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As the new book makes clear, pathological altruism is not limited to showcase acts of self-sacrifice, like donating a kidney or a part of one’s liver to a total stranger. The book is the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that when ostensibly generous “how can I help you?” behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive.
Selflessness gone awry may play a role in a broad variety of disorders, including anorexia and animal hoarding, women who put up with abusive partners and men who abide alcoholic ones.
Because a certain degree of selfless behavior is essential to the smooth performance of any human group, selflessness run amok can crop up in political contexts. It fosters the exhilarating sensation of righteous indignation, the belief in the purity of your team and your cause and the perfidiousness of all competing teams and causes.
"Many real-life social dilemmas contain third parties who cannot make decisions in the dilemma, but are affected by its outcome (receive externalities) nonetheless. Dilemmas with identical payoffs for decision-making actors may greatly vary in their externalities for third parties. If actors value the welfare of thirds, externalities will affect actors’ decisions. We test behavioral predictions from three leading ideas on social preferences (altruism, inequality aversion, competition) in two studies that employ four one-shot, 2-person prisoner’s dilemmas (PDs) that differ only in their externalities. The PDs respectively include a third party that (i) is indifferent, (ii) prefers defection, (iii) prefers cooperation. Our results show that while aggregate behavior is not affected by externalities, individual behavior is. Compared to a PD without externalities, prosocial individuals cooperate more when a third benefits from cooperation, but do not defect more when a third benefits from defection. The opposite pattern is found for competitive individuals. "
"We study behavioral action sequences of players in a massive multiplayer online game. In their virtual life players use eight basic actions which allow them to interact with each other. These actions are communication, trade, establishing or breaking friendships and enmities, attack, and punishment. We measure the probabilities for these actions conditional on previous taken and received actions and find a dramatic increase of negative behavior immediately after receiving negative actions. Similarly, positive behavior is intensified by receiving positive actions. We observe a tendency towards anti-persistence in communication sequences. Classifying actions as positive (good) and negative (bad) allows us to define binary 'world lines' of lives of individuals. Positive and negative actions are persistent and occur in clusters, indicated by large scaling exponents alpha~0.87 of the mean square displacement of the world lines. For all eight action types we find strong signs for high levels of repetitiveness, especially for negative actions. We partition behavioral sequences into segments of length n (behavioral `words' and 'motifs') and study their statistical properties. We find two approximate power laws in the word ranking distribution, one with an exponent of kappa-1 for the ranks up to 100, and another with a lower exponent for higher ranks. The Shannon n-tuple redundancy yields large values and increases in terms of word length, further underscoring the non-trivial statistical properties of behavioral sequences. On the collective, societal level the timeseries of particular actions per day can be understood by a simple mean-reverting log-normal model. "
"In other words, pro-social behaviour requires self-control, but this can be depleted by other things. And one of those other things is the amount of drudge work we have to do. If it takes all our self-discipline to turn up to work and do a routine job, we’ll have less self-discipline with which to act generously."
"the topic of 'Darwin, Dawkins, and the Left' because, a couple of years earlier, I'd put together a stash of notes and links for a blog post that I'd never quite got around to writing."
"The conclusion is that simply thinking about money — even unconsciously — makes people more self-sufficient, more socially insensitive, and less cooperative."
reports some experiments by Kathleen Vohs
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Well - it's this. Great societies, they endure. Their fabric withstands the blows of fate and fortune and there is enough in their people to carry on after. To carry on in an altered, reformed, fundamentally different state, perhaps, but to carry on.
But what gives you that capacity is not typically your technology or your wealth or your dominions - all of which are characteristically wiped out in a crash. No it is your character, your capacity not simply to carry on, but to have a reason to carry on, to rebuild what you have lost. -
the Cracked article, which suggests that each of us has a limit of about 150 people we can know and understand and relate to. The theory is based on Dunbar's number, and Cracked calls it - with more than a little alacrity - the 'monkeysphere'. The article, which was written in 2005, is making the rounds again.
In our complex society, writes Cracked, "Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away." - 6 more annotation(s)...
The Greater Good Science Center is an interdisciplinary research center devoted to the scientific understanding of happy and compassionate individuals, strong social bonds, and altruistic behavior.
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