Unit 3: Compassion and Kindness
This unit will focus on the human propensity for being pro-social--and how and why this fosters happiness. We will be exploring the human impulse to support and nurture others through compassion, which is perhaps the greatest catalyst of kindness.
There will be several areas we will look at
Compassion from a scientific and cultural perspective The cultural components of compassion
Why practice and how to cultivate compassion https://youtu.be/50gPTzjhmhA
Some questions to consider as we explore compassion:
Why do people so routinely act in a kind fashion whether it be
volunteering or giving money away or helping out a stranger in need or more extreme forms of heroism?
The social science suggest that there are multiple motives that guide kind or altruistic behavior.
We can help people because of empathy.
We can help because we gain in our social status
People tend to esteem others who are generous and kind and that will motivate helping.
Very often we will help and be kind and cooperate through feelings of gratitude or a sense that others have given to us and we
reciprocate in kind.
Social science has really zeroed in on compassion as oneof the primary drivers of kind, altruistic and cooperative behavior.
So what do we mean by compassion?
Compassion is really
the feeling that you
have when you
witness someone else
who is suffering or
who is in need, and
then you have this
motivation to help
them, to ameliorate
their condition or to enhance their welfare.
There is a difference between compassion, when you feel concern
over someone’s welfare and have the desire to help them, with other kinds of states, for example empathy, which is where you understand what someone feels or you may actually show the same emotions as they have.
For example if someone’s in physical pain and you have an empathic response, you too feel physical pain, but you don’t necessarily feel concern.
Much scientific literature talks about the tendency for people to
mimic each other’s behaviors. We mimic or imitate yawns, laughs, tones of voice, face scratching and postural movements, eyebrow movements, etc. But again like empathy, mimicry is something that’s really separate from the feeling of concern about somebody’s welfare as with compassion. There is also the matter of pity; which is the feeling of concern for someone that you feel is inferior to you.
With compassion there isn’t a sense of superiority or inferiority. So we can separate pity from compassion.
Historical Compassion
If we look at the totality of human history going back 3-4000 years the concept of compassion and ethical behavior is center stage.
https://youtu.be/PU7DuoVOTXw?list=PL1t8gs-WJprDHaTTZozWnC6O56n9jHD0A
What these historical, spiritual and philosophical periods have in common is they all attempted to define what happiness and a good life is and the pathways to achieve said happiness.
Christianity where we see for example in Matthew 7:12, “In
everything therefore, treat people the same way you want to treat you, for that is the law.”
Buddhism, states that: “Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.” And this is very much in keeping with the Buddhist philosophy of no harm.
In Islamic traditions you see Mohammad writing: “Hurt no one, so that no one may hurt you.”
Daoism founder Lao Tzu: “He is kind to the kind, he is also kind to the unkind.”
Throughout these great traditions you see this prioritization and emphasis on compassion.
When you think about this feeling of concern for the welfare of others and the desire to lift them up as our definition of compassion, what’s really remarkable is the historical evidence of how prevalent and powerful compassion is in the most unlikely of contexts.
Jonathan Glover, who is a historian who wrote a book called “Humanity.” And Glover surveys the sort of first hand accounts of what war was like and what battle was like in a lot of the 20th
century’s wars: the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the world wars.
What he found is with remarkable regularity, soldiers feel and are really overwhelmed by what he called sympathy breakthroughs, that when they encounter face-to-face, eye-to-eye, their adversaries, their lives are on the line, instead of pulling the trigger, they often broke down with
sympathy and weeping in a sense of common humanity.
This raises an interesting question, why are we compassionate? Why are we so frequently kind and generous?
Some of the earliest science on human evolution is a bit contradictory, for example:
Alfred Russell Wallace, co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, felt that evolution didn’t have a lot to say about
compassion or sympathy, that really evolution was about sort of physical structures in human beings and out in nature, but these moral sentiments like compassion or sympathy were put into human beings by God.
Thomas Huxley, who was known as Charles Darwin’s bulldog (a huge supporter), said, there is no way that evolution would have crafted or created or designed compassion into the human nervous system. It really is a cultural product. It’s a set of norms that people as part of societies agree to.
What did Darwin think about this?
In The Descent of Man from 1871, Charles Darwin made the case that sympathy, or compassion, is our strongest instinct. He stated that, “sympathy will have been increased through natural selection for those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish the best and raise the greatest number of
offspring.”
So to Darwin sympathy and compassionate are an evolutionary adaptation – because it helps us get along in communities, it helps us take care of those offspring who are the carriers of our genes.
So what about happiness? Well, the data suggests that cultivating compassion helps with physical health and the condition of your brain. For example scientist Hooria Jazaieri designed a simple training exercise where you practice loving kindness, where you’re just thinking
compassionate thoughts towards others and towards yourself over time. The results show that this pretty dramatically increases your own personal happiness, suggesting that the Dalai Lama was on to something when he said that compassion is the pathway to happiness.
The Physiology of Compassion As you watch this video consider the following questions:
What goes on psychologically and physiologically when we experience compassion?
What happens in our minds, brains, and bodies when we encounter people in need and feel the desire to alleviate their suffering. How are these processes, or components of compassion tied to
improvements in happiness?
https://youtu.be/05zrCwLDkVQ?list=PL1t8gsWJprDHaTTZozWnC6O56n9jHD0A Why Practice Compassion
Scientific research into the measurable benefits of compassion is young. Preliminary findings suggest, however, that being compassionate can improve health, well-being, and relationships.
Many scientists believe that compassion may even be vital to the survival of our species, and they’re finding that its advantages can be increased through targeted exercises and practice. Here are some of the most exciting findings from this research so far.
Compassion makes us feel good: Compassionate action (e.g., giving to charity) activates pleasure circuits in the brain, and compassion training programs, even very brief ones, strengthen brain circuits for pleasure and reward and lead to lasting increases in self-reported happiness.
Being compassionate—tuning in to other people in a kind and loving manner—can reduce risk of heart disease by boosting the positive effects of the Vagus Nerve, which helps to slow our heart rate. One compassion training program has found that it makes people
more resilient to stress; it lowers stress hormones in the blood and saliva and strengthens the immune response.
Brain scans during loving-kindness meditation, which directs compassion toward suffering, suggest that, on average,
compassionate people’s minds wander less about what has gone wrong in their lives, or might go wrong in the future; as a result, they’re happier.
people experience compassion, their brains activate in neural
systems known to support parental nurturance and other caregiving behaviors.
Compassion helps make better spouses: Compassionate people are more optimistic and supportive when communicating with others. Compassion helps make better friends: Studies of college
friendships show that when one friend sets the goal to support the other compassionately, both friends experience greater satisfaction and growth in the relationship.
Feeling compassion for one person makes us less vindictive toward others.
Restraining feelings of compassion chips away at our commitment to moral principles.
Employees who receive more compassion in their workplace see themselves, their co-workers, and their organization in a more positive light, report feeling more positive emotions like joy and contentment, and are more committed to their jobs.
More compassionate societies —those that take care of their most vulnerable members, assist other nations in need, and have children who perform more acts of kindness—are the happier ones.
Compassionate people are more socially adept, making them less vulnerable to loneliness; loneliness has been shown to cause stress and harm the immune system.
How Can Compassion Be Cultivated
We often talk about some people as being more compassionate than others, but
research suggests compassion isn’t something you’re born with or not. Instead, it can be strengthened through targeted exercises and practice.
Here are some specific, science-based activities for cultivating compassion from the new site Greater Good in Action:
Feeling supported: Think about the people you turn to when you’re distressed and recall times when you’ve felt comforted by them, which research says can help us to feel more compassionate toward others.
Compassion meditation: Cultivate compassion toward a loved one, yourself, a neutral person, and even an enemy.
Put a human face on suffering: When reading the news, look for profiles of specific individuals and try to imagine what their lives have been like.
Eliciting altruism: Create reminders of connectedness.
Compassion training programs, such as those out of Emory University and Stanford University, are revealing how we can boost feelings of compassion in ourselves and others. Here are some of the best tips to emerge out of those programs, as well as other research.
Look for commonalities: Seeing yourself as similar to others increases feelings of compassion. A recent study shows that something as simple as tapping your fingers to the same rhythm with a stranger increases compassionate behavior.
Calm your inner worrier: When we let our mind run wild with fear in response to someone else’s pain (e.g., What if that happens to me?), we inhibit the biological systems that enable compassion. The
practice of mindfulness can help us feel safer in these situations, facilitating compassion.
Encourage cooperation, not competition, even through subtle cues: A seminal study showed that describing a game as a “Community Game” led players to cooperate and share a reward evenly;
describing the same game as a “Wall Street Game” made the players more cutthroat and less honest. This is a valuable lesson for
teachers, who can promote cooperative learning in the classroom. See people as individuals (not abstractions) : When presented with
an appeal from an anti-hunger charity, people were more likely to give money after reading about a starving girl than after reading statistics on starvation—even when those statistics were combined with the girl’s story.
Don’t play the blame game: When we blame others for their misfortune, we feel less tenderness and concern toward them. Respect your inner hero: When we think we’re capable of making a
difference, we’re less likely to curb our compassion.
Notice and savor how good it feels to be compassionate. Studies have shown that practicing compassion and engaging in
compassionate action bolsters brain activity in areas that signal reward.
To cultivate compassion in kids, start by modeling kindness:
Research suggests compassion is contagious, so if you want to help compassion spread in the next generation, lead by example.
Curb inequality: Research suggests that as people feel a greater sense of status over others, they feel less compassion.
Don’t be a sponge: When we completely take on other people’s suffering as our own, we risk feeling personally distressed,
burnout. Instead, try to be receptive to other people’s feelings without adopting those feelings as your own.
Why Compassion Really Can Change The World Let’s Discuss
Why are the lives of people like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Desmond Tutu so inspiring? Have you ever been moved to tears by seeing someone’s loving and compassionate behavior?
Research by Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at NYU, suggests that seeing someone help another person creates a state of “elevation,” that warm, uplifting feeling we get in the presence of awe-inspiring goodness.
Haidt’s data suggest that elevation then inspires us to help others—and it may just be the force behind a chain reaction of giving.
Haidt and colleagues have shown that corporate leaders who engage in self-sacrificing behavior and induce “elevation” in their employees also yield greater influence among their employees—who, in turn, become more committed and may act with more
compassion in the workplace.
Compassion is contagious, for example
Social scientists James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard have demonstrated that acts of
generosity and kindness beget more generosity in a chain reaction of goodness.
People keep the generous behavior going for hours. Our acts of
compassion uplift others and make them happy. We may not know it, but by uplifting others we are also helping ourselves: Research by Fowler and Christakis has shown that happiness spreads—if the people around us are happy, we become happier in turn.
Happiness Practice #3: Compassion
Learning Objectives: Students will:
Demonstrate an understanding of the concept of compassion. Recognize the elements of compassion in images.
Begin to develop a vocabulary of words related to compassion. Introduction / Opening: This week, we've been discussing the concept of compassion. What is compassion? How is compassion different from pity, mimicry or empathy? Can you provide an example of compassion from your classroom, your school, and your community, like the ones below:
Trevor was showing compassion when he helped Adrian tie his shoe on the playground.
I felt compassion for my neighbor when her dog died.
When the houses were flooded, compassionate people helped their neighbors to clean up.
Activity:
Step Two: Once you’ve looked at the pictures, choose one and do the following things below
What do you see in this picture?
How does it make you feel?
What do you think happened?
What would you do or say in this situation?
Step Three: Once you’ve looked at the pictures, choose one and do the following things below
Write words that describe how you feel and would act if you were in the picture.
Step Four: Create a Compassion Word Web Record all the words you wrote down
Identify which ones are compassion related and which are not Identify ones that you practice and ones that you dont
Example:
Kind Thoughtful Listening Caring Considerate Helping Comfort Understanding
Step Five: Compassion Activity
Take your list of compassion words and record the frequency you see them practiced at school, at home or at work.
Create a photo essay of instances at school, home or work of the compassion words in practice OR a photo essay where (at school) etc. where compassion is not evident.
Kindness
In recent years, a wave of studies has found that kindness, often motivated by compassion, significantly boosts happiness.
What’s behind your choice to help another human being? Are you motivated by sheer, unadulterated benevolence?
Do you do it only if the cost is minimal, or the benefits great? Or are you hoping for a favor in return?
Or is it about image—are you trying to avoid being tagged as selfish?
Maybe you’re motivated by a higher sense of principle, trying to restore fairness?
Science has considered all of these questions. It might be a relief to hear that researchers have not figured out the formula for what makes people kind—but with a very ambitious new study, a pioneering team from Germany might have brought us one step closer to some answers.
Researchers Anne Böckler, Anita Tusche, and Tania Singer analyzed years of data about how contemplative practice—i.e.,
meditation—affects a slew of biological and behavioral measures (The ReSource
Project).
To investigate the facets and forces of kindness, they honed in on 329 study recruits who responded to questionnaires about empathy, kindness, and personality.
They also catalogued their behavior on computer-based and laboratory tasks designed to gauge kindness, self-interest (e.g., “game theoretical paradigms” and “hypothetical distribution tasks”), and performance on a suite of tasks measuring cognitive skill—all before anyone did anything for the meditation part of the study.
The uniqueness of their data lies in the way it bridges intellectual fields, drawing from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics. This team’s work aimed to establish a rigorous, consensus framework for thinking about human kindness, which scientists often call “prosocial behavior.”
They put all of the measures from half of the people in their study into a big numerical “melting pot.”
Then, they ran a statistical test called exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to see which measures tended to group or “hang” together. For example, would people with high scores on the self-report Machiavellianism scale (who are callous, selfish, hubristic) also make more selfish than mutually profitable choices when given both options?
Their EFA spit out four categories, or factors, that best organized all of their measures of human kindness:
• Genuine kindness (benevolence)
• Strategic kindness (maximizing gain and avoiding cost or loss) • Norm-motivated kindness (reciprocity, helping—and punishing—to
uphold fairness) • Self-reported kindness
The upshot? We’re all inclined towards genuine kindness to different degrees, partly as a function of how we generally feel—and perhaps surprisingly, how smart we are.
Beyond genuine kindness, other kinds of kindness are influenced by age, sex, income—and whether or not we have children. By the way, their analyses do not reveal whether one person is more or less kind than another.
That said, here are the factors that matter the most in shaping kindness: Feelings. How we generally feel—that is, whether we’d characterize
ourselves as having more positive or negative feelings in life— influences our tendency towards genuine kindness.
Intelligence. People who scored higher on a battery of cognitive, attention, and IQ tests also tended to be more genuinely kind—but no more, or less, likely to exhibit kindness based on strategic or norm-motivated concerns.
Age, money, family, and sex. It turns out that demographic factors also influence kindness, according to this study. As people get older, genuine kindness falls. So does norm-motivated kindness. This doesn’t mean that older people are chronically less kind. It just suggests that they may be less concerned with reciprocity, fairness, and reputation—and their kindness hinges more on considering costs and benefits.
income: As income increased, genuine kindness fell, which is consistent with a growing literature on the harmful effects on inequality on the privileged. The data show that higher-income
people see themselves as more discriminating with their kindness. Is this perhaps related to their lesser propensity for genuine kindness? These data can’t say for sure.
People who were parents also scored lower on genuine kindness, while showing no differences on any of the other kindness factors. Are the lives of parents too structured and harried to allow genuine kindness to flourish?
Women scored higher in self-reported kindness. This sex difference, however, did not play out for genuinely kind behavior, which was actually more common in men.
This study is important because it begins to systematically chart out the mental and behavioral underpinnings and contextual parameters of human kindness, to provide a theoretical blueprint for the growing community of research converging on age-old issues concerning human goodness and survival.
“In times of global crises like the climate, financial, and refugee crisis, the matter of changing human prosocial behavior to move toward global responsibility is certainly a pressing one,” write the authors. A more sophisticated scientific understanding of where human kindness comes from is the critical first step to figuring out how to strengthen it. We all know it makes us feel good!
Happiness For a Lifetime https://youtu.be/0EJIaTFfBss
One of the best ways to increase our own happiness is to do things that make other people happy. In countless studies, kindness and generosity have been linked to greater life satisfaction, stronger relationships, and better mental and physical health—generous people even live longer.
What’s more, the happiness people derive from giving to others creates a positive feedback loop: The positive feelings inspire further generosity—which, in turn, fuels greater happiness. And research suggests that kindness is truly
contagious: Those who witness and benefit from others’ acts of kindness are more likely to be kind themselves; a single act of kindness spreads through social networks by three degrees of
separation, from person to person to person to person.
But just because we have the capacity for kindness, and reap real benefits from it, doesn’t mean that we always act with kindness. We may be too busy, distracted, or wrapped up in our own concerns to pay close attention to others’ needs or actively seek out opportunities to help.
Or we’re just out of practice: Researchers have argued that kindness is like a muscle that needs to be strengthened through repeated use.
How do we strengthen kindness?
How to Cultivate Feelings of Kindness
compassion and connection with others.
The Feeling Connected practice involves thinking about a time when you felt a strong connection to another person—through a
meaningful conversation, say, or by experiencing a great loss or success or historic event together—and describing that experience in writing.
How does this practice increase kindness? Research suggests that feeling connected to others satisfies a fundamental psychological need to belong; when this need is unmet, people are more likely to focus on their own needs rather than caring for others.
The Feeling Supported practice, which involves thinking about the qualities of the people you turn to when you’re distressed, then recalling a time when you were comforted by one of them. This simple practice is powerful because it increases “attachment security,” a state that involves feelings of trust and comfort and is especially helpful when we’re feeling threatened or insecure. It can also remind us of the kinds of qualities we want to embody when kindly supporting others.
Take an Awe Walk, which involves going for a stroll somewhere that seems vast and perspective-shifting, and makes us feel connected to something greater than ourselves.
In a 2015 study led by Paul Piff, then a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, some participants stood in a grove of towering eucalyptus trees and gazed up for just one minute; other participants looked away from the trees, at a building. The tree gazers were
subsequently more likely to help someone in need and less likely to feel that they were superior to others.
Compassion Meditation . This simple technique involves paying attention to your breathing as you extend feelings of goodwill toward a loved one, yourself, a neutral person, and even an enemy.
Participants who performed the compassion meditation for two weeks demonstrated more generous behavior, donating more money to a victim of unfair treatment, and they also showed greater activity in brain regions associated with understanding the suffering of others and regulating emotions in response to pictures of suffering.
Another way to increase the amount of kindness we perform over the long terms sounds simple: make a concerted effort to perform more kind and generous acts in the short term.
Intentionally practicing kindness in our everyday lives, even on days when we’re not in a particularly generous mood, can go a long way toward turning kindness into a habit.
Practicing Random Acts of Kindness is a good place to start. This practice involves performing five acts of kindness in one day and then writing about the experience. Random acts of kindness not only lift our spirits in the moment; they also have the potential to alter the way we feel about ourselves and increase healthy forms of self-esteem.
Research suggests that not all acts of kindness are created equal,
however. Many factors can influence whether and how these acts bring us psychological benefits.
The Making Giving Feel Good practice outlines three strategies that can maximize the positive effects of generosity.
The first strategy is to make giving a choice. Research suggests that when we feel obligated to give—such as when we feel cornered by an aggressive request—we
are less likely to enjoy it. It’s important to give yourself the option to say no, and to give others the same option when requesting help. The second strategy is to make a connection with the recipient of
your kindness—for example by taking a colleague out to lunch rather than just giving a gift certificate. The third strategy is to take the initiative to learn about the impact of your generosity, which can elicit contagious feelings of joy. For example, see this video of a bone marrow donor meeting the little girl whose life he saved.
How to Inspire Kindness in Others
It’s important to find ways to boost your own kindness. But arguably the greatest good we can do in the world comes from finding ways to increase kindness in others. That’s what the next set of practices are designed to do.
Create Reminders of Connectedness in a home, office, or classroom. These reminders can be something as simple as a quote evoking shared goals, words like “community,” or a picture conveying warmth or friendships.
Putting a Human Face on Suffering : Being able to identify distinct, specific victims of a problem—and learning about their personal stories—can make that problem more vivid, strike an emotional chord, and thus motivate people to help.
Shared Identity , involves forging a sense of common humanity across group boundaries. Reminding people to see the basic
humanity that they share with those who might seem different from them can help overcome fear and distrust and promote cooperation. Even small similarities, like appreciating sports, can foster a greater sense of kinship. (An overview of these three strategies is also provided in the Eliciting Altruism practice.)
Encouraging Kindness in Kids offers four specific techniques to bring out children’s natural propensity for kindness and generosity. These techniques include avoiding external rewards for kind
behavior, praising kids’ character instead of their behavior so they come to see kindness as an essential part of who they are, and modeling kindness in your own behavior, since actions tend to speak louder than words when it comes to nurturing generosity.
Becoming a kinder person—and nurturing kindness in your children and students —isn’t something that happens overnight. It takes practice to turn your best intentions into concrete actions.
Evolutionary and Biological Links To Kindness
Why in the world would we sacrifice and be altruistic and kind to other people? We’re giving up resources, risking being exploited or taken advantage of
us.
One argument is that human kindness and compassion in particular really drives pro-social behavior towards vulnerable offspring.
Because children are the carriers of our genes, we are only successful evolutionarily if we get our genes to the next generation and one of the great promoters of that is kindness and generosity and altruism.
A second idea, is what’s called reciprocal altruism or in other words we will help people if they help us, we’ll scratch their backs if they scratch ours and indeed there’s a certain amount of evidence that aligns with this theoretical argument that kindness is often quickly reciprocated.
Evolutionists call yet another kind of argument that accounts for the emergence of human tendencies sexual selection processes.
The idea is really straightforward which is that if I have traits that make me more attractive to potential mates and it increases the likelihood that I reproduce, those traits will emerge in evolution as an adaptation or something that’s part of human nature because they increase the likelihood of my getting my genes to the next generation through reproduction, sexual selection.
So this raises a really interesting question: is kindness attractive? Is kindness sexy?
David Buss of the University of Texas surveyed over 10,000 people from 37 different countries, he surveyed these individuals when they were of prime partnering age, they’re in their early 20's, and he asked them, rate the different attributes that really matter to you in forming a partnership with somebody for life.
in these 37 different countries kindness, or good character, was the most important attribute in people’s basis or their self-reported basis of why they were attracted to different people.
Kindness is an important engine of attraction and partnering partnering with romantic individuals.
Lots of good reasons why: the kind individual is less likely to cheat on you, perhaps devote more resources to raising offspring and the like. So there’s even yet another evolutionary argument for the emergence of kindness.
So kindness, like Charles Darwin argued, is one of our strongest instincts and it has all these health benefits. So let me leave you with a couple of recent pieces of evidence that are part of this argument:
significantly more, upwards of 65% of our resources compared to when we deliberate and calculate and think about how much we give, where our giving drops.
So another way we can ask this question is to look scientifically at what do really young kids do when given the chance to be kind?
*Article read kindness in kids
It Feels Good to be Kind Happiness research largely relies on self-report data--i.e.,
conclusions about what makes people happy are based on those people's self-reports of their own happiness.
Another way to measure happy feelings is to go right for the brain. What happens in the brain when we experience compassion or
behave kindly?
Do you feel that brain measures are more legitimate or impactful than other measures of happiness?
What are some strengths and limitations of different ways of measuring happy feelings, and happiness?
Happiness Practice #3: Random Acts of Kindness
This week's research-tested exercise taps into our basic motivation to contribute to the welfare of others. Though life can be very busy and full of obligations and time commitments, deliberately taking the time to do
something kind for others can systematically boost happiness.
After watching this video, go on and try it out, learn more about why and how to practice Random Acts of Kindness and the science behind its impact, and
discover other programs and opportunities to make kindness a bigger part of your life.
https://youtu.be/2YF3Lx3BwO8?list=PL1t8gs-WJprDHaTTZozWnC6O56n9jHD0A 1. This practice involves performing five acts of kindness in one day. Is
there a day in the next week when you have free time and might be able to do this practice? If so, write it in the space below.
2. To get ideas for your acts of kindness, it can help to think about times in your past when you've been the recipient of others' kindness. Take a moment to think about these times, and then list a few of them in the space below.
3. It's likely that you have engaged in acts of kindness yourself, perhaps without even being aware of it at the time. Take a moment to think about your own past acts of kindness, and then list a few of them in the space below.
4. Based on the lists above, list five acts of kindness that you could perform on your Random Acts of Kindness day. Put your Random Acts of Kindness day on your calendar and make a note to take care of any advance arrangements that may be needed.
Although it can help to plan certain acts in advance, allow yourself to also do spontaneous acts if opportunities arise (like witnessing someone in need). And don't forget to write about what you did and how it made you feel.
Skeptical Views on Compassion and Kindness
Not everyone agrees with the "compassion and kindness are good for happiness" perspective. In fact, many influential thinkers throughout history have been skeptical, if not downright hostile, toward this view.
Let’s summarize some of the main criticisms that have been voiced in this "war on compassion.”
The case that we’ve made in the course is that compassion is not only a basic pathway to happiness but part of our evolved human nature, that it is essential to who we are.
But in western thought some of the great thinkers had a lot of skepticism about the place of compassion in human affairs, for example:
Sigmund Freud thought of the human mind as kind of this basic mixture of thanatos and eros or the desire for destruction and sex and wrote in
another place that the fact that we have this rule thou shalt not kill makes it certain that we’ve descended from an endlessly long chain or generationof murders, suggesting that kind of murderous tendencies are in our blood. Ayn Rand, in 1964 in making the case for libertarianism said, “If any
civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.”
Niccolo Machiavelli, you find in his early 16th century writings, him saying that “Of mankind, we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.”
Immanuel Kant really put it in a pointed way that “Sympathy, even though it’s good natured, is always blind and always weak.”
And this thinking encapsulates kind of a derogatory stance towards compassion and empathy. The quotes also suggest a long standing war on compassion or skepticism towards kindness really has tentacles in different parts of our culture. These feelings are particularly acute in the U.S. here are some statistics that
support that one of the centers of the war on compassion is right here.
The United States is really the only industrialized culture one of only a few that routinely practices solitary confinement where prisoners are kept in small cells for23-24 of hours a day and not allowed human contact. The United States has one of the harshest criminal justice systems in
industrialized cultures--over 2 million people in prison, we have some of the longest sentences in industrialized cultures.
Around the world millions of women who are missing because of their being enslaved into the sex trafficking industry.
Some studies in young people in the United States show that over the past 30 years feelings of empathy and compassion have declined a bit
This skepticism towards compassion really rubs up against who we
are as species, an idea that has started to take hold in the last 20-30 years but really it was Darwin who said we are a compassionate, sympathetic species, and that some of the most important shifts in our evolution both neurophysiological and social evolution revolve around sympathy and compassion.
There’s a real simple evolutionary reason for why this is and it has to do with a couple of physical shifts in our evolution.
We are one of the most dependent species on the planet, especially when we are born. Babies take 7, 20, 30 40 months to reach the age of independence.
So the emerging consensus in evolutionary thought is it’s really take
care or die when it comes to the human species, so this skepticism towards compassion really misses the boat when we think about who we’ve be designed to be as a species.
When Compassion and Kindness Are Hard
Despite evidence that humans are innately motivated to be compassionate and kind, we do not always act this way. One key factor that can influence whether or not we behave in accordance with these compassionate, kind impulses is our social environment.
What are some of the barriers (psychological and social) to compassion and kindness?
What factors prevent us from coming to someone's aid or behaving in a kind or generous way, and thus, prevent us from reaping
We've been thinking about this really interesting new science about the biological evolutionary underpinnings of kindness and altruism.
What are some mental states, practices and habits that'll make you kinder and more compassionate?
What are the different contemporary challenges to being kind?
First is just being busy An example of this is the good samaritan study by Batson and Darley where they had students at Princeton University go give a talk on the tale of the good samaritan and if they pass by an individual who is looking to be suffering from
cardiovascular problems slumped over on part of the Princeton campus; if they were on time and feeling like they weren't rushed, over 60% of the time they attended to that person in need; if they were just a minute or two late, that likelihood of helping dropped to 10 percent - a six fold decrease in kindness just by feeling a little bit busy.
Video games, especially violent video games. There is a lot of
evidence looking at the experimental effects of playing violent video games, and not only does it tend to increase aggression (although that finding is a little bit controversial right now), but just as
importantly, kind of saturating yourself in these violent images and these violent games what it definitely does is it reduces your
cooperative, kind tendencies.
People who really feel like they’re from different groups from you, different political groups or ethnic groups and a pretty reliable finding in the literature is we tend to be more kind to people who resemble ourselves. And so one of the challenges of practicing kindness is to really transcend that boundary, that us-them boundary through things like compassion to cultivate kindness towards people who are different from us.
If we feel like helping is not possible or we don’t have the capacity to do so, so in this research when we encounter a lot of people who need assistance, we’re actually much less likely to help. And that tells us that sort
So next up, you’re going to do some reading on how to make giving and kindness more rewarding and pleasurable.
Exponential Kindness
Research, suggests that kindness gathers its own momentum, and its impact goes well beyond our personal happiness or the well-being of the person we help; instead, it can affect countless people whom we may never even meet. There are two lines of research that point to this conclusion.
One has been pioneered by researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, co-authors of the book Connected, who have found that one person's generosity can have a ripple effect, spreading by three degrees through a social network--from person to person to person to person. As Fowler and Christakis write in a ground-breaking scientific paper, this means that "each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met.”
A second line of research is about "elevation," which refers to the warm, uplifting feeling we get when we witness someone else's good deed. Research by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as well as by Simone Schnall, has found that elevation systematically
motivates people to perform altruistic acts themselves.
Can you recall times when you have seen these social dynamics play out in real life--perhaps even when you yourself experienced elevation?
Is there hope that we, as humans, could "scale up" the reach and depth of our own kindness?
We’ve been talking about kindness and being altruistic, what it isand what the benefits of kindness are, and now we’re going to really take a step back and think about how do we scale up kindness? How do we make it
something that’s contagious in society?
Recent science suggests that kindness actually may be one of the most contagious social behaviors in our human repertoire. The book
"Connected" from 2009 makes the case that kindness, compassion, and generosity are contagious processes that can take hold in social networks and communities and neighborhoods.
Let me give you a couple of empirical illustrations that start to speak to this:
Any acts of generosity actually produce increased generosity in people I give to in subsequent interactions that I am not part of. If I’m part of an organization that doesn't give a lot to charity, my
philanthropy tends to be relatively small. If I move to a different part of part of the workplace, a different group, and they tend to practice more altruism, I end up giving more to charity.
When you just watch somebody be kind or altruistic, you become generous and kind myself. This is known as process elevation. This remarkable tendency for people to become noble, to become
altruistic and kind when they see other people they don’t even know practice kindness.
In short kindness is contagious through this process we are going to call elevation.
