Global Giving
Monday, September 21st, 2009 | Tags: Giving, altruism, cooperation, empathy, globalization, money, prosocial behavior, social connections | Leave a Comment »It’s a small world we live in, increasingly connected by technology, trade, and common threats to our species’ survival. Cooperation and collaboration are needed to overcome the enormous environmental challenges before us. But will globalization encourage this kind of cooperation—or ...
Creative Thinking in the Crescent City
Friday, August 28th, 2009 | Tags: arts, cooperation, development, evolution, family, flow, health, money, motivation, need, optimism, positive psychology, prosocial behavior, psychology, social connections, social integration, sustainability | 1 Comment »[caption id="attachment_704" align="alignleft" width="326" caption="Lower Ninth Ward, 2009 "][/caption] This week marks the four-year anniversary of the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. As hurricane season begins again this year, some are left wondering how the survivors of the storm ...
Darwin’s Touch: Survival of the Kindest
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | Tags: Dacher Keltner, altruism, compassion, cooperation, evolution, genetics, goodness, prosocial behavior, psychology | 2 Comments »Two hundred years ago today, Adam Gopnik writes in Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, two pebbles -- Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln -- were dropped into the sea of life. Their ideas and ...
Community = Happiness?
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 | Tags: Jen ratio, cooperation, emotional literacy, empathy, family, happiness, prosocial behavior, self-transcendance, social capital, social connections, social exclusion | Leave a Comment »Dick Meyer, NPR's new editorial director of digital media, has authored a new book, Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium. In it he rails against how our consumer culture has overemphasized the role and importance ...
Being social may help your heart
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 | Tags: cooperation, health, social capital | 3 Comments »A new study lends some scientific support to the idea that humans are social creatures. The study, led by researchers at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health and published in the February issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine, suggests ...
Helper vs. Hinderer: Babies know the difference
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 | Tags: children, cooperation, development, emotional intelligence, evolution | Leave a Comment »A new study by Yale University's Infant Cognition Center, published in the journal Nature, shows that babies develop social skills at an early age, preferring to play with toys that were helpers over those that were hinderers. The Yale team ...
God may be good, but do we need God to be good?
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 | Tags: Uncategorized, altruism, cooperation, money, morality, prosocial behavior, religion | 1 Comment »For a year now, an off-and-on debate has raged over at my other blog, Daddy Dialectic, about raising kids without religion. We're a pretty atheistic and philosophically materialist lot over there at Daddy Dialectic, and so most contributors have tended to ...
Dads and Social Capital
Monday, July 23rd, 2007 | Tags: children, cooperation, family, helping behavior, parenting, prosocial behavior, social connections, social exclusion, social integration | Leave a Comment »Over at the blog Daddy Dialectic, my esteemed colleague "Chicago Pop" meditates on the relationship between caregiving dads and social capital: Is it worth the time for a dad to get involved with a playground clique of mostly moms?The ...
Cooperation: Humans’ Evolutionary Legacy
Thursday, March 29th, 2007 | Tags: cooperation, evolution, human nature, neuroscience, oxytocin | Leave a Comment »Sharon Begley wrote a fascinating story for Newsweek last week about recent discoveries in the science of human evolution. She explains how technological advances are giving researchers a more precise understanding of when, how, and why humans diverged from the ...
