“For all those dismayed by scenes of looting in disaster-struck zones, whether Haiti or Chile or elsewhere, take heart: Good acts — acts of kindness, generosity and cooperation — spread just as easily as bad. And it takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference.
In a study published in the March 8 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they “pay it forward” by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network.”
Read more at Science Daily
So… what’s the point in any of the following things then? :
Patronization.
Judgement.
Morality by reward and punishment.
Gotta love it when a study confirms your suspiscions
“….looting in Haiti” was a myth promoted by Sky News and other more ret@rded areas of the press.
Charlie Brooker in screenwipe showed the reports of looting in Haiti were voice-overed in the UK by hacks who had never been to Haiti – they showed people mucking about with cardboard boxes and portrayed them as evil black persons fighting over food.
as anyone who has ever studied U.S. history knows, acts of nastiness spread even more quickly!
but, thanx fer the encouragement…we shall keep on keeping on.
This is kinda a no-brainer. Just make a conscious effort act just a little nicer to the people around you in a non-fake way for just a few days (especially to some of the folks you consider to be @$$holes) and then see what happens.
Being nice to some “catholic” school kids this morning! That hurt. Want them all to know non-believers can be decent because at times I am paranoid at my atheism being frowned upon. Being kind makes me feel good so it must be an unselfish selfish act.
is there such a thing as a completely unselfish act? or are all the things we do motivated, however slightly, by our own self-interest?
A whole movie was based on this fact already. Called Pay it Forward with Haley Joel Osmond and Kevin Spacey.
@roz: Well I doubt the genes for survival came about after the genes for morality.
Besides, even if there is such a thing as doing something without expecting anything in return, there’s still some self-pleasure/satisfaction involved, so everybody essentially has their own interests in mind.
And to anyone who puts someone else’s survival ahead of their own, it’s so they can avoid the guilt of NOT doing it that will be with them for a long while. So it’s still down to self-interests.
@jameshogg, yeah, i”ve come to that conclusion too. but that’s OK, as long as people are kind!
Hate to say, Buddha told you so.
People misquote and misinterpret his teachings on acts of kindness because they were codified in the context of the times, namely in hindu society, where the idea of reincarnation was deeply ingrained in people’s minds.
When you read his words, and take them literally, he was saying exactly what this study says, that acts of kindness will propagate, and as such even the smallest act of kindness can have supreme importance as the seed of greater kindness.
Buddhism’s great… apart from the vegetarianism. :p
This just proves that we’re all bloody sheep and that our moral compass is dictated to us via consensus rather than personally decided upon. BAAAA!