Awe may promote altruistic behavior

Awe may promote altruistic behavior.

From the 19 May 2015 post at APA

Inducing a sense of awe in people can promote altruistic, helpful and positive social behavior according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“Our investigation indicates that awe, although often fleeting and hard to describe, serves a vital social function. By diminishing the emphasis on the individual self, awe may encourage people to forgo strict self-interest to improve the welfare of others,” said Paul Piff, PhD, assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine. He was lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology^®.

Awe is that sense of wonder we feel in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world. People commonly experience awe in nature, but also in response to religion, art and even music.

[Journal abstract] Hiding your true colors may make you feel morally tainted

Hiding your true colors may make you feel morally tainted.

From the abstract (Psychological Science, May 11)

The Moral Virtue of Authenticity

How Inauthenticity Produces Feelings of Immorality and Impurity

Abstract

The five experiments reported here demonstrate that authenticity is directly linked to morality. We found that experiencing inauthenticity, compared with authenticity, consistently led participants to feel more immoral and impure. This link from inauthenticity to feeling immoral produced an increased desire among participants to cleanse themselves and to engage in moral compensation by behaving prosocially. We established the role that impurity played in these effects through mediation and moderation. We found that inauthenticity-induced cleansing and compensatory helping were driven by heightened feelings of impurity rather than by the psychological discomfort of dissonance. Similarly, physically cleansing oneself eliminated the relationship between inauthenticity and prosocial compensation. Finally, we obtained additional evidence for discriminant validity: The observed effects on desire for cleansing were not driven by general negative experiences (i.e., failing a test) but were unique to experiences of inauthenticity. Our results establish that authenticity is a moral state—that being true to thine own self is experienced as a form of virtue.

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Using Behavioral Indicators to Help Detect Potential Violent Acts A Review of the Science Base

Reminded of a phrase used by one of my college professors.
“Now that you have this information, what are you going to do with it?”

In this case, when one has information about a person’s behavior, what does one do?
Especially when it seems the person might be predisposed to violent acts.
Does one find a way to commit him or her to a mental institution? Arrest him or her on some other charge to remove him or her from the general population? Find some way to get the person help as an out patient?

From the summary of the report at Full Text Reports

Government organizations have put substantial effort into detecting and thwarting terrorist and insurgent attacks by observing suspicious behaviors of individuals at transportation checkpoints and elsewhere. This report reviews the scientific literature relating to observable, individual-level behavioral indicators that might — along with other information — help detect potential violent attacks. The report focuses on new or nontraditional technologies and methods, most of which exploit (1) data on communication patterns, (2) “pattern-of-life” data, and/or (3) data relating to body movement and physiological state. To help officials set priorities for special attention and investment, the report proposes an analytic framework for discussion and evaluation; it also urges investment in cost-effectiveness analysis and more vigorous, routine, and sustained efforts to measure real-world effectiveness of methods. One cross-cutting conclusion is that methods for behavioral observation are typically not reliable enough to stand alone; success in detection will depend on information fusion across types of behaviors and time. How to accomplish such fusion is understudied. Finally, because many aspects of using behavioral observations are highly controversial, both scientifically and because of privacy and civil-liberties concerns, the report sharpens the underlying perspectives and suggests ways to resolve some of the controversy while significantly mitigating problems that definitely exist.

 

Related articles

• Obama Orders Federal Workers to Spy on Each Other (endtimebibleprophecy.wordpress.com)
• Gang Members 25% More Likely To Develop Mental Health Disorders Due To Perpetual Violence (medicaldaily.com)
• Parents of mentally ill child may have averted mass shooting (cbsnews.com)
• A New Moral Treatment (city-journal.org)
• South Carolina Psychiatric Patient Stuck 38 Days in ER – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
• On being Sane in Insane Places (opheliasmirror.org)

 

People May Be Motivated To Carry Out Unspeakable Acts By Social Identification Rather Than Obedience

 

The Milgram experiment: The experimenter (E) persuades the participant (T) to give what the participant believes are painful electric shocks to another participant (L), who is actually an actor. Many participants continued to give shocks despite pleas for mercy from the actor. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

After reading this article, a few thoughts came to mind…

 

The importance of empathy, especially in identifying with the powerless and those different from us.
The importance of religion/spirituality in fostering community and service to others, especially to those who do not hold our beliefs.

 

From the 21 July 2012 article at Medical News Today

 

What makes soldiers abuse prisoners? How could Nazi officials condemn thousands of Jews to gas chamber deaths? What’s going on when underlings help cover up a financial swindle? For years, researchers have tried to identify the factors that drive people to commit cruel and brutal acts and perhaps no one has contributed more to this knowledge than psychological scientist Stanley Milgram.

Just over 50 years ago, Milgram embarked on what were to become some of the most famous studies in psychology. In these studies, which ostensibly examined the effects of punishment on learning, participants were assigned the role of “teacher” and were required to administer shocks to a “learner” that increased in intensity each time the learner gave an incorrect answer. As Milgram famously found, participants were willing to deliver supposedly lethal shocks to a stranger, just because they were asked to do so.

Researchers have offered many possible explanations for the participants’ behavior and the take-home conclusion that seems to have emerged is that people cannot help but obey the orders of those in authority, even when those orders go to the extremes.

This obedience explanation, however, fails to account for a very important aspect of the studies: why, and under what conditions, people did not obey the experimenter.

In a new article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers Stephen Reicher of the University of St. Andrews and Alexander Haslam and Joanne Smith of the University of Exeter propose a new way of looking at Milgram’s findings.

The researchers hypothesized that, rather than obedience to authority, the participants’ behavior might be better explained by their patterns of social identification. They surmised that conditions that encouraged identification with the experimenter (and, by extension, the scientific community) led participants to follow the experimenters’ orders, while conditions that encouraged identification with the learner (and the general community) led participants to defy the experimenters’ orders.

As the researchers explain, this suggests that participants’ willingness to engage in destructive behavior is “a reflection not of simple obedience, but of active identification with the experimenter and his mission”. …

…According to the authors, these new findings suggest that we need to rethink obedience as the standard explanation for why people engage in cruel and brutal behavior. This new research “moves us away from a dominant viewpoint that has prevailed within and beyond the academic world for nearly half a century – a viewpoint suggesting that people engage in barbaric acts because they have little insight into what they are doing and conform slavishly to the will of authority,” they write.

These new findings suggest that social identification provides participants with a moral compass and motivates them to act as followers. This followership, as the authors point out, is not thoughtless – “it is the endeavor of committed subjects.”

Looking at the findings this way has several advantages, Reicher, Haslam, and Smith argue. First, it mirrors recent historical assessments suggesting that functionaries in brutalizing regimes – like the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann – do much more than merely follow orders. And it simultaneously accounts for why participants are more likely to follow orders under certain conditions than others. …

 

Related articles

 

• Social Identification, Not Obedience, Might Motivate Unspeakable Acts (psychologicalscience.org)
• Social identification, not obedience, might motivate unspeakable acts (eurekalert.org)
• Not Obedience But Followership (psychologicalscience.org)
• Social identification, not obedience, might motivate unspeakable acts (medicalxpress.com)
• Social identification, not obedience, might motivate unspeakable acts (sciencedaily.com)
• The Stanley Milgram Films on Social Psychology | Now Available (alexanderstreet.typepad.com)
• Sam Sommers: When Good People Behave Badly (huffingtonpost.com)
• When Good People Behave Badly (psychologytoday.com)
• A scientific study of unethical behavior (southofheaven.typepad.com)
• Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience to Authority (dawnmarie4.wordpress.com)
• Social Engineering (vaticproject.blogspot.com)
• What are the similarities and differences between conformity, compliance, and obedience? (pavlovscouch.com)

 

Religion Replenishes Self-Control

Religion is at its best, I believe, when its practice is centered on focusing on others and the common good.  Self-control naturally flows from this.
Can self-control occur outside of religion? Yes, again, when the focus is beyond self-interest.

From the 16 May 2012 article at Medical News Today

There are many theories about why religion exists, most of them unproven.

Now, in an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Kevin Rounding of Queen’s University, Ontario, offers a new idea, and some preliminary evidence to back it up.

The primary purpose of religious belief is to enhance the basic cognitive process of self-control, says Rounding, which in turn promotes any number of valuable social behaviors. …

Related articles

• Religion replenishes self-control (eurekalert.org)
• Religion replenishes self-control (medicalxpress.com)
• Does Thinking About God Improve Our Self-Control? (wired.com)
• Science for spirituality (addictionandrecoverynews.wordpress.com)