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By David Desteno
As a social psychologist interested in the emotions, I long
wondered whether this spiritual understanding of compassion was also
scientifically accurate. Empirically speaking, does the experience of
compassion toward one person measurably affect our actions and attitudes toward
other people? If so, are there practical steps we can take to further cultivate
this feeling? Recently, my colleagues and I conducted experiments that answered
yes to both questions.
In one experiment, designed with the psychologist Paul
Condon and published in the Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, we recruited people to take part in a study that was
ostensibly about the relation of mathematical ability to taste perception — but
that in actuality was a study of how the experience of compassion affects your
behavior.
Each experimental session consisted of three individuals: a
real participant and two confederates (i.e., people who secretly worked for
us). First, the participants were told that they had four minutes to solve as
many of 20 difficult math problems as they could and that they would receive 50
cents for each one they solved correctly. Twenty was far more than the typical
person could do; the average number solved was 4. After time expired, the
experimenter approached each person to ask how many problems he or she had
solved, paid the person accordingly, and then had the person place his or her
work in the shredder.
The situation was rigged so that the experimenter would run
out of money just before paying the last person, Dan, who was a confederate.
While the experimenter left to get more money, Dan dumped his work into the
shredder in full view of everyone. When the experimenter returned, Dan reported
that he had completed all 20 problems and had already shredded his work to save
time. The experimenter paid him the full $10. But it was obvious to all that
Dan had cheated. (There was also a “control” variation in which Dan did not
cheat.)
Everyone then moved on to the “taste perception” phase.
Here, participants prepared taste samples for one another, and the real
participants were assigned to prepare the taste sample for Dan. The sample they
had to prepare required them to pour extra-hot hot sauce into a small cup. They
were led to believe that whatever they poured into the cup would be placed in
Dan’s mouth in its entirety. What did they do? They did exactly what you would
expect: those who saw Dan cheat poured more hot sauce into the cup — three
times more, on average — than did those who did not witness the cheating. In so
doing, they were intentionally acting to cause him pain.
But what of compassion? In a third variation, we had Dan
cheat, but before preparing the taste samples, the other confederate, Hannah,
began to sniffle and tear up. When the experimenter asked her what was wrong,
she said that she had recently learned that her brother had received a
diagnosis of a terminal disease. With increasing tears she asked to be excused
and the experimenter complied. The participants and Dan then continued as
before, though with quite different results: participants who saw Dan cheat
poured no more hot sauce than did those who did not
witness his cheating.
Before preparing the taste samples, we also had the
participants fill out a questionnaire about their present feelings (among other
items). The degree of compassion they were feeling directly predicted the
amount of decreased hot sauce they poured for Dan.
It seems, then, that the Dalai Lama is right: the
experience of compassion toward a single individual does shape our actions
toward others.
In another study, published in the journal Emotion, the
psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I conducted an experiment ostensibly about
music perception — but that actually investigated how feelings of compassion
might be increased.
Our hunch was that compassion is easiest to feel when you
have a sense of commonality with someone else. So we paired up participants in
teams: one real participant and one confederate. First, they had to tap their
hands on sensors to tones played over earphones. In some cases the tones led
them to tap their hands in synchrony; in other cases, the tones led them to tap
their hands in a random mismatching manner.
WE next had the participants watch their tapping partner
get cheated by another confederate, which resulted in the partner’s erroneously
being assigned to complete a stack of onerous word problems. As our
participants were leaving, they were informed by an automated message that if
they desired, they could help complete some of the work assigned to their
partners. If they did so, we timed how long they spent working on the task.
The results were striking: the simple act of tapping one’s
hands in synchrony with another caused our participants to report feeling more
similar to their partners and to have greater compassion for their plight: it increased
the number of people who helped their partner by 31 percent and increased the
average time spent helping from one minute to more than seven.
What these results suggest is that the compassion we feel
for others is not solely a function of what befalls them: if our minds draw an
association between a victim and ourselves — even a relatively trivial one —
the compassion we feel for his or her suffering is amplified greatly.
What does this mean for cultivating compassion in society?
It means that effortful adherence to religious or philosophical dictums (often
requiring meditation, prayer or moral education), though clearly valuable and
capable of producing results, is not the only way to go. There is nothing
special about tapping in synchrony; any such commonality will do. Increased
compassion for one’s neighbor, for instance, can come from something as easy as
encouraging yourself to think of him as (say) a fan of the same local
restaurant instead of as a member of a different ethnicity.
Simply learning to mentally recategorize one another in
terms of commonalities would generate greater empathy among all of us — and
foster social harmony in a fairly effortless way.
@ The New York Times Sunday Review
NO WOMEN AT THE TOP IN
[As the party gears up for its important 18th Congress later this year - when 2,270 delegates from around the country will gather in Beijing to formally choose a new leader, or general secretary (that person is widely expected to be the current, male, vice president, Xi Jinping) - provincial party committees have also been appointing new leaders in China's 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions.]
The lack of
women at the top is perhaps no surprise. China is ''a male-dominated society,''
as Cai Xia, a professor at the party-building center in the Central Party
School, recently told the People's Daily (here's the report in Chinese).
But how are
women doing lower down in ''the organization,'' as the Communist Party is known
here? (In Chinese that's zuzhi,
pronounced dzoo zher.) Are women faring better lower down the ranks?
Not really,
according to new figures released by the two most official news sources here,
the party-run People's Daily and Xinhua, the state-run news agency.
In fact, the
numbers show something interesting: Fewer than one in four of China
As the party
gears up for its important 18th Congress later this year - when 2,270 delegates
from around the country will gather in Beijing to formally choose a new leader,
or general secretary (that person is widely expected to be the current, male,
vice president, Xi Jinping) - provincial party committees have also been
appointing new leaders in China's 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous
regions.
These people
are crucially important. They will form the core of the next generation of
party leaders who will work under the new general secretary, implementing
orders from above and, sometimes, reaching their own local solutions to local
issues.
But at the
provincial level, too, women are poorly represented. Just one party secretary
is a woman - Sun Chunlan, the party secretary of Fujian
Province China Anhui
Province
A total of
37 women (including Ms. Sun and Ms. Li) sit on the provincial standing
committees, the inner circles of power at the provincial level. That amounts to
just 9 percent of the standing committee members, the People's Daily reported.
There is a
modest bright spot for women in the party: Of the 37 female standing committee
members, a greater proportion is younger, which means they may rise further.
Women under 55 accounted for 57 percent of their age cohort.
The lack of
women serving as party secretaries in the provinces has consequences. An
unwritten rule dictates that only those who have run a province may be promoted
to the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Unless that changes, if women
aren't being promoted to provincial leadership earlier in their careers, they
have little chance of making it to the top.
For Ms. Cai
of the Central Party School
It's so hard
for women to be promoted that ''if a female official wants to secure approval,
she has to be absolutely elite,'' she said. ''And they frequently hit a glass
ceiling on their way up.''
