Recently in Prosocial Behavior Category

I recently read an article from The New York Times that spoke negatively of a practice we as a society routinely engage in--small talk. It seems to be difficult for us be comfortable with silence, and instead of talking about deep topics like the state of the world or life's meaning, we talk about petty things that have no real breadth or substance (e.g. Did you see American Idol last night?). Dr. Matthias Mehl, a psychologist with the University of Arizona, has recently published a study on the topic. He is quoted as saying, "By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world, and interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness." The happiest person in his study had twice as many substantive conversations, and only one-third of the amount of small talk as the unhappiest. Could this be true, or do we simply have deeper conversations with those that we have already established deeper relationships with? Dr. Mehl suggests that we attempt to have one substantive conversation a day for the next five days and see how happy we feel. In what ways do you feel you can positively enhance your everyday social exchanges?

Check out this site for a Guide to Having More Meaningful Conversations.

Chapter 10 in Reeve (2009) discusses the self:  defining and creating the self, relating the self to society, discovering and developing personal potential, and managing or regulating the self. 

Becoming a fair and pro-social person is generally thought of as part of the quest of defining and creating the self.  However, a recent New York Times article reviewed a study published by Science that studied how large-scale institutions affected fairness.  This article seems to show that fairness and pro-sociality may be more due to relating the self to society.  The article can be found at 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/science/23tier.html?ref=science

The study used three different experimental designs to determine the effect of large-scale institutions, such as markets and major world religions have on fairness.  These experiments were then carried out in 15 diverse cultures across the world.  The presence of large-scale institutions was determined by the percentage of calories that were purchased - the higher the percentage the higher the market integration.

The study found that the greater the market integration in a community the more fair its citizens were.  The participation in a world religion increased punishment for unfairness in a community.  The authors argue that this is because in market society would not work if everyone were only out for himself or herself.  For market integration to be successful the society must have underlying norms to be fair and trusting with people beyond each individual's social circle.  They found that by having institutions like Wal-Mart our communities have actually become fairer.  The researchers believe that our modern pro-sociality is not solely due to innate psychology but also due to the norms and institutions that have emerged over human history.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20100222/sc_livescience/5thingsthatwillmakeyouhappier

I'm not sure if anyone else has seen this article, but it is about 5 things that will supposedly make a person happier. In short, they are...

1. Be grateful

2. Be optimistic

3. Count your blessings  

4. Use your strengths  

5. Commit acts of kindness

     Although this first one is rather obvious, there is some merit to mentioning it. I believe that trying to get into the habit of putting a positive spin can make life more enjoyable, but as we have read, each person has homeostasis level that will be resistant to change. (The researcher here seem to admit that people generally have certain dispositions and stable personalities throughout their life, but they argue that a significant amount of happiness can also be attributed to pro-active approaches to increasing one's happiness.) In any case, I suppose making an active effort to appreciate what you have may cause at least a minor increase in feelings of happiness.

Being Grateful  - One rather interesting note is that this finding of the study is largely based on an activity where people wrote letters expressing gratitude. In case you are thinking there might be a confound, such as relatedness or affiliation playing a role, I thought of that as well, but it was found that there was an increase in happiness even if people did not actually send the letters out.

Be optimistic - In the study, researchers actually had participants visualize "an ideal future" which included imagining having a loving, supportive partner and a great job. I am not sure if this strategy would necessarily lead to long term happiness though - the researchers did not mention whether or not this was exclusively short term happiness in their summarized report. The reason I say this is because I think over time significant cognitive dissonance would arise (people could become delusional) if there is a strong focus on a "perfect" life. If interpreted this way, this finding would actually seem to be in contrast to the first. If you are being appreciative of what you have, you will not be constantly focusing on the perfect, ideal life. I have heard that some studies have found striving for excellence can be much better than striving for perfection. I know the "being optimistic" strategy could probably be taken on a more moderate and healthy level, but I think the activity the researchers used does not necessarily seem healthy over the long term.

Count your blessings - I do not believe this one merits any further discussion because this "additional" finding seems to be very similar to "being grateful." In fact, there is no separate research mentioned for this in the article.

Use your strengths - The participants in the study (that contributed to this finding) focused on strengths such as using humor to increase others' happiness. I think this is perhaps related to competence, achievement, and relatedness - all concepts that we have recently mentioned in class. Being able to successfully use's one's abilities to accomplish a goal would lead to feelings of competence and achievement. Having someone identify with your achievement (in this case humor)

Commit acts of kindness - although we have not yet talked about pro-social very much in this class, this finding makes sense, and I think it also has something to do with relatedness.

http://money.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=1010030

This articles describes a millionaire that gave all of his money away. All of it. He was raised in a poor family and he was taught to work hard to earn what he wanted in life. He worked hard his whole life, thinking that a little more money and material possessions would finally make him happy, only to realize that it didn't. So, he gave it all away.

His story interests me for several reasons. His display of charitable behavior is one that many people applaud and see as highly altruistic. It's true that his action was extremely generous and will help many orphans gain a quality of life that they couldn't have without his help, but his actions are not altogether altruistic. The reason he gives his money away is because he is still seeking happiness. He first thought that making money and having stuff would make him happy, now he thinks that giving all of his money to people that need it more than him and living a very simple life will make him happy. While his latest search for happiness is definitely beneficial to many people, was his giving out of altruism and generosity alone, or was it motivated by seeking his own happiness?

I would argue that his generosity is still motivated by selfishness, making his giving not entirely altruistic. By no means am I saying that he shouldn't have done it, because I think it's wonderful that so many people in need will benefit from his action, but I think the most basic driving motivator in this case was still seeking his own satisfaction or happiness.

Do you think this decision will result in lasting happiness? Or will it, like the pursuit of money and material possessions, only last in the shorter-term scheme of a lifetime?

I found this great blog about the chameleon effect.  It is about how mimicking what another person does will make them like you more.  The blog talked about an experiment that was done by Chartrand and Bargh (1999).  In it the researchers wanted three questions answered about the chameleon effect.

First: Do people automatically mimic others, even strangers?

                It was found that yes people do automatically mimic others, even strangers.  It was found that the participants in the present of a confederate did mimic their actions, face touching went up by 20%, and foot movement went up by 50%.

Second: Does mimicry increase liking?

                It was found that you do like someone else more if they are mimicking your behavior.  Participants were asked to rate how much they liked the confederate, when the confederate was mimicking the participant, the participants liking of the confederate went up.  However the liking did not go up by much.  On average the rating went from 5.91 to 6.62.

Third: Do high-perspective-takers exhibit the chameleon effect more?

                When they were talking about perspective takers they are referring to the degree to which people naturally take others' perspectives.  They found that people who were perspective takers did in fact mimic more than others.

Here is the blog website http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/11/the-chameleon-effect.php.  On the website they also go into detail as to how they performed the experiments and what the results showed in more detail.  I found this article to be highly interesting because I had always heard that if you were more like someone that you liked each other better.  This experiment helped to prove that, but if you mimic someone their liking of you only goes up by a little bit.

If you want to read the actual article about the experiment it can be found at http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/76/6/893.pdf.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?bl

    This article talks about sociologists who set out to determine which types of gossip travels the fastest (whether people prefer good news, bad news, etc). The researchers studied a list of the New York Times' most emailed articles "checking it every 15 minutes for more than 6 moths... and controlling for factors like placement in the paper or on the Web Home page."

        The main researcher seemed to hypothesize that stories about sex and politics would be among the highest ranked. To his surprise, the stories that were most emailed actually tended to be those emotional in nature, with positive (those that "inspired awe") faring better than those that were negative. Those that are intellectually challenging and lengthy are also more often emailed. There were also a surprisingly high number of scientific articles that made the most emailed list.

       I was rather surprised by some of these results at first, but after thinking about the potential reasons behind the results I believe I understand this data better. Or, perhaps I am suffering from hindsight bias. In any case, I think it does make sense that people would want to send positive, awe-inspiring articles to their friends and loved ones because we very much want to increase others' feelings of happiness. Emotion is at the very core of our being. There is such an abundance of negative news presented on television, perhaps emailing positive articles is a way to help offset cable news' generally negative tone.

       The researchers made a quick observation about how one might have expected articles consisting of financial advice to be more popular. Their thinking was that if Person A gave person B great advice, then person B would return the favor at a later point in time. Another possible motivation they theorized was that some people might just send articles to "show off" and let others know that they stay well-informed.  

      I also found it a little surprising that articles a bit longer in length and "intellectually challenging" would be among the most popular. I have always been rather hesitant to send lengthy articles to friends because I worry that saturating them in an abundance of information that they might not even find remotely interesting could just make them mad. It does make sense though, that longer articles would be more likely to contain some type of interesting information in them than short articles. I wonder if social networking sites present a confound problem that creates a bias in favor of long articles - for example, if I read a short, interesting story and want to summarize what it said for my friends, I will often just post it on my facebook status.  

        The popularity of science articles was a bit baffling at first, but I think it does seem to make sense to me now. I believe people enjoy reading interesting science articles because they help us think in a new and different way. Scientific discoveries help us gain insight and perspective about the true physical and emotional nature of ourselves and our surrounding environment. I think reading about science can evoke feelings of transcendence - there is much we do not know and there is much we will never know, but with each additional step we take in studying the world, we come that much closer to solving the problems we face and that much more connected with the world around us.