show an interest in fantasy from a very early age," she told me. "So even before the first year, they tend to be the kids who really like puppets and stuffed animals, rather than building blocks or things that are more reality-oriented. Those are the kids who go on at [a later age] to have imaginary friends."

One of the interesting implications of the gender difference Taylor found is that little boys appear to be more wrapped up in projecting themselves into roles of power, while girls from early on are developing characters outside themselves who demand attention and empathy. This plays to certain gender stereotypes, but her research also implies that boys and girls alike can develop empathy and caregiving behavior by developing their imaginations.

Once in place, it seems that imaginary friends can take on a life of their own, becoming characters with autonomous motivations and unique feelings. "Part of the fun of imaginary friends is that they don’t always think like you do," said Taylor. "In fact, it surprised us at first that with a lot of imaginary friends, there is a lot of arguing going on and a lot of negativity, even. An imaginary friend will be mean, hit you on the head, put yogurt in your hair, and so on."

Does this mean that imaginary friends ought to all be all locked up in imaginary jails? Taylor says no. "Like adults who think things through before they act, this gives children an opportunity to play it through before they encounter the situation [in real life]. If something is bothering you, you can control it or manipulate it in the world of pretending. That’s a way of developing emotional mastery. Pretend is something children have available to them, that is a coping mechanism they can use in their lives. And they don’t have a lot of other ones, really. They’re pretty helpless and small and have to depend on others, but they do have their imaginations, and they use them to cope."

Thus pretend play and imaginary characters are often a healthy sign of resilience and creativity. Taylor is routinely contacted by parents who are concerned about what the imaginary friends are doing, fearing that imaginary play might point to something wrong in real life. “We see lots of negativity and difficult stuff going on in the pretend play of kids who are healthy and doing just fine," says Taylor. "That can make parents uncomfortable."

But Taylor found that "children just like to think about being bad. Why not have an imaginary friend who is like that, to explore what it means to be bad? You have to think of it as exploring emotional space. There’s a lot to think through about behavior. Kids use pretend to try it on, they do [bad things] in their pretend play so that they have some control over it.”

One parent came to Taylor because her child’s imaginary friend was always sick. "The child didn’t want to leave home because she didn’t want to leave the imaginary friend because [the friend] was so sick," said Taylor. "We put our heads together and thought about how to work within the pretend play. So we had the mother invent a new imaginary friend who could stay home with the sick one. And then the child was totally happy to go! Children like it when parents pretend along. Some people say, 'Well, the imaginary friend is a private thing that [the child doesn’t] want to share.' But that’s just not true. Kids love it when adults participate in their pretend worlds."

Altruistic birds vs. altruistic humans

2007-08-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

Reports the Washington Post:

A just-published study of birds reports new insights into the evolution of altruistic behavior. It suggests that sometimes the greatest beneficiaries are neither those giving or receiving alms, but those whose main job is the care and feeding of the neediest members of the population.

It is believed that about 10 percent of bird species show "cooperative breeding" behavior, in which one or more mated pairs produce chicks, which are then fed not only by the parents but by other birds sharing their territory. The helpers are usually nonbreeding males from the female's broods of the previous year - the brothers of the hatchlings they are helping to feed...

To find out what motivates this behavior, a team at the University of Cambridge in England "looked at what happened before the baby birds hatched. They compared the eggs laid by females that had helpers with those laid by solo females":

They found that fairy-wrens with helpers produce eggs with less fat, protein and carbohydrate than eggs produced by females that do not have helpers. The hatchlings of those "lite" eggs are smaller than normal chicks, but their initial scrawniness is quickly overcome by the extra food brought by the nonbreeding helpers.

The one who benefits is the mother.

Cooperatively breeding females have a 1-in-5 chance of dying over the next year, compared with a 1-in-3 chance for females without helpers. This is presumably because they are slightly healthier and stronger, having expended less energy to produce their eggs and feed their young. Their longer life span, in turn, gives them a chance to leave more offspring behind, the ultimate measure of evolutionary success.

"The mothers are stealing child care from their current young and spending it on their future young," Kilner said.

What might this say about humans? Maybe nothing. It's simply another clue in solving the mystery of why altruism exists in nature and how cooperation emerges among members of a species.

However, there are parallels with human behavior. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has pointed out how cooperative child rearing has been essential at certain points in human history--for example, in hunter-gatherer societies--when fathers and adults besides the parents had to take a strong role in the care and feeding of young children. In an essay that will appear in the September issue of Greater Good, I speculate that cooperative child rearing (or alloparenting) is making a comeback in American cities, driven by the geographic and social isolation of new families, rough economic parity between men and women, and the hight cost of quality childcare.

The Way We Were vs. The Way We Are

2007-08-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

This photo depicts the J. Bates home in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the late 1800s. Note the size of the family and the size of the porch they share. Families of this period were large, both because extended family stayed together and because children were still an economic necessity: more of them meant more hands to work in farms and shopfloors. Fathers and sons often worked side by side, and so did mothers and daughters. The economic and domestic were not separate spheres; though in the process of being eclipsed by large-scale enterprise, at this time the home economy was still America's fundamental economic unit.

As a consequence, marriage was primarily a business decision--as it had been throughout the world for thousands of years. For the lower, middle, and upper classes, people had little choice about whom to marry. Once married, they could divorce only in special or extreme circumstances. Fathers were the undisputed heads and masters of households, by both law and custom. Marital rape and wife-beating were, in most cases, perfectly legal.

Another thing to note about the J. Bates family: it is monoracial and was almost certainly monocultural. Though interracial marriage was more common than we might suppose--see Randall Kennedy's 2003 Interracial Intimacies--it was still widely condemned and illegal in many states. Nineteenth century families had more in common with previous generations than they might have with families today, but society was changing. The family as an economic unit declined; as a consequence, love rose in importance. Young people began to feel that when love dissolved, so should the marriage. Between 1880 and 1890 the divorce rate soared 70 percent.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, people left farms and small towns for cities. Extended families fragmented and the nuclear family emerged as the dominant family form. Children became more of an economic liability than an asset; as a result, sentimental attachment to them intensified. As the century wore on, child labor was abolished and universal schooling was made mandatory. Government programs like the GI Bill educated millions of American men and increased their social mobility.

By the middle of the century, postwar prosperity made the male breadwinner and female homemaker family possible. Most men worked in offices and factories far from home; they did not take care of children. The vast majority of mothers did not work and raised kids far from from extended family. Thus mothers were isolated and many children grew up without fathers, grandparents, aunts, or uncles as stable, regular presences. By the late 1950s, middle-class women--and their children--started to rebel against isolated, retricted lives. "It took more than 150 years to establish the love-based, male breadwinner marriage," writes family historian Stephanie Coontz. "It took less than 25 years to dismantle it."

At the beginning of the 21st century, families are egalitarian, diverse, isolated, and voluntary. Where once there was no choice at all, today we have too many choices. Take a look at this 2004 photo of Brian Brantner and Matt Fuller holding their 2-month-old adopted daughter, Audrey, in San Francisco. Their family could not have co-existed with the J. Bates family in 19th century Minnesota. The gay family is, in fact, something totally new under the sun, blossoming side by side with stepfamilies, female breadwinner/male homemaker families, multiracial families, and so on. Today, only 7 percent of families fit the 1950s mold of breadwinning father and homemaking mother.

At the same time, the American economy is far less stable and social mobility has declined dramatically; class barriers are much more rigid than they are anywhere else in the developed world. This means that family is more important than ever in determining a child's chances in life. Poor children are falling behind richer counterparts, a process that starts before they even enter school. Educated parents are investing large amounts of time and money in their small number of offspring; both husbands and wives are spending more time with kids and at work, and less time with each other or in the community, which puts tremendous strain on love-based marriages.

Surveying decades of research, the sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen writes, "What is now becoming clear is that the seeds of inequality are sown prior to school age on a host of crucial attributes such as health, cognitive and noncognitive abilities, motivation to learn, and, more generally, school preparedness." As marriages become more egalitarian, society becomes less so. We should celebrate the gains made in women's economic empowerment and male participation in domestic labor. At the same time, we should do what we can to resist rising inequality and social under-development.

Most of the photos above illustrate an article by Stephanie Coontz that will appear in the September issue of Greater Good magazine, which will focus on the relationship between the diversification of family types and the well-being of parents and children. I'm happy to provide a free copy to any blogger who promises to write about the issue. Send me an email at jeremyadamsmith (at) mac.com.

Divorce and Reverse Traditional Families

2007-07-26T15:53:00.000-07:00

Stop the presses: Breadwinning moms are divorcing their stay-at- home husbands!

Not really--there's absolutely no evidence that this is happening-- but you wouldn't know it from a recent wave of essays, articles, and blog entries by and about moms who are disappointed with their marriages to caregiving spouses.

Two of the most recent examples: an instantly notorious blog entry by career coach Penelope Trunk on why her stay-at-home husband doesn't love her anymore and an article in the UK Daily Mail on a "househusband backlash" trend that the reporter seems to have invented.

Reports the Daily Mail: "Divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd-Platt says that in her experience, the decision to allow the wife to be the main wage earner will have a detrimental effect on as many as half of these relationships, and that divorce statistics in these cases have risen by at least five percent in the past two years."

I can't attest to Ms. Lloyd-Platt's experience, but I do know that the vast majority of all marriages are troubled for the first three years after a baby is born--the Gottman Institute puts the number at 67 percent for more-or-less traditional marriages. So if only half of the reverse-traditional marriages Ms. Lloyd-Platt encounters are having problems, then they're actually doing pretty good.

But about that divorce stat she mentions--"five percent." The article doesn't compare the divorce rate of reverse-traditional families to traditional or dual-income families, so we have no idea what "five percent" means. We do know that the number of "househusbands" (as they're called) in the U.K. has risen by 83 percent since 1993. If the divorce rate for that group (and I'm impressed that someone in the UK is keeping track of it) has only risen five percent--and again, we have no idea what's happening with other family groups--then I'd say that's not too bad.

Some historical perspective: Non-traditional family forms are always entail some degree of internal and external conflict during their period of emergence--that is, until they become traditional, i.e., widespread and normal. This was, for example, the case when people left farms and extended families and moved to the big city and into small nuclear families -- a period of tremendous stress and conflict, and, incidentally, high rates of divorce and abandonment. Then all of a sudden (around WWII), the nuclear family was considered ideal. Family configurations aligned with the economy, and thus a post-war culture was born. In 1957, J.M. Mogey of the University of Oxford predicted that "the divorce rate should continue to decline for some years to come.”

Ha! History is cruel. That very same year, divorce rates started to once again rise, after a thirty-year decline. One in three couples married in the 1950s would ultimately divorce. Today the divorce rate stands at about 50 percent, and guess what: according to many studies, today's egalitarian marriages are the most stable. "Women are more prone to depression and to fantasize about divorce when they do a disproportionate share of the housework," reports psychotherapist Joshua Coleman in Unconventional Wisdom. "Wives are more sexually interested in husbands who do more housework. And children appear to be better socially adjusted when they regularly participate in doing chores with Dad."

Today, traditional families have their own problems--most of them will fail. And so the question isn't, Are reverse-traditional families more unstable? That's a dumb question, given the context. Instead, the question should be (to adapt a phrase from Stephanie Coontz), What can we do to help reverse-traditional families minimize their weaknesses and maximize their strengths?

I'm not saying that the stories of unhappy breadwinning moms aren't interesting and important, only that they are not as representative as they pretend to be. Some of these moms explicitly blame at-home daddyhood for their problems -- they seem to feel that the arrangement robs their men of masculine authority and self-respect. This is true of Trunk's blog entry, in which she reports being shocked and dismayed to discover that her husband describes himself as a "stay-at-home dad" in an online professional networking profile. "Surely writing stay-at-home dad on a LinkedIn profile cannot be good," she writes, clearly ashamed of her husband.

It's a digital variation of an image that keeps recurring in these stories: the public moment when a coworker or old school friend asks the breadwinning mom what her husband does for a living, and she feels a deep sense of shame. She marks that as the moment when the marriage declined.

It's really quite horrible, when you think about it. I think there's two things going on, socially. One is that some women seem unprepared for the pressures of providing, just as some dads must struggle with the demands of caregiving. They weren't raised for these roles, they never imagined themselves doing it, and they have few role models. The second thing is that social support is extremely important -- this is one of the insights that came out of a recent University of Texas study of at-home dads, and it's certainly true in my experience. If you spend all day, every day, walking uphill with the wind in your face, you get tired. Much better to have people behind you, pushing you forward.

But we have tended to focus on social situation of the at-home dad, sometimes at the expense of the breadwinning mom: they need support, community, and role models just as much, if not more. The pressures they face are enormous: all the usual breadwinning pressures, plus sexism, plus the social ambiguities of role reversal.

Despite all that, however, many moms are very happy with their roles; I've interviewed some of them for my book. Their stories also need to be told--and then maybe women like Penelope Trunk won't feel so ashamed.

* * *

A post-script: In an article posted to her old website, Kidding Ourselves (1995) author Rhona Mahony asks: “When the sexual division of labor in the home has melted away, what will divorce mean for children? No one knows for sure. In all likelihood, though, it will be less harmful to children than it is today. I suspect that the average breadwinning mother will be more emotionally attached to her children than the average breadwinning father is today, because of the lingering emotional echoes of her pregnancies and her breastfeeding, if she breastfed. Even if her primary-parent husband catches up with and surpasses her in emotional attachment, she is starting from a higher base than the average father today. Concretely, that means that fewer, absent breadwinning parents will fail to visit, fail to send money, and go AWOL completely. More of them will be mothers. Remember, too, that improvements in child support assurance, and in other programs, will probably be necessary to attract millions of men into primary parenting. Those improvements will also cushion the effects of divorce for children whose fathers are breadwinners, too.”

Dads and Social Capital

2007-07-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

Over at the blog Daddy Dialectic, my esteemed colleague "Chicago Pop" meditates on the relationship between caregiving dads and social capital:

Is it worth the time for a dad to get involved with a playground clique of mostly moms?

The idea of social capital would suggest that the answer to [that] question is "yes," because cliques of neighborhood moms are much more than social groups: they are information networks. Without a doubt they are highly gendered, based on forms of sociability that are heavily feminized according to traditional gender constructions. But in a "networked" society, this form of sociability is now where the advantage now lies -- across the board, not just with regard to parenting -- and women therefore have a distinct edge.

It's an interesting observation, and an interesting way to look at stay-at-home parents. Chicago Pop continues:

In an economy in which the general ability to network is now a fundamental survival skill, more and more men are likely to feel comfortable adopting the hitherto strictly feminine practice of kibitzing at the playpark in order to gain access to vital childcare knowledge, support, and healthy camaraderie.

But this means that the issues involved in discussions of reverse-traditional families, or gender equality in childcare, need to expand beyond the core concerns of labor and reward, to include basic practices of sociability that can have tremendous impact on the future prospects of one's child. Blogs about at-home dads are certainly one step in that direction. But because most educational and daycare questions are unavoidably local, nothing beats face-time on the neighborhood mommy beat. The 'strong, silent type' of dad will be a disaster when it comes to setting a child up for academic success, even if he outdoes mom in terms of diapers washed and dishes cleaned. Much of what is most valuable in parenting resides in intangible but significant networks of information and the ability to access the network at different points.

What are you grateful for?

2007-07-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Greater Good highlights the physical, psychological, and social benefits of counting your blessings.

So what are you most grateful for?

New issue now online!

2007-07-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of Greater Good is now online at http://www.greatergoodmag.org/!

The Summer 2007 issue explores the new science of gratitude. More than a simple "thank you," studies show gratitude can build physical health, personal happiness, and strong social connections. Our contributors discuss some of the most exciting research on gratitude and suggest how it can apply to everyday life. You can read the full Table of Contents at http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/current_issue

We'd love to hear what you think of this new issue. You can comment below, or email us at GGLetters@Berkeley.edu

Taxation without Vexation

2007-06-19T17:12:00.000-07:00

A new study published in Science suggests that paying your taxes might actually make you feel good. Researchers gave students at the University of Oregon $100, then recorded their brain activity when they were given the chance to make anonymous donations to a food bank with some of that money. When they made their donations, the areas of their brains that lit up were the same as those associated with pleasure and reward. That finding is consistent with similar research, such as that conducted by James Rilling of Emory University, suggesting a link between altruism and positive emotions.

But the researchers here also sometimes levied a tax on the money they'd given out, telling their participants the taxed money would also go to the food bank (which it did). They found that the brain activity was the same, though not as strong, as when people gave money on their own accord.

Reporting on this finding in today's The New York Times, John Tierney writes that the results "bolster the case for 'pure altruism'"--as opposed to altruistic acts performed for selfish motives--"because the student paying the tax could not take personal credit for deciding to feed the hungry." In other words, even though they received nothing in return for their money--not even recognition for their generosity or the personal satisfaction of knowing they'd tried to do something nice for others--the participants still felt good.

Tierney quotes Ulrich Mayr, one of the study's authors, as saying, "The most surprising result is that these basic pleasure centers in the brain don’t respond only to what’s good for yourself. ... They also seem to be tracking what’s good for other people, and this occurs even when the subjects don’t have a say in what happens.”

making the most of our sense of humor

2007-06-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to an interesting article from the SF Chronicle that takes a closer look at how scientists are refining their understanding of how humor works, as well as offering some for helpful techniques for the humor-deprived. For more information on what makes us laugh, you might want to attend the upcoming conference of the International Society for Humor Studies.

And our tagline is...

2007-06-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

"The Science of a Meaningful Life"

That's the winner of Greater Good's first (and hopefully last) tagline contest.

We thank all the Greater Good readers who offered their creative tagline suggestions. There were several attractive tagline candidates in the running, but ultimately "The Science of a Meaningful Life" received the strongest support from Greater Good's staff, and it's easy to understand why: The term "meaningful life" seems to encompass compassion, happiness, empathy, social connection--no other single word or phrase works as well to capture what the magazine is all about. Plus, we appreciate the way that "science" and "meaningful life" play off each other: The broad idea of the "meaningful life" is nicely counterbalanced by the emphasis on rigorous "science." And the entire tagline conveys how Greater Good distinguishes itself from other publications: by applying scientific analysis to topics of personal importance to our readers.

Back in March we launched an online contest for readers to propose their own tagline. We were impressed by the range and originality of many of these suggestions. While we didn’t choose any of them verbatim, “The Science of a Meaningful Life” is very close to a tagline proposed by reader Sara Margulis, “Science for Life.” So Sara wins our tagline prize: A one-year subscription (gift or renewal) to Greater Good and a free book selection from our library. Congratulations Sara!

Thanks again to everyone who submitted an idea to Greater Good’s tagline contest.

Sincerely,

The Greater Good staff

Teaching The Levees

2007-05-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

Ted Jackson, staff photographer on the New Orleans Times-Picayune, contributed The Eye of the Storm photo essay in the Fall/Winter 2006-07 issue of Greater Good that illustrates how he responded to the scenes before him during the first day that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

Since then Spike Lee has produced a movie about the disaster, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” from HBO Documentary Films, and now "Teaching The Levees" a curriculum package is currently being developed at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Through the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, free copies will be made available to teachers, schools, libraries, and community groups in late summer 2007. The package will include copies of the “When the Levees Broke” DVDs and the curriculum book.

increasing the human capacity for empathic curiosity

2007-05-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

UCB bio-ethicist and friend of Greater Good, Dr. Jodi Halpern, addresses the dilemma of doctors who experience a range of negative emotions when confronted with patients who refuse necessary treatment or are angry, in an article, "Empathy and Patient-Physician Conflicts," appearing in the May issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine. Her work was featured recently in a UCB newsstory:

"Caregivers who can learn to sustain their genuine curiosity about and receptivity to patients' perspectives, even in the midst of emotionally charged interactions, not only reduce levels of anger and frustration for both parties, they can significantly improve decision-making on both ends and increase the effectiveness of treatment."

Interview with Family Historian Stephanie Coontz

2007-05-15T15:58:00.000-07:00

Stephanie Coontz is a professor of history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and Director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families. She is widely recognized as one of the leading authorities on the history of the American family.

Coontz has authored numerous books and articles, including, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap and The Way We Really Are. In 2005 Viking-Penguin published, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage—a tremendously important book that's just been released in paperback.

Marriage, A History argues that marriage has evolved from the economic and political alliance of two or more family groups, to an individual love-match, which over the past thirty years has catalyzed the creation of new family forms like gay and lesbian families and helped dissolve the division of labor between husband as breadwinner and wife as homemaker. The result, says Coontz, is not the end of the family as we know it, but instead its revitalization as a more just and equitable institution.

I sat down to talk to Coontz at the tenth anniversary conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, an organization she helped to found.

In your books, you’ve demonstrated how the family is constantly evolving. But have you identified any traits shared by all families that successfully cultivate the health and well being of their members?

In the broadest sense, there are some universals. For example, helping members to go outside the family – I think there’s been an incest taboo for a good reason, for thousands of years. We even find a primitive version of it in chimpanzees. It’s important to create individuals who not only can build successful relations within the group, but that are not so physically or emotionally incestuous. The good family teaches its members to reach out and form bonds with others.

So the family is a facilitator of human diversity.

Or rather, of social connection. The healthiest families are those families that don’t try to be everything and do everything. But I do think that what makes a family work really depends on social circumstances.

Let’s take the question of marriage. I think that in the 1950s you could build a successful marriage and rear kids who were going to do pretty well on the basis of a union of two gender stereotypes. And it wasn’t really necessary to have the depth of intimacy and friendship that is required now. That could lead to all sorts of abuses, and did. But on the whole, it could produce pretty decent people in the context of that time.

Today, that doesn’t work. When you have two people coming together at an older age, they are both economically and emotionally independent in very important ways. Men don’t require women to do their housekeeping services, women don’t require men to support them. In that circumstance, the level of friendship has to be much deeper and the level of intimacy needs to be much deeper. You can’t raise your kids with the same degree of authoritativeness—or especially, with the same level of authoritarianism—that they could, many years ago.

And each of these changes, I think, creates new problems. We solve old problems but create new ones. A good example is parenting. We have solved so many old problems in parenting. There is so much less child abuse, both emotional and physical, than there used to be in the past. There is a real interest in developing the child’s individuality—not necessarily individualism.

But, some parents go too far in the opposite direction and forget the need to establish generational boundaries and not be their kid’s best friend. So over and over again, what families need changes with the social and historical context and we create new challenges in the process of solving old problems.

As new family forms are emerging—and I mean the whole range, including reverse traditional families, gay and lesbian families, stepfamilies, and so on—how might that evolution contribute to the well-being of family members and society as a whole? How does the evolution hurt well-being?

Well, it’s another one of those trade-offs. Families have always been diverse, but that diversity was swept under the rug, and they were made to be ashamed of it. They were not helped, nobody analyzed their potential strengths and helped address their absolutely clear weaknesses. So as we’ve brought this diversity into visibility and increasingly legitimized that diversity, we’ve opened the way for all sorts of positive things. For example, preventing people from being forced to stay in a heterosexual marriage when, in fact, their impulses go the other way, or forcing people to stay in an unfair or unsatisfying marriage, which has been a huge relief for many people, I mean, literally a life saver. In every state that adopted no-fault divorce, the next five years saw twenty-percent declines in the suicide rates of wives.

But again, it certainly opened up more opportunities for people to make more bad choices, more opportunities for failure. It’s opened new opportunities to misjudge how much work it takes to build a new family form in an environment where the economy, the work practices, the school schedules, and the emotional expectations favor—privilege—one family form. So you have some people being overly optimistic about how easy it is to carve out a new life – they might say, “Oh, I can be a single mom, no problem,” and they’re not prepared for the difficulties they’ll encounter.

So I think that it does have some negative effects, but I would emphasize that these changes are not going back underground. They’ve had tremendous positive effects by rescuing people from very difficult situations and they pose us the challenge of helping people make more informed choices.

In Marriage, A History, you show love and intimacy have become more important to marriages. How has that evolution contributed to the rise in male caregiving?

This is one of the real, unambiguous good news stories that we’re finding. When the women’s movement first encouraged women to make these demands on their husbands, to spend more time at home, it caused a lot of conflict in families. And I think the conservatives are quite right to say that women’s liberation destabilized marriage.

But as men made adjustments—and they really have—the result has been tremendous good news, that, first of all, these adjustments have strengthened marriage. Men who do more caregiving have more satisfying marriages, they are less likely to have their wives leave them, and their kids do better. It’s a win-win situation, because if the parents do divorce, men who have been involved in such caregiving are much less likely to walk away from their kids. They have developed an independent relationship with the kids that is no longer mediated through the mom, and they don’t have that old-fashioned idea that, “Since I no longer get the mom’s services, so I can’t relate to the kids either.”

So I think that there are all sorts of positive things about it. There’s a myth in sociology and among many feminists that there’s been a stalled revolution, that there’s been a lagged one, but the fact is that men are changing very rapidly. In fact, as a historian, I have to say that they are changing, in a period of thirty years, in ways that took most women 150 years of thinking and activism. Every cohort of men is doing more in the house, and if you look within a cohort, the longer a man’s wife has worked, the more likely he is to do caregiving and housework. This is a huge change.

How has the rising importance of love in marriage contributed to the emergence of gay and lesbian families?

Social conservatives claim, as James Dobson put it, that gay and lesbian marriage is turning 5,000 years of tradition on its head. I actually believe that 5,000 years of tradition has been turned on its head, but it was heterosexuals who did it, and they changed marriage in ways that encouraged gays and lesbians to say, now this institution applies to us – after, in fact, having rejected that institution, because of its rigidity and inequality. I think this is good evidence that the institution has been evolving in a way that means it is not inherently oppressive.

Now I have gotten attacked by a couple of feminist authors for saying that. They want me to keep arguing that there’s something inherent in the institution of marriage. I think, in fact, we’ve transformed it and discovered that it’s not inherently oppressive, except in so far as it is put forward as the only way to honor long-term obligations. But if it is not, then I think marriage has become much fairer through the ages and much more capable of really being equal, and I think that’s why many gays and lesbians have started to embrace marriage.

You describe a lot of change. What hasn’t changed?

There are still a lot of rigid gender roles. It’s a lot worse around the world, where women still face incredible amounts of domestic violence. There are massive gender inequities on a global scale to be addressed, and there is the residue, and a serious residue, of inequality at home, too. But the biggest problem we need to address is the peculiarly American assumption that individuals can learn individual responsibility without any social responsibility. We ask individuals to keep commitments that we don’t ask corporations or politicians to keep, and that needs to change.

Unconventional Wisdom

2007-05-10T14:12:00.000-07:00

I just got back from the tenth anniversary conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, a network of family researchers that I recently joined. There they released a new report entitled "Unconventional Wisdom" that summarizes recent research and clinical findings by CCF members. Some highlights:

In contrast to the media focus on gender differences, a new consensus challenging this view is emerging from the research literature. Many well-designed studies find no significant gender differences with respect to such cognitive and social behaviors as nurturance, sexuality, aggression, self-esteem, and math and verbal abilities. The big story is that there is far greater within-gender variability on such behaviors than there is between-gender difference. For example, when young boys act up and get physical we are accustomed to hearing their behavior explained away by their high levels of testosterone. In fact, boys’ and girls’ testosterone levels are virtually identical during the preschool years when rough-and-tumble play is at its peak.

When we compare the work-day hours that Gen-X and Boomer fathers spend caring for and doing things with their children in 2002, we find that Gen-X fathers spend significantly more time with their children, an average of 3.4 hours per workday versus an average of 2.2 hours for Boomer fathers -- a difference of more than 1 hour. Because Gen-X fathers typically have younger children than Boomer fathers, we adjusted for the age of youngest child and still found the same significant difference favoring Gen-X.

Numerous studies reveal the benefits to a relationship and family when a father participates in housework. Women are more prone to depression and to fantasize about divorce when they do a disproportionate share of the housework. Wives are more sexually interested in husbands who do more housework. And children appear to be better socially adjusted when they regularly participate in doing chores with Dad. In my clinical experience, men do more in homes when they have stronger egalitarian attitudes, and when their wives are willing to negotiate standards, act assertively, prioritize the marital friendship, and avoid gatekeeping.

People often think that women whose husbands make “good money” stay home when they have children. But it takes being married to men in the top 5th percentile (men earning more than $120,000 a year) to seriously reduce women’s employment -- only 54 percent of mothers with husbands with these top earnings worked for pay. Among married women whose husbands were in the top 25 to 5 percent of all earners (making salaries ranging from about $60,000 to $120,000), 72 percent of mothers worked outside the home, almost identical to the 71 percent work participation figures among married moms whose husbands' earnings were in the lowest 25 percent of men’s wages. Women’s own education has a much bigger effect on her likelihood of working than her husband’s earnings; highly-educated women who can earn a lot typically don’t become stay-at-home mothers.

Despite concerns of policy makers that children are not receiving sufficient parental time, married parents’ time with children is higher now than during the “golden era” of the nuclear family in 1965: Married mothers increased their time in childcare by 21% (from 10.6 to 12.9 hours per week between 1965 and 2000) and fathers have more than doubled their time in childcare (from 2.6 to 6.5 hours per week). How have they done this? Mothers in particular have shed large quantities of housework in order to accommodate their increased time with children. Married parents of today’s era also spend more time multitasking, and less time with their spouse and friends and extended family. Although parent-child time has increased over the years, almost half of American parents continue to feel they spend too little time with their children, particularly married fathers who spend less time overall with children than married mothers. Married mothers also long for more time for themselves and both mothers and fathers feel they have too little time for each other.

In a study of 130 couples from wedding until their first babies were three years old, John and Julie Gottman found that 67% of couples had a big drop in relationship happiness and a big increase in hostility in the first 3 years of the baby's life. In addition, the parents' hostility during pregnancy was associated with baby's responsiveness at three months. Based on this, they designed and tested an intervention to help new parents: the workshop reversed the drop in couple happiness and the increasing hostility. They also found a reduction in postpartum depression. At three years old, the babies whose parents had been to a workshop were more advanced in terms of emotional and language development. Part of this was due to father's involvement: the workshops improved father's involvement.

A nationally representative study of more than 1000 young people in the 3rd through the 12th grades asked children: “If you were granted one wish that would change the way that your mother’s/your father’s work affects your life, what would that wish be?” In a parallel study, more than 600 employed mothers and fathers were asked to guess what their children would wish. Most parents (56%) guessed that their children would wish for more time with them. But more time was not at the top of children’s wish list. Only 10% of children made that wish about their mothers and 15.5% made that wish about their fathers. Most children wished that their mothers (34%) and their fathers (27.5%) would be less stressed and tired.

Men and women who were married or had children were asked in 1977 and again in 2002, “How much do your job and family life interfere with each other?” In 1977, 41 percent of women, but just 34 percent of men, reported experiencing some or a lot of work-family interference. By 2002, however, more men (46 percent) than women (41 percent) reported experiencing work-family stress. Fathers in dual-earner families are no more likely to experience some or a lot of work-family interference (53%) as fathers who are in single earner families (52%).

Based on a representative sample of a major metropolitan area, almost eight out of ten young adults who grew up in a home with a work-committed mother believe that this was the best option. In contrast, those who lived in homes where mothers did not work in a committed way are more divided in their outlooks, with close to half wishing their moms had pursued a different path. Those who lived in a single-parent home are similarly divided. While a slight majority wished that their biological parents had stayed together, close to half concluded that, while not ideal, a parental separation provided a better alternative than living in a conflict-ridden or silently unhappy home. Conversely, among children who grew up in an intact home, most agreed that this was the best arrangement, but four out of ten felt their parents might have been better off apart. In all these family arrangements, sustained parental support and economic security are more important than family form in shaping young adults’ satisfaction with their childhood experiences.

The full report is well worth a read.

Tony Deifell: helping others see beyond themselves

2007-04-24T22:24:00.000-07:00

Tony Deifell, photographer, documentarian and Chief Strategist for the nonprofit playground builder Kaboom! delivered the opening keynote address at the recent Social Enterprise Alliance Gathering in Long Beach. He spoke about his work teaching blind teens to use photography as a tool for communication and expression and what he had learned from these children:

Refraction--how we mistake fragments of the world for the whole.

Transparence--breaking down the walls that divide us and overcoming our blindness to our moral senses.

Illuminance--how we create opportunities to help others see their own blind spots and piece our fragmented world back together.

The photographs are featured in Tony's new book Seeing Beyond Sight. Check out the SBS web site for photo exhibits and events in the SF Bay Area.

passionate philanthropy or rational investing

2007-04-16T22:21:00.000-07:00

Kevin Jones, proprietor at Xigi.net, recently posted an entry about the origins and implications of the fronto–mesolimbic networks that guide decisions about charitable donations:

"giving activates the same brain centers as sex, drugs, food and greed. Even more interesting, they actually got a picture of the brain at work in giving, through the magic of FMRI. You know what they found? When you feel a warm glow from giving, that’s because your brain is warm and glowing."

Social fund managers may want to connect to the philanthropists' passions for giving rather than focusing on the rational computations of an SROI (social return on investment).

motivating power of the greater good

2007-04-16T22:17:00.000-07:00

An inspiring example from the journals of Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, leader of the failed Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914-1916:

"The thought of those fellows on Elephant Island kept us going all the time. It might have been different if we'd had only ourselves to think about. You can get so tired in the snow, particularly if you're hungry, that sleep seems the best thing life has to give. But if you're a leader, a fellow that other fellows look to, you've got to keep going. That was the thought which sailed us through the hurricane and tugged us up and down those mountains [of South Georgia Island]... and when we got to the whaling station, it was the thought of those comrades which made us so mad with joy that the reaction beats all effort to describe it. We didn't so much feel that we were safe as that they were saved."

Here's a link to the James Caird Society, named after the small lifeboat that carried Shackleton and five others 800 miles across Drakes Passage to South Georgia Island in the depths of an Antarctic winter.

So it goes

2007-04-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

I rolled out of bed at 5:30, my wife and baby still sleeping. I pulled on some clothes and went out the door in search of coffee. Walking down 24th St., hunched over, hands in pockets, I glanced at a newspaper box and saw a headline that stopped me cold: "Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84."

Until I was roughly 12 or 13 years old, I was a voracious reader, but I read only comic books, trashy spy thrillers, and bad science fiction. I don't remember why I plucked Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five from the shelf of my school library (a book that conservative moralists have repeatedly fought to ban from library shelves). I was probably drawn to the science fictional premises -- time travel! aliens! -- but I do vividly remember how absorbed I was by the end of the first chapter. Slaughterhouse Five, which depicts the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, was my first true introduction to literature, and it served as a gateway to deeper reading.

Why did that strange novel grab me? When I flip through my junior high yearbook, I see bleak, snowy Michigan fields, girls with feathered hair, boys in members-only jackets, and pictures of teachers who seemed ancient at the time, but were probably much younger than I am today. I was a sad, confused kid, but not having a language or avenue to express it, I drove the sadness and confusion underground. I felt sorry for my parents, my classmates, my teachers, my town, and myself, because we all seemed to be locked into schedules, obligations, and values that we did not create and did not want.

During the next year, I read all of Vonnegut's novels and short-story collections that had been published up until that point. I did not understand most of what I read (and today I still get something new out of Vonnegut, every time I re-read one of his stories), but I knew that he seemed to perfectly capture the world I saw around me, giving voice to feelings that I didn't have the language or maturity to express. I see now that sometimes his sadness shaded over into pure depression and that there is a very fine line between his universal pity, which caused him to prescribe kindness as the best basis of human relations, and his own private self-pity, which derailed his more autobiographical work and seemed to cut him off from his readers.

Was it healthy for so young a kid to be exposed to Vonnegut's adult experience with war, death, and depression? In 1988, the psychologists N. T. Termine and C. E. Izard studied the effect of mothers' sadness on their infants. They found that expressions of sorrow through face and voice slowed the exploratory play of the babies; additional studies show that sadness slows cognitive processes and enables deliberate scrutiny of self and situations. Though we might see happiness as the apotheosis of human existence, sadness has its place in helping us to slow down and reflect upon our lives and the lives of the people around us. Whether we want to or not, we teach our children to be sad, and it's a good thing, too. Vonnegut (and others, of course) taught me how that sadness is something to cultivate alongside happiness. Both help us to get through our days.

Slaughterhouse Five also gave me my first glimpse at the real-world consequences of war and violence, something that American media and popular culture conceal from us. I gradually turned away from books, movies, and TV that portrayed killing as easy for the killers, war as a glorious endeavour, and aggression as a desirable trait. "God damn it," writes Vonnegut in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, "you've got to be kind."

I haven't always lived up to that advice, but I've tried. Thanks, Kurt, for the books.

Cooperation: Humans' Evolutionary Legacy

2007-03-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

Sharon Begley wrote a fascinating story for Newsweek last week about recent discoveries in the science of human evolution. She explains how technological advances are giving researchers a more precise understanding of when, how, and why humans diverged from the evolutionary path of other species.

It seems that what truly set humans from other species may have been changes in the architecture of their brains, which made them more skilled at reasoning, learning, and memory. Begley considers this finding along with the fact that humans five to six million years ago were small and had teeth suitable for fruits and nuts, but not meat. These facts, Begley writes, suggest "that early humans were more often prey than predators," an argument made by Washington University anthropologist Robert Sussman. And this conclusion has some profound implications for our understanding of human nature.

The realization that early humans were the hunted and not hunters has upended traditional ideas about what it takes for a species to thrive. For decades the reigning view had been that hunting prowess and the ability to vanquish competitors was the key to our ancestors' evolutionary success (an idea fostered, critics now say, by the male domination of anthropology during most of the 20th century). But prey species do not owe their survival to anything of the sort, argues Sussman. Instead, they rely on their wits and, especially, social skills to survive. Being hunted brought evolutionary pressure on our ancestors to cooperate and live in cohesive groups. That, more than aggression and warfare, is our evolutionary legacy.

Both genetics and paleoneurology back that up. A hormone called oxytocin, best-known for inducing labor and lactation in women, also operates in the brain (of both sexes). There, it promotes trust during interactions with other people, and thus the cooperative behavior that lets groups of people live together for the common good. By comparing the chimp genome with the human, scientists infer that oxytocin existed in the ancestor of both. But it has undergone changes since then, perhaps in how strongly the brain responds to it and in how much is produced. The research is still underway, but one possibility is that the changes occurred around the time our ancestors settled into a system based on enduring bonds between men and women, about 1.7 million years ago.

Why We Should All Care About Day Care

2007-03-27T09:44:00.000-07:00

Over the last two days, a new report on the effects of child care in America has gotten a lot of press. It found that a year or more spent in day care increased the chances that a child would later have behavioral problems in school. The researchers, working under the federally financed Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, controlled for children's sex, family income, and the quality of the day care center they attended.

Lest anyone think the researchers were biased, out to undermine women's ascent in the workforce, Benedict Carey's article on the report in The New York Times includes this quote toward the top, from Sharon Landesman Ramey, director of the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education:

I have accused the study authors of doing everything they could to make this negative finding go away, but they couldn't do it. They knew this would be disturbing news for parents, but at some point, if that's what you're finding, then you have to report it.

Carey does point out, however, that

other experts were quick to question the results. The researchers could not randomly assign children to one kind of care or another; parents chose the kind of care that suited them. That meant there was no control group, so determining cause and effect was not possible. And some said that measures of day care quality left out important things [such as employee turnover].

In the articles I read, the reporters and the experts framed the finding as disconcerting to parents, and I'm sure it must be troubling to many parents, given that roughly 2.3 million American kids under age five are in day care.

But this seems like a narrow and misguided way to consider this finding. It should trouble all of us. It's not as if parents had blithely assumed that child care would be better for their kids than looking after them themselves during the workday. Most kids are in child care because their parents don't have much of a choice: They both need to work to make ends meet, or they're single parents generating their household's only source of income.

The high number of kids in child care seems to be the symptom of larger, structural problems in American society that have impacted the socio-economic stability of many families. This report seems to suggest yet another reason why we need to come up with stronger long-term solutions to social and cultural shifts that have been taking place over two generations. Parents may bear the immediate brunt--and, implicitly, the blame--for this problem, but it really rests on all of our shoulders.

Banality of Evil: the flip-side

2007-03-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

Discussion is warming up about the banality of evil at Open Source, a web community that produces a daily hour of radio, hosted by Christopher Lydon.

In the upcoming show airing 3/27 online and on public radio, Dr. Philip Zimbardo will speak about the flip-side of the banality of evil, what he calls the banality of heroism, featured in the current issue of Greater Good.

Empathy vs. Logic vs. Morality

2007-03-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

The LA Times reports:

Damage to the part of the brain that controls social emotions changes the way people respond to thorny moral problems, demonstrating the role of empathy and other feelings in life-or-death decisions.

Asked to resolve hypothetical dilemmas -- such as tossing a person from a bridge into the path of a trolley to save five others -- people with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex tended to sacrifice one life to save many, according to a study published Wednesday by the journal Nature.

People with intact brains were far less likely to kill or harm someone when confronted with the same scenarios.

The study suggests that an aversion to hurting others is hard-wired into the brain.

"Part of our moral behavior is grounded ... in a specific part of our brains," said Dr. Antonio Damasio, one of the study's lead authors and director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California...

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex processes feelings of empathy, shame, compassion and guilt. Damage to this part of the brain, which occupies a small region in the forehead, causes a diminished capacity for social emotions but leaves logical reasoning intact.

Online contest for Greater Good magazine tagline

2007-03-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

Please join our online contest to draft a short and memorable slogan for Greater Good magazine. The tagline runs underneath the name of the magazine and conveys what we're all about: practical tools and inspiration for personal and social change, grounded in science (that's too long!)

Examples that we like from other magazines include:

Seed: Science is Culture
Grassroots Fundraising Journal: Fundraising ideas that work!
Utne: Understanding the Next Evolution

Post your suggestions as a comment to this blog entry. If your tagline is chosen you’ll win a free subscription (gift or renewal) to Greater Good and a free book selection from our Editor’s Pick.

We look forward to your contributions!

Thank you,

The Greater Good Staff

Primal Empathy & The Roots of Morality

2007-03-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

The New York Times Science section has a long piece today about the biological and evolutionary roots of human morality. The article features primatologist Frans de Waal's work with chimps and monkeys, which has strongly suggested that these primates possess basic forms of empathy and exhibit emotions and behaviors that provide the building blocks for human morality.

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.
Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.
Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

De Waal, who's a Greater Good editorial board member, made this argument in more detail in a compelling essay in Greater Good last year.

The Essentialist Android

2007-03-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

Empathy and sociability are hot topics for the people who build and study robots--although they sometimes seem to miss certain crucial social dynamics when talking about robotic applications.

“The study of human relationships has begun to uncover some of their key features,” writes Billy Lee, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, in the December 2006 issue of Connection Science. “Such relational processes offer insights for the design of people-oriented androids.”

Drawing heavily on recent discoveries about mirror neurons that provide “a neural bridge between the actions of self and of others,” Lee argues understanding empathy is key to building androids who will be capable of “going beyond the self.” An empathic android, he writes, “would qualify as a moral being.”

Lee showed film clips to 70 women and 64 men of actors presenting authentic or fake autobiographical speeches, in order to understand what conditions cultivated empathy, trust, and intimacy. At the end of the clip, the women and men were asked to decide whether the actors were telling the truth or not. Participants were also asked if they would let that person comfort them if they were upset and if they would go to the person if he or she was crying.

The result: He found that for both men and women, female actors were "much more likley to be given comfort and to have comfort accepted from them." From this one experiment, Lee concludes:

Women appear to be the gatekeepers of intimacy...If androids are to substitute for the intimacy function of humans, the android body must be equipped with nurturing features associated with the female form. Some of these are physical, others psychological...
It is perhaps no accident that people are more able to feel connected with women than with men. Every person was once connected physically, via the umbilical cord, to a woman, and every person has been held and incubated by a woman's body...Androids designed for a caregiving role should therefore replicate the female form or be able to invoke the feminine archetype.

If true, Billy Lee’s study raises tough questions about gender roles. He doesn't question existing gender roles or power relations, or how those have been constructed. He implies that women should automatically be assigned to caregiving roles.

But he also raises an issue that I hadn't thought about: Are our machines to be built according to gender stereotypes and inequalities? Of course, they already are, in many respects: look at many of the robotic dolls now being produced for both boys and girls, not to mention countless digital avatars, that push specific messages about gender identity, for example men as warriors and women as dainty princesses.

It's important to note that while many robot builders are investigating the effects of embodiment on human-robot interaction, not everyone buys Lee's logic. “We have seen that people react to robots in similar ways that they do to humans,” says Cory D. Kidd of the Robotics Life Group in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. “For example, the work of Cliff Nass and colleagues at Stanford has repeatedly shown people exhibiting social responses to various forms of technology and showing similar biases to those shown with humans, such as deferring more to a male voice and finding a female voice more reassuring.”

But Kidd doesn't think that a human-like appearance — and, presumably, gender stereotypes — are necessary for machines to interact with humans. “While I believe that we can greatly build on and take advantage of characteristics of human interaction," he told me, "I don't think that our robots need to go so far in being human-like in appearance and action. If you look at the work coming out of our lab at MIT, you'll see that none of the robots are humanoid. Rather they are creature-like or suggestive of a human form in some ways -- anthropomorphizable, but not androids.”

What might robotics tell us about human beings?

“It is important to recognize that humans are a profoundly social species,” writes Cynthia Breazeal, director of the MIT Media Lab, where she and her colleagues built Kismet (pictured), the world’s first empathic robot. Kwan Min Lee of the University of Southern California explained to me that the design of MIT Kismet's social brain was influenced by University of Cambridge psychiatrist Simon Baron-Cohen's work on autism, in which he identified four brain modules—Intentionality Detector, Eye Direction Detector, Shared Attention Mechanism, and Theory of Mind Mechanism—needed for everyday social interaction. “Kismet was a breakthrough in the design of social robots in that unlike previous robots, it was the first robot equipped with those modules needed for normal human social interaction,” says Lee (no relation to Billy Lee).

For now, robotics is drawing on research into human social and emotional intelligence, but Lee believes that one day the knowledge will flow in the other direction. “In the future, I believe studies on social robots will give us many new insights on the nature of our social brain,” says Lee. “Social robots can be used as an excellent simulation tool to investigate the nature of human emotion, empathy, and social interaction.”

Compassion is Not in the Numbers

2007-03-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

Advocates for intervention in cases of genocide work tirelessly to publicize the tragedies suffered by the people upon whom the violence is visited. One of the most common strategies is to talk about the sheer numbers of people who have been killed or displaced, in an attempt to galvanize people into action by emphasizing the magnitude of the horror. But new research in psychology indicates that this may not be the most effective strategy to get good people to intervene against evil.

Paul Slovic questions the conventional wisdom that people are only compelled to act in cases of genocide when the human stakes are very high and made clear through grim statistics. In a short research note on Foreign Policy online, he argues that “it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act.”

Slovic reports on a series of psychology experiments conducted by various researchers on compassion, and concludes that statistics, no matter how big the numbers, do not convey the real meaning of the evil of genocide. This is because cold, hard numbers “fail to trigger the affective emotion or feeling required to motivate action.” Rather, in a fascinating cognitive twist, an appeal to reason—through statistics, for example—numbs affect, which is the human ability to know whether something is good or bad. In Slovic’s experiments with another researcher, subjects’ donations to aid a starving African child actually fell sharply when the child’s image was accompanied by details about the millions of other needy children like her.

The good news is that inaction in the face of genocide does not seem to come from any fundamental deficiency in our humanity: people are, after all, often very motivated to exert significant effort to help needy individuals. The bad news is that ‘compassion fatigue’ can set in very quickly, even at the point where one needy individual becomes two. This means that expecting people to be finally galvanized into action in, say, Darfur when some tipping point of genocide has been reached will likely be fruitless. What may be more successful in spurring a response are detailed individual stories that bring the horrors of genocide home, in a way that resonates with the human instinct for compassion.

Social Exclusion Decreases Prosocial Behavior

2007-03-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

When I think back to the social drama of high school— cold scowls of indifference, deflecting insults with nervous laughter, the dizziness I felt when an old friend abandoned me—I can still feel the kind of paralysis it induced then. The effect was often disabling: stuttering speech, action, and thought. I always wished I could come up with some quick retort to an insult or rise above it, but instead I felt helpless.

A recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, "Social Exclusion Decreases Prosocial Behavior," helps me—and, I imagine, many others--understand this disabling phenomenon. The authors found that when individuals are excluded from a group they do not respond emotionally, as we may expect. Rather, to cope with exclusion, they may slip into an unemotional state. By disconnecting from their emotions, rejected individuals protect themselves from distress.

Yet however protective this emotional disconnect might be, there are also a few less desirable effects. In addition to helping one adapt to her environment, emotion is “a tool for interpersonal understanding,” write the authors. It’s our emotions that help us connect to another person’s emotional state. Conversely, however, as one disconnects from her emotion while being excluded, she is unable to empathize with other people.

What impact does this empathic disconnection have on the excluded person’s socialization? Surely if one lacks empathic emotion, it seems she will be less concerned with social connection. Indeed, researchers found that socially excluded individuals were less likely to act pro-socially--that is, to positively affect other people through helping behavior or cooperation.

These findings illustrate the effects of exclusion on both a personal and social level, from emotional numbness to social isolation. It provides insight into how, at times, the effects of rejection are often more profound than we can possibly grasp in the moment. From this standpoint, it is not difficult to imagine why many people remain isolated throughout life, not realizing how an early rejection or two could start a vicious cycle of solitude.

Hurricane Katrina and the Protestant Work Ethic

2007-03-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

The Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) – it’s a commitment to painstaking labor and dedication as the means to success. And it’s a cornerstone of the American dream. The idea that it’s always possible to attain success in life, no matter where you start, is a familiar one to most of us. Given how deeply entrenched it is in our culture, we wouldn’t expect Americans’ belief in the PWE to be easily changeable. But a recent study suggests that it can be, especially among people who have had their faith in American ideals shaken—in this case, by Hurricane Katrina.

Sheri R. Levy and colleagues at SUNY Stony Brook and UC Berkeley looked into possible differences in the PWE and how it changed among European-Americans and African-Americans in response to Katrina. As the government responded to the crisis in New Orleans, many people felt that its response was too slow. This response convinced some, such as rapper Kanye West, that “The government doesn’t care about black people.”

One semester before Katrina, three weeks after Katrina, and one semester after Katrina, the researchers measured agreement levels among European-Americans and African-Americans with these premises: “PWE-general,” that if people work hard they can get a good job; and “PWE-equalizer,” that PWE allows members of different groups to be more equal because it takes individual abilities into account.

Soon after Katrina, African-Americans agreed less with PWE-general and PWE-equalizer than European-Americans, but the difference had disappeared by the following semester. The causality between the hurricane and PWE agreement was further confirmed by a third study that reminded half of its subjects of Katrina; African-American members of that group were less likely than their European-American counterparts to agree with PWE-general and PWE-equalizer, but there was no difference for those without the reminder.

Of course, Katrina affected much more than PWE. As the researchers noted:

It remains to be seen how prevalent markers of Katrina will be in people’s everyday environments in the future…the rebuilding of the afflicted areas is still underway and is likely to take years, perhaps a decade. Even after Katrina fades from the headlines, it may have a lasting impact as a cultural talking point.

While it seems that an event like Hurricane Katrina can undermine one’s faith in the PWE, there is a bright side: the shift seemed fairly reversible. Devastating as such events are, the subjects’ fairly quick recovery offers us hope about our own resilience.

Reference: Levy, Sheri R; Freitas, Antonio L; Mendoza-Denton, Rodolfo; Kugelmass, Heather. Hurricane Katrina’s Impact on African Americans’ and European Americans’ Endorsement of the Protestant Work Ethic. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy. Vol.6, No.1. 2006. Page 75-85.

Happiness, Inc.

2007-03-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

The San Francisco Chronicle's Steven Winn had a piece yesterday about the recent boom in the study and the marketing of happiness, citing everything from last year's film Happyness (with Will Smith) to the international Happiness Foundation:

As the field fills with social scientists, pharmaceutical breakthroughs and brain scans, the happiness quest grows more complicated and fraught. Philosopher Sissela Bok, in a 2003 address on the subject, argued that "it's in times of high danger and turmoil that concerns for happiness are voiced most strikingly and seen as most indispensable." That's what made the "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" language in the Declaration of Independence so ompelling. It almost might explain why sales of those smiley-face buttons boomed during the Vietnam War (50 million in 1971). And why, in our own anxious and unsettled times, happiness is once again a growth industry.

And, Winn writes, "the converse may also be true. In times of relative peace and prosperity, happiness seems self-evident and therefore a little shrill and vulgar to acknowledge." He refers to Todd Solondz's bleak and cynical 1998 film Happiness as an example of how the subject was treated when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal seemed to be our greatest threat to national security.

I can agree with Winn's premise, but only to a point. Part of the happiness boom today is surely motivated by scientific breakthroughs, particularly in neuroscience, that just didn't happen until recently. If they were made in 1998, I think the same amount of ink would have been spilled about them then. Indeed, many of the "pharmaceutical breakthroughs" he refers to were made in the mid-90s, and they generated an entire literary sub-genre of books with the word "Prozac" in the title (Prozac Nation and Listening to Prozac both came out in 1997). And it would be misleading to imply, as Winn does, that many of today's happiness scientists embrace the concept uncritically--see Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, which Winn does mention--just as some of those Prozac books were skeptical about the whole idea of happiness ten years ago.

All that said, there's definitely a booming happiness industry, at least in the research and publishing worlds. I only wonder whether this happiness boom is truly sui generis, the product of this particular cultural moment, as Winn suggests--or if it's just a movement that's been escalating for the last 200+ years.

The Measure of a Father

2007-03-06T13:32:00.000-08:00

From the Guardian in the UK:

Children are more likely to suffer development problems if their fathers do not take paternity leave or spend enough time with them when they are very young, according to an analysis of thousands of babies born around the turn of the millennium.

A report published today by the Equal Opportunities Commission and based on research tracking 19,000 children born in 2000 and 2001 found emotional and behavioural problems were more common by the time youngsters reached the age of three if their fathers had not taken time off work when they were born, or had not used flexible working to have a more positive role in their upbringing.

Previous research has highlighted the importance of a mother's involvement when a child is small, but the EOC says this is the first study to confirm that the close involvement of a father also has a significant impact on a child's future...

The EOC points to a "social revolution in fatherhood", in which fathers are increasingly involved with their children's upbringing and feel confident as carers, yet 63% felt they did not spend enough time with their new baby.

That fathers are being studied at all is part of the revolution. I recently interviewed UC Riverside Sociologist Scott Coltrane, author of many studies and books on fatherhood. In the past, says Coltrane, researchers looked only at whether the father was present and married to the mother. They might also have looked at demographic or economic information about the fathers. But they did not study how fathers interacted with their children or what impact fathers had on children's development. Until the 1970s, it was (unconsciously?) assumed that mothers were solely responsible for child outcomes.

Coltrane describes how "in the late Seventies researchers started saying, 'Wait a minute, why don’t we measure what the fathers are actually doing? How do they parent? What do they do?'" Today scholars "tend to include father variables in their studies, so we are doing a better job of tracking the father participation that is occurring. And we are considering that men might be doing housework beyond taking out the trash and mowing the lawn. And because women are more likely to be employed and earn good wages, more families are sharing more of the family work - so when we look we see shifts." Applying the same measures of mothers and fathers, says Coltrane, is still "relatively novel, as simple an idea as that is."

The Guardian article concludes: "The government last night pointed to moves including the introduction of paid paternity leave and more than doubling of maternity pay as evidence of commitment to helping families balance work and caring responsibilities."

Ah, sounds lovely.

U.S. & UK: "Worst places to be a child"

2007-03-06T01:11:00.000-08:00

UNICEF released a study last month that ranked more than 20 developed nations in six categories: material wealth, health, education, relationships, risky behaviors, and children’s subjective well-being. The result? “The United States and Britain ranked as the worst places to be a child,” reported the LA Times. The U.S. and Britain placed in the bottom third in all six categories, except for education, in which the U.S. ranked 12^th. The Netherlands ranked highest on an average of all categories, followed by Sweden and Denmark.

Call it hindsight bias, but it wasn’t too shocking to find that America and Britain are not the optimal places to raise children. This study merely lends more support to the conclusion (backed up by lots of research) that money does not buy happiness; that is, although the U.S. and Britain are among the most developed countries in the world, well-being does not automatically result. In fact, it seems that what money is buying actually blinds us from non-material capital, such as friends and kin.

“The findings that we got,” says Jonathan Bradshaw, one of the report’s authors and a professor of social policy at York University in England, “are a consequence of long-term underinvestment in children.” It seems that falling ill to capitalism’s main objective of monetary gain has unfortunately blindsighted parents to the developmental impact of children’s social needs. With the desire to accumulate financial capital comes the obligation to spend more time at work and essentially leave children to occupy their time with activities and toys that do not require parent-child interaction. For example, the U.S. and Britain have higher per capita income than the Czech Republic, but according to the study, the Czech Republic has a more equitable distribution of wealth and higher educational and public health investment.

This report supports the idea that well-being involves more than money. More research should try to provide a better sense of how different developed countries actually do or don't cultivate well-being in their citizens. "All countries have weaknesses to be addressed," says UNICEF's Marta Santos Pais, the study's director.

Happiness is a Flaming Lip

2007-03-01T16:44:00.000-08:00

I was initially skeptical when I heard that NPR was launching the series This I Believe, based on the old Edward R. Murrow program of the same name. But I'm always impressed when I catch a segment, which consists of someone explaining his or her worldview in three to five minutes, often zeroing in on a defining experience, hobby, or belief. They manage to sound polished and professional while still conveying the distinct personality of each essayist--some famous, some not. I usually find that I like each contributor, even if I don't agree with them.

I was jolted out of Monday-morning grogginess a few days back when the host (the esteemed public radio host/producer Jay Allison) introduced this week's This I Believer: Wayne Coyne, the singer/guitarist for the band The Flaming Lips. I'm a big fan. Then I got really excited when Coyne proceded to expound on a topic relevant to Greater Good, essentially offering his own theory on the nature of happiness.

His piece had a curious approach to the psychology of happiness--kind of a cross between Horatio Alger and Norman Vincent Peale. Check it out:

Try to be happy within the context of the life we are acutally living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves.

To back himself up, he pointed to his own 11-year(!) stint as a fry cook at Long John Silver's, which could have seemed like a dead-end job, but which he came to appreciate as a chance to get paid to daydream and nurture other ambitions. (Plus, "at least I had a job," he says.)

At first, part of me was taken aback by what could be construed as a rather conservative message, encouraging people to embrace the status quo. But I was also impressed by how Coyne's essay resonated with a major theme of positive psychology research: Gratitude. Robert Emmons, probably the leading researcher of gratitude in the world, has described gratitude as

a conscious, rational choice to focus on life's blessings rather than on its shortcomings... a universal human experience that can be either a random occurrence of grace or an attitude chosen to create a better life.

And, in line with Coyne's theory of happiness, Emmons (and many others) have found that boosting one's feelings of gratitude result in better health, increased positive emotions, a significantly rosier outlook on life, greater progress toward achieving personal goals, and maybe even more helpful behavior toward others.

So can anyone cultivate gratitude, or just those people who are capable of winning a few Grammies and producing some of the best albums of the 90s and the 21st Century? Or is gratitude what helped Coyne ascend from fast-food fry cook to indie-rock demi-god? So far, research suggests that, with the right kinds of practice, almost anyone is capable of reaping at least some of the short-term benefits of gratitude. But the jury's still out. I'd love to see Emmons and Coyne get together to discuss this further.

Early Parenthood and Politics Don’t Mix

2007-02-26T14:29:00.001-08:00

Most everyone did little things as a teenager that happily had no lasting consequences later in life. But what are the impacts of more fundamental teen choices? Recent research says that major life transitions in adolescence can have lasting effects on later political participation.

Julianna Sandell Pacheco and Eric Plutzer analyzed the effects of three important teen life transitions—adolescent parenthood, early marriage, and dropping out of high school—on later political engagement. In a paper published in American Politics Research, Pacheco and Plutzer report that the three transitions “can contribute to a pattern of cumulative disadvantage because experiencing one teen transition often leads to another.” Teen parents are much more likely to drop out of school, which in turn sets of other chains of events that dampen political participation, making it unlikely they’ll be able to advocate effectively for their needs and opinions.

Interestingly, the scholars find that the effects of these life transitions on voter turnout differ across racial and ethnic lines, with the impact of teen parenthood applying more to Whites than to Blacks or Hispanics. They suggest that the differences across racial groups may reflect divergent norms about educational achievement and early parenthood and marriage. This hints that providing the right kinds of social support to teens could offset the negative impacts of their life transitions. Further sociological research into the effects of varying sets of cultural practices could have very practical implications for helping adolescents cope with their choices.

The authors demonstrate that supposedly “nonpolitical” life events can have an influence on political behavior. From a harm reduction viewpoint, it may be possible to cut into the causal chain to prevent one bad choice from leading to another. Their results suggest that efforts to help teen parents in a way that makes it easier for them to stay in school could carry great benefits—both for their immediate educational success and their lifelong political engagement.

Reference: Julianna Sandell Pacheco and Eric Plutzer. “Stay in School, Don’t Become a Parent: Teen Life Transitions and Cumulative Disadvantages for Voter Turnout” American Politics Research 35(1), January 2007: 32-56.

Explaining Environmental Concern

2007-02-22T20:02:00.000-08:00

Why do some people take it upon themselves to care for the environment – whether by recycling, cutting back on driving, or other methods – while others don’t seem to care at all? A recent study by Swedish researchers Anna Olofsson and Susanna Öhman, published in Environment and Behavior, finds that a host of factors are associated with environmental concern among North Americans and Scandinavians – especially their levels of education, political affiliation, and their general beliefs and values.

The researchers’ large scale questionnaire and system of categorization involved nearly 5,000 adults from the United States, Canada, Norway, and Sweden. Respondents were categorized according to their gender, age, education, residence type, and political affiliation, as well as their individual beliefs about materialism and individualism vs. social collectivism.

When the results were tabulated, women were shown to have higher environmental concern than men, as were younger adults and those who leaned toward the left politically. Individualists, of which there were more in the U.S. and Canada, expressed less environmental concern than collectivists.

Interestingly, education was found to be the most stable predictor of environmental concern, with a higher education level corresponding to greater concern in all four countries. The gender and age trends were weaker, and left-leaning political affiliation correlated significantly with environmental concern only in Scandinavia.

Taken on their own, these results are mostly what you’d expect. But there’s more. As the old adage says, actions speak louder than words – and feeling or expressing concern about the environment doesn’t necessarily mean that a person will act on that concern in a concrete way. Olofsson and Öhman noted this distinction and addressed it by adding a measure of environmental behavior to their study. While younger people felt more concern about the environment, questions about the financial sacrifices they would make to benefit the environment and relevant political behavior revealed that older adults were more likely to actually do something about their concern.

Of course, a general increase in financial stability during the life course explains part of this finding. However, there seems to be a strong bystander effect as well. One portion of the study asked participants about their level of resignation toward the environment. The same groups that expressed more environmental concern and behavior – women, collectivists, and those with more education – expressed less resigned attitudes.

Perhaps, then, the secret to saving our environment lies not just in solar powered houses or electric cars, but rather in something psychological: our own level of self-efficacy. While new technologies have the potential to make a difference, they are powerless if we don’t use them, and we won’t use them if we don’t believe in our personal ability to make a difference.

Reference:

Olofsson, Anna and Öhman, Susanna. General Beliefs and Environmental Concern: Transatlantic Comparisons. Environment and Behavior. November 2006. Vol. 38. Pages 768-791.

Human Nature Redux, Redux

2007-02-21T11:02:00.000-08:00

Following up on Jeremy Smith's post (below) about David Brooks's recent column in The New York Times, he and I, along with Greater Good co-editor Dacher Keltner, sent this letter to the Times:

To the Editor:

In his Feb. 18 column, “Human Nature Redux,” David Brooks would have us believe that there's no such thing as "natural human goodness"--that human genes condemn us to lives of evil and nastiness. Yet cutting edge research supports the opposite conclusion: that we are wired to be good.

Consider these empirical findings: When people perform altruistic acts, the same regions of their brain light up as when they receive rewards or experience pleasure; humans are equipped with specialized "mirror neurons" that enable us to empathize with others; we produce the hormone oxytocin, which promotes social bonding, trust, and generosity; and activation of our vagus nerve, a bundle of nerves near the spinal cord, increases compassion and cooperation.

Indeed, contrary to Mr. Brooks's ill-informed column, these scientific findings reveal the deep biological roots of human goodness—which promote the kindness and cooperation vital to human survival and progress.

Dacher Keltner, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley;
Co-editor, Greater Good magazine

Jason Marsh
Co-editor, Greater Good magazine

Jeremy Adam Smith
Managing Editor, Greater Good magazine

Cyber Social Intelligence

2007-02-20T16:20:00.000-08:00

Daniel Goleman has a nice piece in today's Science section of The New York Times, applying his theory of social intelligence to email and other forms of electronic communication. It's bascially about "flaming" (which researchers call “online disinhibition effect,” a term I hadn't heard before). Flaming's nothing new, but Goleman offers a neuroscientific explanation for flaming that helps us better understand its causes, and possibly even suggests how we can curtail it.

New research, writes Goleman,

points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy.... But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.

So what can we do to reduce flaming, restore some civility to online conversations, and save a lot of people from unwanted embarassment? Goleman cites one proposal to replace typed messages with video chats. That would probably be effective, but cost will prevent it from catching on anytime soon--not to mention the fact that people prefer the anonymity that the web affords them, it's why many of them spend time online in the first place, for better or worse.

More effective, it seems (as Goleman suggests), would be doing more to teach good old-fashioned social intelligence. If more people can learn to reflect on their emotions, and the consequences of their actions, before saying or doing something that might hurt others (and reflect badly on themselves), I'd guess that rates of flaming would drop, as would many other forms of incivility and cruelty. I'd also surmise that incidences of flaming would still be higher than those other forms of incivility, for all the neuroscientific reasons Goleman cites.

But wouldn't it be fascinating to do a content analysis of emails sent by people who score high in empathy and other forms of social intelligence? I wonder how much their real-world social skills hold up online, and how frequently those skills begin to break down when mediated through a screen and keyboard. Research like that would truly help us gauge the uninhibiting effects of online anonymity.

Human Nature Redux?

2007-02-20T13:43:00.000-08:00

In his Feb. 17 New York Times column, "Human Nature Redux," David Brooks argues that belief in human goodness is nearly extinct--and that science is responsible:

Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don’t even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness.

This belief, most often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins with the notion that “everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Human beings are virtuous and free in their natural state. It is only corrupt institutions that make them venal...

This belief had gigantic ramifications over the years. It led, first of all, to the belief that bourgeois social conventions are repressive and soul-destroying... It led people to hit the road, do drugs, form communes and explore free love in order to unleash their authentic selves...

Let's pause here and ask ourselves if what Brooks writes is true.

Perhaps belief in goodness led people to hit the road and launch communes, but drugs? Does a belief in human goodness compel the believer to take drugs? Are crack addicts and pot smokers united in their faith that men and women are born good?

I wasn't able to find an empirical study (I looked) that says so, and I doubt very much that Brooks found one. Most of the studies I found pointed to histories of abuse, stress, and so on that fuel patterns of addiction--I didn't see anything about Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mr. Brooks continues:

In the realm of foreign policy, it led to a sort of global doctrine of the noble savage — the belief that societies in the colonial world were fundamentally innocent, and once the chains of their oppression were lifted something wonderful would flower.

Whose belief? When? Obviously Brooks is referring to the anticolonial struggles of the middle of the twentieth century, when European empires collapsed under their own weight and the nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America gained some degree of independence--leading, in many cases, to wars and civil wars, dictatorships, and border disputes. To be sure, such struggles produced armies of disappointed idealists, few of whom, I think it's safe to say, saw themselves as "noble savages."

But more seriously, it is false to claim that simple belief in human goodness is what lifted "the chains of their oppression." If only that had been the case. No, I think if Brooks bothered to research the anticolonial struggles of the era, he'd find that it was a combination of economic failure and guerrilla warfare that drove Europeans out of their colonies. In the end, they didn't have much choice in the matter.

Brooks continues:

Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded.

The past 30 years? Here's a quote I found from a 1932 issue of Time Magazine: "Simple human goodness is out of style. To modern eyes it appears too simple to be good, too good to be true." And so it seems that for newspaper and magazine columnists, simple human goodness is continuously going out of style; for the rest of us, however, it somehow persists. This lack of perspective does not stop him from continuing:

It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science.

Did progressive education fail? I will put that question aside; it's beyond the scope of a single blog entry. Instead I am going to focus on the alleged "big blow" science delivered to belief in human goodness. Writes Brooks:

From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists...

Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups...

Where to begin? On nearly every point, Brooks proves himself to be wrong or ill-informed or out-of-date.

Far from believing that "human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules," today neuroscientists (and scientists in many other disciplines) are discovering that brain structures are more "plastic"--that is, "subject to changes brought about by environmental input"--than previously supposed. "Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest," writes UC Berkeley Social Psychologist (and Greater Good editor) Dacher Keltner. "These studies support a view of emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive--a view which has its origins in Darwin's Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Compassion and benevolence, this research suggests, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated."

In his introduction to Douglas P. Fry's new book Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace, Robert Sapolsky, professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and of neurology at Stanford's School of Medicine, demolishes the case Brooks tries to make in his column. Sapolsky is worth quoting at length:

One of the truly well-entrenched realms of It-Is-Inevitable-That is that it is inevitable that humans will be violent and that human societies will wage warfare... Anyone noticing the blood-drenched world we live in would have to take that idea seriously. And academics of various stripes have as well.

Students of primatology and human evolution sure thought this. The 1960s saw the rise of the Robert Ardrey / man-the-territorial-hunter / big-cojones school of human evolution. Drawing upon the social system of the savanna baboon as a surrogate for our formative history in the savanna, the conclusion was that we are by nature a violent, stratified, male-dominated species...

[Meanwhile, the] game theorists were awash in the inevitability of violence and noncooperation as well... Neuroendocrinolosts weighed in also. Testosterone increases aggression, as it increases the excitability of parts of the brain relevant to aggression...

And, naturally, none of this is true.

Even those violent chimps and baboons can reconcile after fights, have cooperative, altruistic relationships, can even establish and transmit cultures of low aggression. Then there are the bonobo chimps, a separate species that is as genetically related to us as are chimps, a species that is female-dominated, has remarkably low rates of aggression, and solves every conceivable social problem with every conceivable type of sex. The game theorists, meanwhile, have spent recent years revealing the numerous circumstances that select for cooperation rather than competition even in competitive games...And normal levels of testosterone turn out not to cause aggression as much as exaggerate preexisting social tendencies...

Thus Brooks is quite wrong to write that science has dealt "a big blow" to belief in human goodness. The opposite is true. If his column proves anything, it's that belief that humans are born evil goes hand in hand with shoddy and superficial thinking.

Maslow's Theory Revisited

2007-02-16T00:22:00.000-08:00

What motivates people to choose their career, to choose their mate, to treat other people in the way that they do? According to legendary psychologist Abraham Maslow, people are motivated by their needs. Indeed, most scholars of psychology recognize Maslow by his famous pyramid, termed the hierarchy of needs.

The base of Maslow’s pyramid contains our most basic biological needs, while safety, love, and self-esteem form the next three levels, respectively. The textbook capstone of the pyramid is a desire for self-actualization, or self-fulfillment. Without meeting one’s basic needs at the bottom, said Maslow, one cannot have those more evolved, uniquely human needs at the top. Thus self-actualization, according to Maslow’s first model, is what all people ultimately strive toward—it’s the purpose of life.

But a new article in the Review of General Psychology revisits Maslow’s theory. According to its author, Mark Koltko-Rivera, Maslow’s reasoning shifted over the course of his career. The shift occurred while he was studying peak experiences, which are “mystical experiences, aesthetic experiences, [and] emotional experiences involving nature.” Maslow posited that a separate cognitive activity occurs during these experiences. Unlike the egocentrism of everyday thought patterns, the cognitive activity experienced during peak experience “[goes] beyond or above selfhood;” he called this “Being-cognition.”

At first, Maslow assumed “Being-cognition” was a characteristic of the self-actualized individual. He reasoned that as an individual becomes self-actualized, “he is more able to fuse with the world, with what was formally not-self.” However, Maslow soon found his attempt to conflate self-actualization with Being-cognition presented a paradox. Many people he earlier described as being self-actualized, like President Eisenhower, clearly do not engage in “Being-cognition.” Others, like Mother Teresa, do.

In order to account for people like Mother Teresa, who were clearly self-actualized but also held an apparent desire to “identify with something greater than the individual self,” Maslow set a higher motivational level above self-actualization. He named this motivational level “self-transcendence.”

By renaming self-transcendence as the new capstone, Maslow revered the profound human capacity to “[go] beyond or above self-hood.” The implication of Maslow’s revision is eloquently stated in Koltko-Rivera’s final analysis:

At the level of self-actualization, the individual works to actualize the individual’s own potential [whereas] at the level of transcendence, the individual’s own needs are put aside, to a great extent, in favor of service to others... Certainly the image of the best developed human being that emerges from Maslow’s hierarchy is very different depending on which of these two stages is placed at the top of the motivational hierarchy.

Indeed, according to Maslow’s final theory, the purpose of life is not to perfect oneself, but to transcend oneself by connecting with others. This is a radical new understanding of one of the dominant theories in modern psychology.

See Something/Do Something Day

2007-02-15T17:46:00.001-08:00

We've already blogged about the heroic altruism of Wesley Autrey (aka the NYC "Subway Superman") as a perfect example of someone who has transcended "the psychology of the bystander"--the theme of the latest issue of Greater Good.

Now a group of people, inspired by Autrey, have launched a new holiday called See Something/Do Something Day.

Mark your calendars: The first ever See Something/Do Something Day is this Saturday, February 17th. Here's how the folks behind SSDS Day describe their idea:

"You see something in distress, do the right thing. You know? Help out." Wesley Autrey, the New York City resident who leapt to the aid of a young man in the path of an oncoming train, said that. He saw someone in need. He did something. He saved a life. On February 17, we hope you will do something, too. See Something/Do Something Day is an effort to open all of our eyes to the needs we sometimes choose not to see: the homeless man with no breakfast. The schoolyard with no kickball. The elderly neighbor with no ride to the grocery store. The block where no one stops to clean the littered sidewalks. On See Something/Do Something Day, we hope you will see what you want your world to be. And then we hope you will do something to help create it. For more ideas on what you might see and do, talk to your friends, neighbors, and community members, and see the ideas posted at www.seesomethingdosomething.com. Feb. 17. See Something? Do Something.

In an email, the group's founder, Betsy O'Donovan, added,

We're actively soliciting stories about SSDS activities (and supporting photos or similar) to share ideas and progress. We're in this for the long haul and hope to see the idea gain ground as the years go by.

The concept is simple, but that's part of what makes the whole premise so radical: It's a grassroots effort to induce other people to overcome the powerful bystander effect. That's especially appropriate given how the bystander effect feeds on itself. The more people who witness a crisis, the less likely any one of them will respond to it, as they assume someone else will take action. So SSDS Day runs that kind of social influence in reverse, turning potential bystanders into real-world heroes--and (hopefully) inspiring more of us to follow their example.

Social entrepreneurs at Davos and in the streets

2007-02-14T13:14:00.000-08:00

In the current issue of Greater Good, Marc Ian Barasch, talks about the motivating force of social entrepreneurs like Zen roshi Bernie Glassman, who has integrated spiritual practice with compassionate social action. Sojourners Magazine recently posted a copy of Nicholas Kristof's New York Times Jan. 30th editorial, "Do-gooders with Spreadsheets" about social entrepreneurs, including Sojo's own Executive Director Jim Wallis, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:

"the most remarkable people to attend aren’t the world leaders or other bigwigs. Rather, they are the social entrepreneurs. Davos, which has always been uncanny in peeking just ahead of the curve to reflect the zeitgeist of the moment, swarmed with them."

According to Kristof, social entrepreneurship is

"one of the most hopeful and helpful trends around. These folks aren’t famous, and they didn’t fly to Davos in first-class cabins or private jets, but they are showing that what it really takes to change the world isn’t so much wealth or power as creativity, determination and passion."

Other recent and upcoming North American convenings of social entrepreneurs were at the Canadian Conference on Social Enterprise in Vancouver BC at the end of January, and the Social Enterprise Alliance in Long Beach CA in April 2007.

Outside Room 15: Teaching Emotional Intelligence

2007-02-13T09:45:00.000-08:00

Six months ago a newspaper columnist and a sociologist met outside their daughters' kindergarten classroom and started talking about things vital to any parent: their families, their careers, and their desires to raise happy kids. Today their conversation is still going strong. Kelly Corrigan (the columnist) and Christine Carter McLaughlin (the sociologist) are posting their ongoing dialogue here on Greater Good's website, covering scientific research on children and happiness--and discussing how it all applies to life inside and outside of Room 15. This conversation continues last week's conversation about social connections.

Kelly: My daughter can read my face like an emotion monitor -- the pre-explosion lip tightening, the shocked hand-over-mouth, the frustrated teeth-grinding. Does that mean she is a prodigy of emotional literacy?

Carter: She just may be -- the ability to read body language and facial expressions is a big part of emotional intelligence. Emotionally literate children are good at reading social cues, which in turn helps them form strong social bonds.

How is she at managing her own emotions? That's the other big part of emotional intelligence. John Gottman's research shows that children who can regulate their emotions are better at soothing themselves when they are upset, which means that they experience negative emotions for a shorter period of time. They have fewer infectious illnesses and are better at focusing their attention (a skill needed to find flow). Such children understand and relate to people better, and form stronger friendships.

Kelly: I encourage my kids to be outgoing, to share and be fair. Sometimes I feel like I’m making progress, other times it seems like I’ve never encouraged them to make eye contact, take turns, or be inclusive.

Carter: Those are good habits to teach kids, but I’m really talking more about the emotional fundamentals rather than ettiquette. Emotional intelligence is rooted in the parent-child bond. Researchers have paid a great deal of attention to how secure attachments with parents contribute to social competence. Infants and toddlers who are securely attached to their mothers or their daytime caregivers are more mature and positive in their interactions with others. Children who have secure attachments with BOTH their mothers and their caregivers are the most socially skilled of all.

Kelly: So the name of the game is a strong bond. I try to achieve that by listening to my girls, delighting in them, and showing affection. Is that gonna get me there?

Carter: You're on the right track. Bonds are made when parents are consistent, dependable, and sensitive to children's intentions and needs. When parents and caregivers pay close attention and respond to the emotional cues expressed by their children, children learn to regulate their emotions better.

Beyond the bond, parents need to "emotion coach" children by offering them empathy and helping them cope with negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, and fear. Parents who are effective emotion coaches are more than just aware of their children's emotions. They actually consider their children’s outbursts as opportunities to connect with and teach them.

Kelly: Hmm. I can’t say the words “golden opportunity” popped into my head this morning when Claire decided she didn't want to wear her raincoat.

Carter: I hear you. I find it incredibly hard to control my emotions when my kids are melting down, even though I fully understand how important it is to do so. But the true masters are able listen to their children empathetically, helping to explore and validate their feelings.

And they don't stop there. First they help their children verbally label the emotions they are feeling, and then they set limits (e.g, in my house: "it is NOT okay to hit your sister") while helping them problem solve (“if you feel angry, what else can you do besides hitting?”).

Kelly: Oh dear. That sounds exhausting, simple but exhausting. I have never been known for great patience.

Carter: Changing our habits is exhausting, but once you’ve got emotion-coaching down it is probably far LESS exhausting than losing your cool. Just think:

Option A: Scream and yell and otherwise escalate emotions.

Option B: Really listen and try to understand what is happening with your kids.

Often for me, that is enough to get me on the emotion coaching path – I hate for my kids to be feeling badly, and I know I can help them start to feel better by helping them understand what they are feeling, to help them understand that there are limits in our household (which makes them feel secure), and to facilitate their problem solving.

Kelly: So there's losing your cool, which I need to work on, and then there's the matter of expectations. It's hard for me to gauge whether my expectations are reasonable. I would hate to think I am putting too much pressure on my kids. I heard a speaker recently, Madeline Levine, and she struck fear in my heart.

Carter: Let's save a discussion about pressure and The Price of Privelege for next week.

If you liked this "blogversation," check out our previous Outside Room 15 posts:

"flow"and happiness
social connections

Further Reading and References

Two great books about emotion coaching:
Gottman, J. M. (1997). Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child. New York, Simon & Schuster.

Healy, E. D. (2005) EQ and Your Child: 8 proven skills to increase your child’s emotional intelligence. San Carlos, CA: Familypedia Publishing. (Fiona and I are on the cover of this book – Eileen is a friend.)

Belsky, J. (1999). Interactional and Contextual Determinants of Attachment Security. Handbook of Attachment : Theory, Research, and Clinical Applications. J. Cassidy and P. R. Shaver. New York, Guilford Press: 249-264.

Gottman, J. M., L. F. Katz, et al. (1997). Meta-Emotion : How Families Communicate Emotionally. Mahwah, N.J., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hartup, W. W. and B. Laursen (1993). Conflict and Context in Peer Relations. Children on Playgrounds : Research Perspectives and Applications. C. H. Hart. Albany, State University of New York Press: 44-84.

Howes, C. (1988). "Peer Interaction in Young Children." Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (Serial No. 217) 53(1).

Howes, C., C. Rodning, et al. (1988). "Attachment and Child Care: Relationships with Mother and Caregiver." Early Childhood Research Quarterly 3: 403-416.

Shonkoff, J. P., D. Phillips, et al. (2000). From Neurons to Neighborhoods : The Science of Early Child Development. Washington, D.C., National Academy Press.

The Influence of Dreams

2007-02-12T15:45:00.000-08:00

Why do we dream? And why do we have different kinds of dreams at different times?

Many researchers propose that dreams serve to alleviate emotional distress. So by this logic, dreams present distressing scenarios that symbolize similar life events and help dreamers heal from those events while they sleep.

Now a recent study by researchers from the University of Alberta, published in the journal Dreaming, compares the short-term effects of nightmares, which the authors define as primarily containing fear and harm; existential dreams, “in which sadness and separation are salient”; and transcendent dreams, which focus on “awe and magical accomplishment.” The results of the study indicate that existential dreams are most strongly related to “self-perceptual depth,” meaning that they address weighty topics such as spiritual conviction, life’s meaning, and so forth.

Transcendent dreams were most likely to be followed by reports of spiritual release—i.e., the dreamer experienced “refreshing—even ecstatic—freedom from life’s entanglements.” And contrary to general beliefs about the effects of nightmares, the results of this study indicate that nightmares neither have an impact on waking thoughts and feelings nor are they related to dream-induced self-perceptual depth. This study clearly affirms that different dream effects are attributable to different types of dream, which raises an important question about how we think about dreams:

Most commonly, dream researchers have developed linear adaptive models that describe how certain events (e.g., trauma) influence dreaming (e.g., by causing nightmares) and then how dreaming (e.g., nightmares) causes ”adaptive“ dream effects (e.g., by facilitating defensive reactions to similarly traumatic events). However, if different dream types have contrasting short-term functions, it may be useful to construe long-term dream function as the capacity of a complex self-organizing system that depends upon the integration of several simpler capacities (Cummins, 1983). From this perspective, the short-term functions of each impactful dream type, when coordinated according to the system’s superordinate integrative principles, may subserve a long-term function that is irreducible to the function of any particular dream type. Such a decompositional analysis may help to coordinate evidence of temporal relations between the various dream types.

So a sequence of different types of dreams might be more significant than the effects of any one dream. For example, the authors explain, after a significant loss, dreamers reported more nightmares at first, followed by existential dreams, and eventually transcendent dreams, as though the function of each dream type has a psychological priority corresponding to its chronological order. Thinking about dreams in this way could truly change how we understand how our mind works while we sleep.

Benefit for the Green World Campaign

2007-02-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

Greater Good contributor and best-selling author Marc Ian Barasch (author of the incredible Field Notes on the Compassionate Life -- www.compassionatelife.com) is hosting a benefit this Sunday for a new nonprofit he has started, the Green World Campaign (www.greenworldcampaign.org). Here's Marc's invitation:

The benefit will be at the e3rd Lounge, a cool new downtown LA restaurant. It's our "soft launch" to kick off what I think will be an effective and fun way to help the world.

4-6 music and mingle, talk, drink and eat great hors d'oeuvres by Master Chef Sean Ahn
6-6:30 short presentation, film clip
7-9 music and dance

Feel free to send this invite to anyone else you think might enjoy it. ($20 at the door, tax-deductible, with the money going to tree-planting in Ethiopia and our website development).

Location: e3rd Lounge, 734 E. 3rd St., L.A. 90013 (in the Arts District, near JapanTown).
Tel: 213.680.3003

Hope to see you there!
Marc Ian Barasch
www.greenworldcampaign.org

Outside Room 15: Social Connections

2007-02-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was a newspaper columnist who spent most of her time trying to figure out how to live happily. One day, while watching her daughter rub her palms raw on the monkey bars, she met a PhD candidate who was doing the very same thing. That is, watching her daughter rub her palms raw while trying to figure out how to live happily. While the columnist had been relying mostly on anecdotal evidence to support her theories, the PhD candidate had been pulling all nighters for six years, forced, as academics are, to pin her theories to studies and statistics. The writer ran an idea past the researcher and a conversation started that, six months later, is still going strong every weekday outside Room 15.

This conversation is continued from last week.

Kelly: So about connection. You know how there's this prevailing desire for space and privacy? People dream of a home with a long driveway on five acres but if and when they get there, it's too quiet, too isolated, too removed from the comforting sounds of a neighborhood. At least for me, the thing I like most about my home is seeing people walk by as I do my dishes or bumping into friends as I walk my kids to school.

Carter: This is what sociologists call social integration, and the upshot of all the research on it is that social connectedness is so closely related to well-being and personal happiness the two can practically be equated. Robert Putnam wrote a really interesting book, Bowling Alone, about how we Americans are becoming less and less connected to one another.

Countless studies document the link between society and psyche: people who have close friends and confidants, friendly neighbors, and supportive co-workers are less likely to experience sadness, loneliness, low self-esteem, and problems with eating and sleeping…The single most common finding from a half century's research on the correlates of life satisfaction, not only in the United States but around the world, is that happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one's social connections (Putnam 2000, p. 332).

Kelly: That’s huge. We could stop right there. The sum of 50 years of research is that social connections create happiness? Wow.

Carter: Seriously, think about that again and how we spend our time: our happiness is best predicted by the quantity and quality of our relationships with others. So proximity to neighbors and friends is an advantage to be valued, not a hardship to be tolerated.

Kelly: Thank God! Acreage in California is a non-starter. And it’s what my children gravitate towards – more kids, more noise, more chaos. It is their natural inclination.

Carter: I do think we are hard-wired to want to be together, and kids tend to show us that. Unfortunately, the average American household is getting smaller and smaller.

Kelly: So what do I do? Me with my tiny household? How can I compensate?

Carter: We’re lucky—our neighborhood is perfect for building social connections because it is safe, and we have sidewalks, and lots of reason to use them since we’re all walking our kids to and from school. So let’s take advantage of that: be invested in our schools and connected to our neighbors.

Kelly: That means building in extra time to connect throughout the day. If our schedule is too tight, I find we have no time to stop and have a chat, or pet a dog, or see my neighbor’s new deck—whatever interactive opportunities present themselves. I want my kids to see me prioritize friendship over the day’s To Do list.

Carter: Well, you’ve hit on something critical there. For kids to have and be good friends, they need more than time to stop and chat. They need to be emotionally literate, and it is incredibly important for us to teach this—emotional literacy—to our children. Let’s talk about that tomorrow!

Further Reading:
Myers, D. G. (2000). The American Paradox : Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty. New Haven Conn., Yale University Press.

Putnam, Robert D. 2000. Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster.

What's Your Jen Ratio?

2007-02-07T14:33:00.000-08:00

My work as a psychologist—and my life as a father—has led me to believe that a simple fraction can tell us whether or not we’re truly happy. Put aside your justified suspicions for a moment and consider the following ratio--we’ll call it the jen ratio, in honor of the Confucian concept jen, which refers to a multilayered mixture of humanity, benevolence, and kindness not well captured by any word or phrase in the English language. A person of jen, Confucius observes, “wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others,” and “brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion.”

In the denominator of the jen ratio place recent actions in which someone has behaved in selfish, malevolent fashion, bringing the bad in others to completion -- the aggressive driver who flips you off as he roars in front of you, pealing away; the disdainful diner in a pricey restaurant who sneers at less well heeled passersby. Above this, in the numerator of the ratio, list recent benevolent acts of others, which brought the good in others to completion – a kind hand on your back in a crowded subway car; the woman who laughs melodiously as a stranger accidentally steps on her foot. The greater the value of the jen ratio, the more humane your world. The smaller the number becomes, the clearer it is that you are living in a Hobbesian, dog-eat-dog world, bloody in tooth and claw.

Let’s take the jen ratio for a test drive. An after school moment at my daughters’ playground yields the following: In the numerator, two boys laugh, giving each other noogies on the head; girls do handstands and cartwheels, giggling at their butt-thumping mistakes; on a grassy field, laughing kids dog pile on a young boy deliriously clasping the football to his chest. In the denominator, a boy calls a smaller boy baboon breath, in measured, low tones; two girls whisper, heads askance, about another girl who tries to enter into their game of unicorn. This minute of playground life yields a jen ratio of 3/2, or 1.5. A pretty good scene.

Let’s compare that with… in an interminable, eight minute line to buy stamps. I see 24 varieties of exasperation, from sighs to glares to threatening groans of the bureaucratically imprisoned, and one guy laugh 3 times. 3/24 = .125. Not such an uplifting time. And then how about two minutes of a video game? That’s easy: 38 heads explode/0; it’s infinitely malevolent.

One can apply the jen ratio to any realm -- our interior life, the esprit of a family in a photograph, the face of a loved one at a poignant moment in time, the tenor of a dinner party or family reunion, the ebbs and flows of intimacy in the life long relations of two sisters, the rhetoric of presidents, the spirit of historical eras, the good will of a neighborhood, more satisfying and more trying periods of a marriage.

Of course, a high jen ratio does not define what is right or good. Sitcoms, cheerleaders, servers at fastfood restaurants, and beauty pageant contestants, on the surface, yield higher jen ratios than any page of Dostoevsky, most paintings of Van Gogh, and the films of Scorscese. Think of the jen ratio as a snapshot, though, of the state of your life as you perceive it, and as it truly is.

Bystanders in the News, Pt. 2

2007-02-06T11:34:00.000-08:00

In the 1960s, the late Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted one of psychology's most famous and controversial experiments. He wanted to test how willing the average person would be to obey an authority figure, even when instructed to perform morally dubious acts that violated his or her conscience. Inspired by recent revelations of Nazi war crimes--his first study began around the time that Adolf Eichman went on trial--Milgram wanted to test the idea that, if placed in certain situations, many seemingly good people would be capable of evil deeds.

Study participants were instructed to give a shock to someone in another room each time that person failed to get an answer right on a memory test. (The shocks weren't real, but the participants didn't know that.) The "shocks" supposedly got more intense with every wrong answer; when participants would hesitate, someone in a lab coat would instruct them to proceed. Before the experiment, Milgram's colleagues guessed that 1-2 percent of participants would go all the way to administer the most lethal shocks. His actual results were, well, shocking: 62.5 percent of the participants were willing to keep giving shocks until there were no more shocks to give, even after the shock recipient begged, pleaded, and then become eerily silent.

Milgram's experiment is very relevant to our latest issue of Greater Good, with its focus on "the psychology of the bystander." We wanted to explore why moral people, often influenced by group dynamics, often don't take moral action when it's called for, especially when it involves coming to the aid of someone in distress; we also wanted to try to understand the psychological and social factors that do induce some people to perform altruistically and even heroically when put to the test.

Of course, we were curious to see how we'd hold up in many of the scenarios described in our issue--like seeing people beaten, bullied, or just in need of some spare change--and we also wondered whether people today would in general fare any better than Milgram's subjects did in the '60s.

ABC News took it one step further: They worked with a psychologist at Santa Clara University to recreate Milgram's methods, albeit in a slightly more ethical fashion.

They ran their story about the results last month, just as our bystander issue was coming out. Read their story to check out their results. But in a nutshell: not much as changed.

Moral Monkeys

2007-02-05T14:25:00.000-08:00

From today's Boston Globe:

Morality, [Marc Hauser] argues, is influenced by cultural teachings but is also so deep and universal an aspect of human existence that it is effectively "hard-wired" into the brain, much like the instinct for language...

A psychologist, evolutionary biologist, and anthropologist, Hauser has felt students grow restless as he talks about the underpinnings of morality. In one class, he said, a student complained, "I know where you're going: Because it's universal, it's biological, and therefore there's no role for religion."

Hauser recalls responding: "I'm not saying you shouldn't derive meaning from religion. I'm just telling you that at some level, the nature of the moral judgments that you make and I make are the same, even though I don't go to church and you do..."

In general, Hauser's morality work is part of a growing movement called experimental philosophy that has philosophers rising from their armchairs and seeking to gather hard evidence on the deep moral workings of the mind: "evidence from evolutionary theory, from comparing humans to other animals, and other methods to derive constraints on the nature of these principles, constraints we couldn't just derive by reasoning alone," said Joshua Knobe, an experimental philosopher at UNC.

I found the student's objection curious. Why can't religion be a formalized, ritualized expression of innate biological instincts? Why couldn't Hauser's research point us to a divine, conscious design for humanity? From this perspective, organized religion is not the font of morality--that lies elsewhere--but it does retain an important role in operationalizing morality in everyday life, helping people to navigate ethical choices, and joining with others in a mutually supportive community. Of course, I suspect the student's complaint has more to do with power than morality.

People interested in these issues might want to read this dialogue at the Daddy Dialectic blog, about the role of religion in raising moral kids.

Bystanders In the News

2007-02-05T11:05:00.000-08:00

Our latest issue of Greater Good magazine came out this month, featuring several essays about "the psychology of the bystander." We look at the factors that do--and don't--induce people to come to the aid of others in a crisis situation.

Just before this issue came off the press, the front page of The New York Times told the story of Wesley Autrey, a man who leapt onto the NYC subway tracks to save a stranger who was having a seizure... while a train was approaching the station... while Autrey's two little daughters stood on the platform. A few days later, the Times's Week in Review section included an article that discussed research on the bystander phenomenon, interviewing many of the same people featured in our issue. (Autrey was later honored in President Bush's State of the Union address.)

I won't go until all the factors that may or may not contribute to bystander action or inaction--for that you'll have to read the issue--but one thing I found notable was that Autrey served in the Navy. In an article my co-editor, Dacher Keltner, and I wrote for this issue of Greater Good, psychologist John Darley mentioned how a person's past experiences might determine whether or not they come to someone's aid in the future--i.e., someone accustomed to making snap decisions in a crisis might be more likely to intervene rather than remain a bystander. Darley remembered how one particular participant in one of his studies reacted when Darley and his colleagues pumped (benign) smoke into the room where this guy was sitting, to see how he (and other participants) would react to that sign of danger.

Darley recalled how the guy "got the hell out [of the room] and did something, because of his past experiences." And what "past experiences" was Darley referring to? The man's stint in the Navy, where his ship once caught on fire.

So is military service the key to not acting the bystander? No, but I don't think this should necessarily be dismissed as coincidence, either. Do people who are prone to risk their lives for others join the Navy, or does the Navy make people more willing to risk their lives for others? I don't know that either is true, but I don't doubt there's some connection--do you?

Forgiveness in Action

2007-01-31T11:28:00.000-08:00

An amazing story of forgiveness:

Nearly four months ago, a milk delivery-truck driver lined up 10 girls in a one-room schoolhouse in this Amish farming community and opened fire, killing five of them and wounding five others before turning the gun on himself...

The Amish and the non-Amish have given the widow of the gunman, Charles C. Roberts IV, and the couple’s three children comfort and unconditional support. Neighbors put up a Christmas tree at the local volunteer fire hall and decorated it with toys and gift cards for the family. Soccer players at Solanco High School in nearby Quarryville made it a point to show their encouragement by attending soccer matches played by the Robertses’ young son Brice...

On the wall in a firehouse dining room is a watercolor of the schoolyard painted by a local artist, Elsie Beiler. Its title is “Happier Days,” and it depicts the Amish children of Nickel Mines playing, without a care, before the shooting. Five birds, which some say represent the dead girls, circle in the blue sky above.

Ms. Beiler said the fact that she knew some of the victims’ families had inspired her to paint the scene and to donate some of the money from the sale of prints to the victims’ fund. “I pray for the families of the children,” Ms. Beiler said. “And I thought about what a struggle it was for them to live out each day in forgiveness.”

This capacity to forgive is rare in America today (think, for example, of the responses that followed 9/11) and I think many, perhaps most, people, including me, would find it difficult to embrace this kind of profound forgiveness. Some will even argue against forgiveness, and for retribution as a healthier and more just response to violence. A story like this also raises an interesting question: is it possible for forgiveness of this type to be practiced in a secular community, or does it require a concept of god and spirit in order to flourish?

Marriage, No Marriage and Happy Marriage

2007-01-30T13:59:00.000-08:00

As a sociologist with an interest in family issues, headlines like “51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse” and “Why Are There So Many Single Americans?” are bound to catch my attention. Both of these articles, which appeared in the New York Times earlier this month, address the fact that in 2005, married couples became a minority in American households. A number of factors are shaping contemporary marriage trends: high divorce rates, Americans are waiting longer before they marry or are living with unmarried partners for longer periods of time and, since women outlive men, women are more likely to live longer as widows.

So for those who are married, and those who intend to (re)marry, what factors seem to contribute to partners’ well-being and life satisfaction? A 2004 study by Stutzer and Frey , which focused on the causal relationships between marriage and subjective well-being, found that the more similarities there were between partners, the higher they rated their life satisfaction. Stutzer and Frey found that couples with similar levels of education gain, on average, more satisfaction from marriage than spouses with large differences. This suggests that “similar or homogenous partners are expected to share values and beliefs” and that this homogeneity is likely to facilitate supportive relationships and a sense of companionship that comes from enjoying joint activities.

Stutzer and Frey also found that marriages in which the husband was the sole breadwinner and the wife stayed home, reported on average higher life satisfaction than dual income couples. Interestingly, it is women’s life satisfaction that is driving this distinction between traditional and dual income couples. While men from both kinds of couples report similar levels of life satisfaction, it is women in dual income marriages who report significantly lower levels of life satisfaction than women in traditional marriages. This suggests that in dual income couples, women continue to bear most of the responsibility for childcare and housework, despite sharing economic responsibilities with their husbands. The stress resulting from two jobs – one in the paid labor market and one in the home – might “reduce the subjective well-being most markedly for women with children.”

Although it seems that changing patterns of courtship, marriage, divorce, and labor force participation are among a number of factors that have resulted in the fact that Americans now spend half of their adult lives outside of marriage, it is clear that there are ways for people to “do” marriage better. While the findings of studies like those of Stutzer and Frey can be interpreted in a number of ways, if Americans want to focus on ensuring high levels of life satisfaction for themselves and their partners, one way to do so is to make sure that their partners are not bearing a disproportionate amount of the responsibility for various family tasks and to find ways to increase a sense of companionship that is fulfilling for both partners.

Outside Room 15: Chocolate Ice Cream vs. "Flow"

2007-01-25T19:04:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time there was a newspaper columnist who spent most of her time trying to figure out how to live happily. One day, while watching her daughter rub her palms raw on the monkey bars, she met a PhD candidate who was doing the very same thing. That is, watching her daughter rub her palms raw while trying to figure out how to live happily. While the columnist had been relying mostly on anecdotal evidence to support her theories, the PhD candidate had been pulling all nighters for six years, forced, as academics are, to pin her theories to studies and statistics. The writer ran an idea past the researcher and a conversation started that, six months later, is still going strong every weekday outside Room 15.

KC: If I inventoried my kids’ moods, I’d bet that watching TV and eating ice cream and getting to play at a friend’s house longer would be the high points of every week. Is that happiness? And if it is, what’s so hard about that?

CCM: Who said happiness is hard? For kids I think it comes quite easily, even to moody American teenagers—70% report being quite happy.

There's definitely happiness—in the form of pleasure—that comes from laughing at a TV show, snarfing down ice cream, and playing with a buddy. A happy life is full of positive feelings, and those can easily come from a television show, an ice cream cone (which has the added benefit of triggering a physiological response in the brain’s pleasure center) and a playdate. The thing is, happy for how long? The feelings from the TV show fade. That ice cream is gonna boomerang when all that sugar dumps them. The one thing you mentioned that has a chance at generating lasting or meaningful happiness, in my opinion, is the playdate.

KC: So that’s why I’m having so much fun right now. Because I’m playing with my friend.

CCM: Well, you might be having just as much fun watching a funny movie while eating ice cream, but I'd say we’ve got two things going on right now that have been shown to create more lasting happiness. The first is “flow,” that blissful state when you are exercising your unique strengths. I love how Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chick-SENT-me-high-ee”), the world’s foremost expert on “flow,” describes it:

[A] person in flow is completely focused...Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification.

KC: I love flow--like when you forget to eat or when you leave your coffee in the microwave all morning because you got going on something and you never even heard the beep or missed the caffeine.

CCM: Exactly, and kids have flow too. Look at our three year-olds, Molly and Claire, and how they get lost in their pretend play. Joint imaginative play is hard for three year-olds, but they have so much in common [mainly, obsession with the Wizard of Oz] that what is normally difficult is actually, for them, the ideal developmental challenge. That’s a key aspect of flow: the challenge cannot be too difficult, which just leads to frustration and anxiety, or too easy, which would lead to boredom and loss of engagement.

KC: Just like Goldilocks and her porridge: not too hot, not too cold, just right.

CCM: That's it. And I’d argue that the happiness Claire and Molly experience from their play far surpasses what they’d get out of watching TV—which takes no skill whatsoever. Their imaginative play is actually an application of their unique skills and talents.

KC: It's the difference between fleeting pleasure and happiness, the difference a quick tickle and a long hug.

CCM: I think this is one of the important lessons in the childhood roots of adult happiness: kids learn to achieve flow when we enable them to participate in the activities likely to produce it--namely, those things that both challenge them and provide them with some immediate feedback.

KC: So that's the name of the game, helping them find flow. I got it. Makes me happy just thinking about it.

CCM: I gotta say that there is another really obvious thing happening here that is making us happy: we’ve got a meaningful social connection (aka friendship). Hanging out with you outside Room 15 and talking about life and happiness makes me feel connected, both to you and to our larger community of families and teachers.

KC: So let's talk about connection, because some connections feel good and some don't. You know? I have some questions about that.

CCM: It'll have to wait for next week.

References & Further Resources:

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding Flow : The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York, BasicBooks. Quote above on pp. 31-32.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., K. R. Rathunde, et al. (1993). Talented Teenagers : The Roots of Success and Failure. Cambridge England ; New York, N.Y., Cambridge University Press.

a little tickler about the correlation between friendship and happiness...

Diener, E. and M. E. P. Seligman (2002). "Very Happy People." Psychological Science 13(1): 81-84.

The Mind of the Bystander

2007-01-24T16:02:00.000-08:00

The latest issue of Greater Good includes several essays about “the psychology of the bystander.” The issue considers why some people do nothing when they witness a crisis, while others spring to action. Why do we all act like bystanders in some situations, but not in others? Are some people less likely to act like bystanders—and if so, is that because of the way they were raised, their religious background, or just the specifics of the situation they find themselves in at a given moment in time?

Included in the issue is an interview I conducted with Philip Gourevitch, the editor of The Paris Review who’s also the author of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. Based on his reporting in Rwanda and elsewhere around the world, I wanted to ask Gourevitch what he sees as the factors that induce nations to intervene—or as is more often the case, not intervene—in regional violent conflicts around the world.

He had a pretty realpolitik take on international affairs, explaining how lofty humanitarian ideals are often difficult to put into practice. At one point in the interview he explained U.S. reluctance to intervene in regional conflicts, even in instances of genocide, as evidence that we feel a stronger emotional connection to people who live in greater proximity to us.

So if you find out that people whose existence you had never previously noticed are raping and axe murdering some other such people on the other side of the planet, do you say, “Let’s get in the middle of that. If we don’t stop it we’re all less safe—they’re human beings just like us”? Alas, it just doesn’t feel that way to most people. Of course, they’re human beings, and it’s a terrible thing, but the sense of a shared fate is weakened by distance and difference.

I’d have to agree with him. It's a pretty obvious point: Instinctively, we don’t feel as strong a moral obligation to people halfway around the world as we do to people next door to us, not to mention our own friends and family.

But I can’t say I feel good about that. And I also wonder whether it has to be so. Why exactly do we feel this way? Is it just a result of social conditioning, biological predispositions, or some combination of the two? And perhaps more importantly, even if we are hard-wired to feel this way, does that make it right?

Neuro-psychologist Joshua Greene has some pretty provocative answers to these questions. Greene studies the neurological bases of our moral decision making. In one study, he presented participants with different moral dilemmas. In one, you would imagine driving along a country road when you see a man by the side of the road, his legs covered in blood. This man will probably lose his leg if he doesn’t get to a hospital soon, but if you pull over, the blood would do a few hundred dollars worth of damage to the leather upholstery in your car. Should you pull over?

In another scenario, participants would consider receiving a letter from a reputable international aid organization, asking for a donation of two hundred dollars. The letter explains that a two-hundred-dollar donation will allow this organization to provide needed medical attention to some poor people in another part of the world. Would it be morally acceptable to not make the donation?

Greene tested participants’ brain activity as they mulled over these dilemmas. He assumed, as would most of us, that most people would find inaction in the first scenario to be morally reprehensible, but not in the second. He wanted to see if this moral distinction was at all reflected in participants’ brain activity.

He found a difference in brain activity when people considered “personal” moral dilemmas, where they come into close contact with someone like the man with the bloody leg, as opposed to “impersonal” ones like the request from the aid organization: When people considered the “personal” dilemmas, their brains showed greater activity in areas associated with emotion and social cognition.

What does this mean? In a paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Greene offers an evolutionary interpretation.

Consider that our ancestors did not evolve in an environment in which total strangers on opposite sides of the world could save each others’ lives by making relatively modest material sacrifices. Consider also that our ancestors did evolve in an environment in which individuals standing face-to-face could save each others’ lives, sometimes only through considerable personal sacrifice.Given all of this, it makes sense that we would have evolved altruistic instincts that direct us to help others in dire need, but mostly when the ones in need are presented in an “up-close-and-personal” way.

So, Greene speculates, due to our evolutionary history, we've developed stronger altruistic instincts toward people in close proximity to us. Until relatively recently, we had no definite proof of anyone else on the planet even existing, so we don't have an evolved sense of moral responsibility to individuals who seem more like abstract ideas than human beings. And thus our moral judgments are actually driven by the more immediate, instinctive, emotional responses we have to moral dilemmas, not the rational, abstract calculations we try to make. Greene goes on to ask, “What does this mean for ethics?”

We are tempted to assume that there must be “some good reason” why it is monstrous to ignore the needs of someone like the bleeding hiker, but perfectly acceptable to spend our money on unnecessary luxuries while millions starve and die of preventable diseases. Maybe there is “some good reason” for this pair of attitudes, but the evolutionary account given above suggests otherwise: We ignore the plight of the world’s poorest people not because we implicitly appreciate the nuanced structure of moral obligation, but because, the way our brains are wired up, needy people who are ‘up close and personal’ push our emotional buttons, whereas those who are out of sight languish out of mind.

Greene stresses that, so far, this is just a hypothesis. And I think there are a couple of different ways to interpret his (admittedly preliminary) findings. On the one hand, you could be rather fatalistic about the whole thing: This is just the way we’re wired, so we can’t really expect most people to feel a strong, instinctive moral obligation to others who look very different from them and live halfway around the world. When someone chooses not to care about those people in need, there’s no sense in condemning them for selfishness. They’re just being true to their nature.

But there’s another way to read these findings: Just because a moral judgment is instinctive doesn’t make it right. We should scrutinize all our moral decisions, even—perhaps especially—the ones that come to us reflexively. In fact, knowing the possible neurological (and even evolutionary) basis of these judgments might help dispel the notion that they’re beyond reproach. Most of us know that even if there's a biological basis to them, our whims and predispositions don’t always—or even often—direct us to moral and ethical choices, whether they concern out diet, sex lives, or relationships. So it would certainly seem to be a mistake to confuse our instinctive moral judgments for objective truths.

Greene sort of gets at this in the last paragraph of his Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper.

The maturation of human morality will, in many ways, resemble the maturation of an individual person. As we come to understand ourselves better — who we are, and why we are the way we are — we will inevitably change ourselves in the process. Some of our beliefs and values will survive this process of self-discovery and reflection, whereas others will not. The course of our moral maturation will not be entirely predictable, but I am confident that the scientific study of human nature will have an increasingly important role in nature’s grand experiment with moral animals.

And so where does all this leave Philip Gourevitch and the future of American interventionism? I don’t think it’s entirely clear. But I think it can, at the least, offer some hope for a heightened American sense of responsibility for the problems of those far less fortunate than us. How we should act on that sense of responsibility is a different story.

Altruism: Selfishness or God?

2007-01-22T13:24:00.000-08:00

Altruism has been a hot topic in the blogosphere during the past 24 hours. Anthropolgy.net has an interesting overview of the debate over the origins of altruism. The author concludes:

In any case, people have tried to explain away altruism in all its forms by attributing it all to one thing, like selfishness, or God. I think it helps to step back and really think about how the development of a trait is influenced by many factors, and is not easily reducible to one idea. However we have evolved, it has happened in such a way that there are a number of ways in which we might react or behave in an urgent situation, depending on the individual and numerous other factors. It is also important to realize that natural selection isn't some kind of orchestrated process sorting out the "bad" traits from the "good" ones. Evolution is pretty random sometimes, and has resulted in an amazing diversity of behaviors and traits.

Meanwhile, John Hawks notes a new study in Nature Neuroscience that "claims to have spotted a brain correlate of altruism" -- namely, the posterior superior temporal sulcus. You can find the study itself here and a simple summary of the methodologies and results here:

The results suggest altruistic behavior may originate from how people view the world rather than how they act in it...“We believe that the ability to perceive other people’s actions as meaningful is critical for altruism,” [said one researcher].

In other news: McLean Hospital in Boston is launching a Positive Psychology institute "that will aim to teach healthcare providers and patients some of the more practical tenets of positive psychology, a mix of science and self-help that has been growing explosively in academia and building buzz in the media." This might be the first effort of its kind.

Compassionate Economist

2007-01-22T13:08:00.000-08:00

The SF Chronicle published Rick DelVecchio's article today about John Letiche, a retired UC Berkeley economics professor who specializes in the interesting field of behavioral economics.

"He says all well-functioning national economies have one thing in common, and it doesn't matter their size or how far apart they are politically and culturally: Their leaders know what motivates their people and they provide incentives -- stable currency, balanced budgets, unemployment and health insurance -- that boost individuals' optimism and desire to work, invest and spend."

While Letiche is a fan of markets and globalization, it's interesting to note that he's advocating a moderate stance to its implementation:

"globalization works for no nation without a moderately liberal social safety net in place."

You can access a PDF of Letiche's recent article on how "well-considered" macroecomic policies like this has helped in economic transitions in the Nov. 2006 issue of the Journal of Asian Economics. I wonder what he would think of the movement to include Gross National Happiness as one of these measurable incentives?

I'm interested in fostering entrepreneurial solutions to these "social safety nets", in particular, social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. In my other life I publish the Social Enterprise Reporter, an online business newsletter for social entrepreneurs, and I'll be blogging on this topic here for Greater Good.

Some Thoughts on Family Policy

2007-01-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

Recently I was swapping emails with a group of feminist activists I've known for 15 years. We were talking about progressive family policy.

At some point in the dialogue, I realized that we were starting from two very different assumptions. Theirs was that progressives should fight first and foremost for daycare and preschool, so that mothers could go to work and pursue worldly ambitions.

I couldn't help but feel that my friends saw kids as a burden that public policy should strive to alleviate, shades of Linda Hirshman. And until, oh, about 29 months ago, I pretty much shared their assumption and priorities.

Before my son Liko was born, we figured that after six months my wife would go back to work and we'd engage some form of childcare. Wrong. Liko didn't want his parents to go to work. This might have been a problem, except that we agreed with him. We didn't want strangers to take care of our son. We didn't think it was best for him or for us.

And so we overhauled our lives: first she stayed home with him and I worked; then I (mostly) stayed home with him and she worked; recently I went back to full-time work and she's home with him again. I've thought a great deal about our caregiving impulse and its relationship to our values, and what it might mean for the family policies I'd support as a parent.

UC Berkeley prof Neil Gilbert neatly identifies two feminist models of family, consistent with the different assumptions my friends and I held. The first, functional equality, emphasizes “a model of gender relations marked by a symmetrical division of labor and responsibility” and the elimination of gender categories altogether. This model—whose current most vocal proponent is Linda Hirshman—tends to negate the value of caregiving and argue for children to be placed in daycare, as an alternative to taking parents out of the labor market. The second feminist model, social partnership, regards marital relations “as a partnership built on economic interdependence, mutual adjustment, and self-realization through a combination of domestic activity and paid employment.” My friends embraced the functional equality model; my family has adopted the social partnership.

Just to be clear: Childcare and preschool are good. High-quality childcare should, like health care, be available to anyone who wants and needs it. Moreover, I believe that daycare and preschool should be guaranteed and tightly regulated by government. It's a matter of equity as well as economic development. More women (and men) in the workforce is good for the economy.

Good for the economy, but is it good for children? Is it necessarily a good thing for all mothers and all fathers to march off to work every morning? There are literally hundreds of empirical studies that answer no to these questions; taken together, they suggest that parents working outside the home too much, too early in a child's life is bad for the kid as well as the parents.

In her new book What Children Need, Jane Waldfogel surveys the research and synthesizes the results. She finds that "Children whose mothers work long hours in the first year of life or children who spend long hours in child care in the first several years of life have more behavioral problems...Children do tend to do worse [in health, cognitive development and emotional well-being] if their mothers work full-time."

The effects of paternal employment have hardly been studied; social science firmly places the burdens and joys of caregiving on moms.

Does this mean that conservatives are right? Are working moms guilty of neglect and responsible for America's social ills? Emphatically: no. First of all, and most critically, we need more men to contribute more to taking care of kids.

We need to be careful in interpreting these results [writes Waldfogel], given that in nearly all cases studied the fathers were either working full-time themselves or were not in the household at all. These results tell us the effect of having two parents working full-time or a lone mother working full-time. And so their clearest message is that children would tend to do better if they had a parent home at least part-time in the first year of life. They do not tell us that the parent has to be the mother.

The number of guys who take care of children has doubled during the past ten years, for reasons that remain mysterious (although I think it has quite a lot to do with the success -- yes, friends, success -- of the feminist and GLBT movements, which have altered gender roles and changed power relations). Male mothering (there's a controversial use of a verb!) should be institutionalized, supported, protected, ennobled, and promoted.

Second, the studies also show that parental sensitivity and responsiveness "is the most important predictor of child social and emotional development--more important than parental employment." So there's no point in staying home with your kid if you're not sensitive and responsive--better to hire a nanny. This also means in part that the gender of the caregiver is irrelevant; what's important is that the caregiver--nanny, dad, mom, whoever--is responsive and sensitive to the child's individual needs. (My fellow radicals: forget all that utopian nonsense about kids being raised in creches. Practical experience and research, mostly on Kibbutzim, has shown that treating kids like collective property is actually harmful to their health and well-being. Plus, most parents don't like it.)

Third, we need genuinely family-friendly policies that respect parents' choices and will allow parents of any gender to stay at home as much as possible with their kids for at least the first year. To my mind, this needs to be the progressive policy priority. Such policies are well-known and widely implemented outside of the US, consisting of paid parental leave and wage replacement, job and legal protections, guaranteed health care, requiring employers to consider requests for part-time work, etc. As usual, the social democracies of Scandinavia set the standard; meanwhile, the United States looks like it watches too much Fox News.

It should be acknowledged that support for parents to stay home can help keep parents out of the workforce or inhibit career growth. This impacts women most, but there are solutions to this problem. Sweden combines benefits for parents to stay home with comprehensive daycare and preschool programs and career support for when they go back to work, with good results. But I don't want to move to Sweden. It's too damn cold.

Biology, Empathy, and Science Journalism

2007-01-19T09:18:00.000-08:00

Last month we reviewed a study by Dutch neuroscientist Erno Jan Hermans (and colleagues) that set out to test whether testosterone can inhibit a person's ability to empathize with someone else. To find out, the researchers dosed twenty women with either testosterone or a placebo, and then measured their ability to mimic facial expressions, which previous research has shown to be one marker of empathy. Their results showed that testosterone might indeed reduce empathic behavior.

I initially objected to publishing a brief about the study in the magazine. I'm automatically suspicious of the methodologies and conclusions of any study that suggests biology is behavioral destiny. Plus, even if the science is solid, I didn't think it would be useful to our readers. If testosterone really does limit empathic behavior, so what? How does that knowledge help our readers?

I talked it over with the other editors, Jason Marsh and our resident social psychologist Dacher Keltner, who reviewed the methodologies and felt they checked out. We agreed that reporting the study fell within the mission of the magazine. And so we turned to discussing ways to report the findings that would not play to social stereotypes about men and women. Looking back, I can see that I was learning something about how we can talk about science in popular forums.

It's first critical to begin with the fact that all human beings have the capacity for empathy; it's fundamental to our psychology, with a basis in evolution. Men are human beings and are therefore capable of empathy. That puts the findings in broad perspective. In addition, we need to keep individual variance in mind; I've met lots of men who are more empathetic than many women, and I'm sure you have, too.

Second, it's important to acknowledge the limits of the study. To get those, you first have to read the study and talk to the scientists themselves. Most scientists are extremely reluctant to speculate or make sweeping generalizations based on limited findings, for good reasons; they're also careful to acknowledge the limits of their methodologies and to suggest further areas of study. This doesn't stop journalists, politicians, and bloggers from seizing on findings and putting them at the service of their personal and political agendas; hell, I've done it plenty of times. (That's our job, but I think we can perform our jobs more responsibly.)

In the brief we published in the current issue of the magazine (whose symposium is on the figure of the bystander in contemporary science and culture), we were careful to reflect the limitations of this methodology, noted by the researchers themselves. "While facial mimicry may be one component of empathic behavior, it is clearly not the defining feature," writes Mario Aceves, a fellow with the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, in the brief. "Before we conclude that testosterone leaves men at an emotional disadvantage, additional studies must show that testosterone affects the many other dimensions of empathy."

My colleague Jason Marsh asked Erno Jan Hermans for a comment. "[Testosterone] reduces empathetic behavior; we can't say it reduces empathy,” he said. His research also shows that while "testosterone is a regulating factor in gender-specific behavior... obviously you can never rule out that there are cultural differences in play."

Last and certainly not least, scientific findings of this type don't dictate some kind of automatic ethical or political response. They do not prove that men are by nature emotional dolts, and therefore not accountable for idiotic behavior. They do not suggest that women are in essence loving, nurturing, dove-like creatures of ethereal beauty. No woman who wants to live in a more empathetic, compassionate society should plan to launch all-female communes in South America--even if you were to screen out women with high levels of testosterone, you're still not going to achieve a feminine utopia like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. Human beings are too complex. Attacking complexity is not the path to a better world.

Science is an evolving dialogue, in which new conclusions are constantly modifying old ones. Newton wasn't wrong about how motion changes with time, but Einstein took his ideas to the next level when he showed how mass bends spacetime. When back in the Seventies, Irven DeVore and Robert Trivers launched the field of sociobiology--which sought to find biological bases for human behavior--critics quite rightly raised the specters of Social Darwinism and Nazi eugenics, both of which invoked biological science as justification for policies that ranged from abandonment of the poor, denying rights to women and many other people, forced sterilization, and systematic genocide.

But as sociobiology branched off into evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology, researchers discovered some things about human beings that directly contradicted the specious, self-serving assumptions of the Social Darwinists. Scientists like Johnathan Haidt, Leda Cosmides, Marc D. Hauser, and many others have found that human beings appear to be hardwired for compassion, altruism, cooperation, and so on. Biology might indeed be destiny, but it's a provisional, sanguine kind of destiny that doesn't automatically lead to pessimistic or destructive views of humanity. Above all, a great deal of new science is demonstrating the degree to which we humans are tough, adaptable little monkeys, defined right down to our neurons by a capacity for continuous growth and evolution.

Whenever we read about some new study about parents and children, men and women, we should remember how searching and tenuous the science is, and refrain from sweeping generalizations that might contradict our deepest moral instincts. We can't ever know where our questions will lead, but we can't be afraid to ask them.

Welcome to the Blog for the Greater Good!

2007-01-16T16:24:00.000-08:00

Here at Greater Good Magazine, we cover research into the roots of compassion, altruism, empathy, and other prosocial human behaviors and emotions. Welcome to our trial blog, set up as a test run before we re-launch our website. My name is Jeremy, and this past September I started as the Greater Good'smanaging editor. I hope you join the conversation.