We fundamentally enjoy contributing to others welfare.
Have you tried the active listening exercise from week 2?
Compassion and benevolence are rooted in our brain and biology and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.
Seeing our children evoke similar neural responses to seeing victims of violence.
Helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure.
Being compassionate causes a chemical reaction in the body that motivates us to be even more compassionate.
There is a particular facial expression of compassion, characterized by oblique eyebrows and a concerned gaze. When someone shows this expression, they are then more likely to help others.
Touching neglected pups can reverse the effects of their previous social isolation, going as far as enhancing their immune systems.
Compassion appears to be something we're universally capable of expressing and understanding, as simply as through a stroke on the arm.
Does compassion promote altruistic behavior? When we take the other's perspective, we feel an empathic state of concern and are motivated to address that person's needs and enhance that person's welfare, even at our own expense.
Compassion motivates anonymous acts of kindness.
Compassion is deeply rooted in nature, overwhelms selfish concerns and motivates altruistic behavior.
Positive emotions are less determined by DNA than negative ones. Compassion is a trait we can develop.
Good secure parents have more compassionate children.
Parents who reason with their children about the effects of their actions better nurture compassion than those who simply declare what they think is right and wrong.
We see that compassion is deeply rooted in our brains, our bodies, and in the most basic ways we communicate. What's more, a sense of compassion fosters compassionate behavior and helps shape the lessons we teach our children.
We must make room for our compassionate impulses to flourish.
Is there a biological fingerprint for compassion?
The parasympathetic branch (PNS) promotes behaviours like "rest and digest", "feel and breed" and "tend and befriend", these directly relate to the Vagus nerve, which turns out to be something of an enforcer for the PNS when it comes to the heart and compassion.
The Vagus nerve calms our hearts beating in a rhytmic manner, faster when we inhale, slower when we exhale. The Vagal activity or tone is measured through the differences in these speeds during breathing.
Warm, sensitive parenting for three year olds predicts greater focused concentration, the Vagal tone effect was largely related to the children's concentration skills.
Feeling compassionate is correlated to increased Vagal tone.
What happens in your Vagus affects whether or not you can handle the feelings provoked by another person's suffering, and whether or not you'll feel concerned and motivated to help.
Kids became happy by giving treats and even happier when they had the option of eating the treat themselves but chose to give it away anyways.
Studies suggest that adults are happier giving to others and kids are motivated to help.
Rewarding children for kindness may be counterproductive.
Altruism is a reward in itself, even (especially) to very young kids.
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/kindness_makes_you_happy_and_happiness_makes_you_kind
Two recent studies suggest that giving to others makes us happy, even happier than spending on ourselves. What's more, our kindness might create a virtuous cycle that promotes lasting happiness and altruism.
Performing kind and/or novel acts daily boosts happiness.
Recalling a selfless act produces more joy than remembering a selfish one. Being happy from remembering a selfless act makes us more likely to make more acts of kindness.
Charitable organizations can remind and thank donors of previous donations to increase the likelyhood of another donation.
Faces are graded as more beautiful when described with positive words such as honest.
People can continue to be physically repelled by people they perceive to be morally corrupt for decades.
Being driven and hard working increases physical attractiveness rating whereas being lazy decreases it.
We see those we like as more attractive.
"If you want to enhance your physical attractiveness, become a valuable social partner."
By strengthening the content of your character you become more beautiful.
There is biological evidence that kindness fosters happiness.
5 ways giving is good for you:
Taking the time to do kind acts for others can systematically boost happiness.
This practice involves performing five acts of kindness in one day.
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 kindness.
Take a moment to think about your own past acts of kindness.
List acts of kindness that cou can perform on your Acts of Kindness days.
Variety is key: Performing the same acts over and over is not as good as performing new kind acts, cultivate creative inspiration to continously discover novel kindness.
Sonja Lyubomirky has done research on this practice.
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_increase_your_compassion_bandwidth
We can beneficially expand our compassion.
People think they will feel more compassion when more people are suffering but they actually feel less. To raise donations it is more effective to present aided/needy individuals than entire populations, people zone out in the face of too much suffering and feel as if their donation will make little difference.
People feel more compassion for one than for many but only when they are compelled to help.
We can choose to not restrict the compassion we feel, choose to be compassionate.
If we can get people past their fears of being overwhelmed, and teach them strategies for staying with rather than avoiding compassion, then we can increase their compassion bandwidth.
Strategies for increasing compassion bandwidth:
Compassion cultivation techniques have been shown to increase positive emotions and social support and reduce negative distress at human suffering.
Mindfulness has two important sub-components: the ability to attend to the present moment and the ability to accept experiences without judging them. Both increase inclinations to help.
Present-focused attention predicted increased positive emotions whereas non-judgmental acceptance protected against negative emotions.
Training people in present-focused attention may increase their ability to savor and sustain compassion for many victims.
Mindfulness enhances compassion.
In a study people were given money to spend on themselves or charities, the amount of money had little impact, those who spent on charities received the most happiness.
The amount of money people give away much better predicts their happiness than the amount of money they spend on themselves.
Across 136 countries studied by Gallup World poll donating to charity had a similar relationship to happiness as doubling household income.
1. Make it a choice:
Being pressured into helping does not feel good.
Craft charitable appeals that encourage people to give, without making them feel forced to comply.
Ending a plea with "It's entirely your choice whether to help or not" is effective.
2. Make a connection:
We feel better receiving gifts from those we are close to.
Giving to someone and spending time with them while they enjoy the gift is rewarding.
Invest in others in ways that help you connect with people.
This website enables connection based donations.
3. Make an impact:
Through this charity people can explicitly help a child with a mosquito net.
We feel better about giving when we can sense the real-world impact of our generosity.
When prosocial spending is done right (when it feels like a choice, connects us with others and makes a clear impact) even small gifts can have a big effect on happiness, potentially spurring a domino effect of generosity.
Ripple effects in social networks can have large impact.
http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/wired_to_be_inspired
Why do we care when a stranger does a good deed for another stranger?
"I have defined elevation as a warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself."
We intuitively want to live in a moral world.
Social disgust is the emotional reaction to despicable acts. Elevation is the opposite emotional reaction.
Seeing someone else give help or aid to a person who is poor or sick, or stranded in a difficult situation, invokes elevation.
Elevation inspires general desires to help others and to become a better person.
Love and a desire for affiliation appear to be a common response to witnessing saints and saintly deeds, or even to hearing about them.
A hallmark of elevation is that, like disgust, it is contagious. Good deeds can ripple through society, transforming whole communities.
Shed a tear that says it's okay, relax, let down your guard, there are good people in the world, there is good in people, love is real, it's in our nature.
Heroism can be described as altruism that involves a serious risk.
The experiment had to be terminated because the guards became brutal.
Another experiment made a majority of humen administer what they thought were deadly electrical shocks to a subject for failing a learning task, when pressured by the researchers.
If you passively observe evil take place you are allowing the evil to take place and in effect become the evil.
Not one of the guards that did not partake in the abuse said anything about ending the abuse.
The banality of heroism concept suggests that we are all potential heroes waiting for a moment in life to perform a heroic deed.
A crowd can fail to act because everyone assumes someone else will.
Heroism is different than altruism. Where altruism emphasizes selfless acts that assist others, heroism entails the potential for deeper personal sacrifice. The core of heroism revolves around the individual's commitment to a noble purpose and the willingness to accept the consequences of fighting for that purpose.
Heros are able and willing to guide themselves from their inner moral compass, rather than doing what everyone else is.
Heroic imagination is the capacity to imagine facing physically or socially risky situations, to prepare yourself for heroism.
There are several concrete steps we can take to foster the heroic imagination. We can start by remaining mindful, carefully and critically evaluating each situation we encounter so that we don't gloss over an emergency requiring our action.
Second, it is important not to fear interpersonal conflict, and to develop the personal hardiness necessary to stand firm for principles we cherish.
Third, we must remain aware of an extended time-horizon, not just the present moment.
Fourth, we have to resist the urge to rationalize inaction.
Finally, we must try to transcend anticipating negative consequence associated with some forms of heroism, such as being socially ostracized. If our course is just, we must trust that others will eventually recognize the value of our heroic actions.
We must avoid being seduced by evil, no matter how small it may seem, lest a tumbling pebble turn into a rockslide.
We can, in ancient tales, find heroic motivation.
Updated on 2020-07-22.