Greater Good

Are you one of the lucky people? You know, one of those people that always seems to be in the right place at the right time, that is lucky in love and has good parking karma? Do good things happen to you by chance?

If you aren't one of those people, do you want to be?

Lucky people meet their perfect partners, achieve their lifelong ambitions, find fulfilling careers, and live happy and meaningful lives. Their success is not due to their working especially hard, being amazingly talented, or being exceptionally intelligent. Instead, they appear to have an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time and enjoy more than their fair share of lucky breaks.

–Dr. Richard Wiseman

As a sociologist, I am skeptical of "luck." I've always felt lucky myself, but I'm aware that I was born into fortunate circumstances that make life easier for me than it is for others. I say I'm lucky, and by that I mean I'm grateful for my life circumstances. I know things that are out of our control affect our social status—whether we are born black or white, short or tall, to rich parents or poor, go to a good school or a sketchy one—and that those things can have a pretty profound effect on our health and happiness.

At least for some people.

Some people are born into lucky circumstances and their lives seem charmed. Others seem spoiled and unable to make the most of their good fortune. Similarly, there are always people who are raised in the worst imaginable situations who rise above it.

I've always credited success—difficult circumstances or not—to hard work and resilience, to having a growth mindset and the ability to cope with failure. Turns out that luck has something to do with it, too. Moreover, luck is not really what we think it is. Luck is not entirely chance, a whole body of research shows; it is a skill set.

Luck is a Skill?

Main Entry: luck
1 a : a force that brings good fortune or adversity b : the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual

2 : favoring chance; also : success

By definition, luck is generally a force outside of ourselves, over which we have no control. Random chance, or fate, can change our lives for better or worse at the blink of an eye. Most would agree that is better to be lucky than unlucky, but who's to say why someone is lucky or not?

Richard Wiseman is. He's conducted dozens of studies over just as many years about why some people are star-crossed while others perpetually doomed. His book, The Luck Factor, is one story after another about charmed people who get everything they ever dreamed of, seemingly by chance. Wiseman also writes about those people whose lives are perpetual train-wrecks: they barely have a chance to pull themselves up from one random misfortune before the next blow comes their way.

Wiseman and his colleagues have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that lucky people are made, not born. That they are skilled at the things that bring luck. Life circumstances might bring fortune, but luck enables us to reap the best of it. Furthermore, by practicing those skills that make us "lucky," even the most ill-fated among us can improve our luck.

Why We Want Our Kids to Consider Themselves Lucky

Research shows that people who believe themselves to be lucky are far more satisfied with their lives than unlucky people or people who think of themselves as neither lucky nor unlucky. Lucky people are happier with their family life, their personal life, their financial situation, their health and their career. How lucky we feel is connected to how much gratitude we have, as well as to our confidence and optimism—incredibly important positive emotions. Luck is hugely related not just to our success, but to our happiness. In fact, the word happy originally meant lucky—hap meant "chance" or "fortune".

Like happiness, luck can be cultivated. (Interestingly, in Welsh the word for lucky first meant wise, something which indicates experience, not chance.) But being lucky or unlucky is not related to intelligence. Usually without realizing it, lucky people live by four principles—they've developed four particular habits, really—and so they seem to twist fate in their favor.

I'm now so convinced about the importance of luck for happiness that in the coming weeks I'm going to blog about how to teach our kids those four specific skills (and 12 sub-skills) that will make them lucky. I have realized that luck is not something to think about only on St. Patrick's Day, and it certainly isn't something to be cultivated with four-leaf clovers. So stay tuned for next week's posting: "How to Raise Lucky Kids."

Are you lucky? Are your kids? If so, to what do you attribute your luck?

Reference:

Wiseman, Richard (2003). The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles. Hyperion: New York.

© 2010 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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It is totally weird, but it's true: I have gotten hate mail for writing a blog about raising happy children. And based on the stories I've heard from my co-workers at the Greater Good Science Center, I'm not the only one. But cyber bullies, take note: Research suggests you'll be happier if you make your point politely.

Nasty online communication is a phenomenon called "flaming." Studies show that people are more likely to be hostile and aggressive online than they are in their face-to-face communications. The anonymity of the Internet can block people's self-awareness, making them less in-tune with their emotional states. This makes it harder for people to control their behavior or engage in rational conversation.

Research also shows that when people flame, their comments reflect how they were feeling before they read whatever they responded so violently to. So we may think we are engaging in an intellectual debate, but actually, we are just acting out the funk we were in before we read that blog post that supposedly ticked us off.

Which is probably why the rude comments and mean emails reached an all time high for me this past Christmas day: the holidays can be a hard time emotionally. Stress levels run high, and people have to deal with difficult family members and difficult emotions. My holiday postings threw several people into a rage; I know now that they were acting out the negative emotions that they were feeling before they read my post.

Besides the fact that people seem just plain crazy when they post nasty comments or send hateful email, there are some great reasons to be polite and respectful.

Reason #1: You'll be happier. Kind people experience more happiness and they have happier memories. And all that happiness affects our ratios of positive to negative emotions. When people experience at least three times as many positive emotions as negative ones, they reach an emotional tipping point—they become more resilient in the face of adversity and more open and creative. Being mean makes you rigid; being nice improves your relationships, your health , and broadens your mind. (To learn more about these benefits, I'd suggest checking out this upcoming Greater Good Science Center event.)

Reason #2: You'll be more powerful. In research settings, the kindest and most altruistic people gain the highest status in a group, and they are chosen most frequently as partners. In the real world, people in high-status positions accrue many other benefits: power, wealth, health, better moods, higher self-esteem, and lower stress levels.

Reason #3: Your children will be happier. We parents model skills and habits that affect our kids' happiness all the time. When we are nice, children learn the skills they need to be nice. When we let loose a nasty email, they infer that it's okay to treat other people with contempt. This won't lead to anyone's happiness.

Moreover, emotions are incredibly contagious. If I'm feeling angry, that anger is likely to transfer to my kids, even if I'm just sitting at the computer writing hostile emails.

Let's be clear: I'm not advocating avoiding negative feedback. I think constructive criticism is one of the best ways for us to grow as human beings. Though even the most well-intended constructive feedback can feel negative, we thin-skinned people are happier and more successful when we learn to cope with negative-feeling feedback rather than simply avoid it.

But there's a difference between constructive criticism and flat out hostility. When you are giving constructive criticism, remember to communicate with warmth and respect. Research shows that when your are clear that you think the target of your comment is competent and worthy of your attention, you will be more likely perceived as a friend rather than a foe, and that this promotes engagement and cooperation. What better way to contribute to the greater good? You can say your piece while doing someone a favor (rather than hurting their feelings). And it is those types of kindnesses that make everyone happier in the end.

This week's Raising Happiness events:

Thursday, March 11, 2010
Sweet Thursday Series, Author Interview
7:30 PM, Lafayette Library
952 Moraga Rd., Lafayette, CA

Saturday, March 13, 2010
Parents' Workshop
 and Concurrent Children's Program 
for ages 2 through 8th grade
2:00 – 4:00 pm , The Oneness-Family School
6701 Wisconsin Avenue, Chevy Chase, MD
Click here to buy tickets

And an important correction—in the newsletter last week the links for this event didn't work…if you'd like to buy tickets to the Palo Alto Junior League event, please do so here.

Thursday, March 25, 2010
Talk & Book Signing
9:00 – 10:30 AM, Palo Alto Junior League
Includes buffet breakfast
Click here for tickets & info

© 2010 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

References:

Andersen, SM, Saribay, SA, & Thorpe, JS. (2008). Simple kindness can go a long way: Relationships, social identity, and engagement. Social Psychology, 39(1), 59-69.

Barsade, SG. (2002). The Ripple Effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644-675.

Hardy, CL, & Van Vugt, M. (2006). Nice guys finish first: The Competitive Altruism Hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(10), 1402-1413.

Lee, H. (2005). Behavioral strategies for dealing with flaming in an online forum. The Sociological Quarterly, 46, 385-403.

McKenna, KYA, & Bargh, JA. (2000). Plan 9 from cyberspace: The implication of the internet for personality and social psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4(1), 57-75.

Otake, K, Shimai, S, Tanaka-Matsumi, J, Otsui, K, & Fredrickson, BL. (2006). Happy people become happier through kindness: A counting kindnesses intervention. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7, 361–375.

Many thanks to Stephanie Harstrup for her research assistance.

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Become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook.

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Is your teenager grouchy? Does your little one have a cold? Research shows that kindness is a sure route to greater happiness and, in some cases, improved health. (See last week's posting, What You Get When You Give for more about this.)

Here are five ways to raise kinder kids:

1. Model kindness yourself. Kindness can be contagious: when we see someone else perform an act of kindness, we are more likely to feel an impulse to help out, too. Research suggests that altruistic children have at least one parent (usually of the same sex) who deliberately communicates altruistic values to their kids. Similarly, when preschoolers have nurturing caregivers who deliberately model helping others, they tend to be more helpful and verbally sympathetic to other children when they hurt themselves. There are many ways to model altruism for your kids, as the Half Full reader shows:

   "We have twin 4 year olds. Girls. We make a lot of art for people. Even just a drawing. We also make cookies or other baked goods for people. We're in the process of planning to do a bake-a-thon for a bake sale for Haiti and my girls are very excited for that. Right now it's little things but I hope to get them actually volunteering and holding lemonade sales at an early age."

2. Make kids personally responsible in some way. Four to 13 year olds who were asked to donate their Halloween candy to hospitalized children donated more (and were more likely to make a donation) when they felt personally responsible. Researchers made kids feel responsible when they said things like: "I will be counting on you and you and you…I will put each of your names on the bag of candy I give tomorrow to the hospitalized children" rather than "please give them as many as you want by putting the candies in the box on the table."
3. Don't reward helping behavior. Very young children who receive material rewards for helping others become less likely to help in the future compared with toddlers who only receive verbal praise or receive no reward at all. This research suggests that even the youngest children are intrinsically motivated to be kind, and that extrinsic rewards can undermine this tendency. One reader posted this comment in response to my last posting about kindness on the Huffington Post:

   "Some of us feel happy helping others while some feel happy hurting others. I opine that it is the conditioning by our parents when we were young that have led different people to different paths. As a parent, we need to reward our kids when they do a good deed so that they become condition to help others."

   What parents model conditions kids in ways that affect their behavior later (though I do have a hard time believing that anyone would feel true joy hurting another person). Although rewarding kids has been shown to backfire eventually, praising kids for helping others is a good idea if we use growth-mindset praise.

4. Be positive. Parents who express positive feelings and use positive, non-coercive discipline raise children who are kinder and more compassionate toward others. Using the ERN method described in this posting is positive and non-coercive; yelling, spanking, and threatening is not.
5. Expose them to need. Too often we protect our kids from pain and suffering, and in so doing we shelter them from others' needs. Consider the counterintuitive notion that compassion is a positive emotion strongly correlated with happiness, and provide them with opportunities to feel compassion. Teach kids that this compassion is a gift—it is a way to give their time, attention, and energy to another. Added bonus: When we expose kids to others' suffering, they often feel both compassion and gratitude.

I'll close with a reader's comment on my last post that provides a nice illustration of this link between kindness, compassion, and happiness:

"I run a program that helps people overcome the emotional after-effects of traumatic illness and injury. I have seen numerous examples of people changing their life direction after they began giving of themselves to others. It also made a difference for me after I went through life changes due to heart disease and cancer."

© 2010 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

References:

Martin L. Hoffman, "Altruistic Behavior and the Parent-Child Relationship," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31, no. 5 (1975).

Peterson, "Generativity and Successful Parenting: An Analysis of Young Adult Outcomes."

Marian Radke Yarrow, Phyllis M. Scott, and Carolyn Zahn Waxler, "Learning Concern for Others," Development Psychology 8, no. 2 (1973).

Nancy Eisenberg and Elizabeth Geisheker, "Content of Preachings and Power of the Model/Preacher: The Effect on Children Generosity," Developmental Psychology 15, no. 2 (1979).

Geoffrey Maruyama, Scott C. Fraser, and Norman Miller, "Personal Responsibility and Altruism in Children," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42, no. 4 (1982).

D.C. McClelland and C. Kirshnit, "The Effect of Motivational Arousal through Films on Salivary Immunoglobulin A," Psychology & Health 2, no. 1 (1988).

Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, "Extrinsic Rewards Undermine Altruisitic Tendencies in 20 Month-Olds," Development Psychology 44, no. 6 (2008).

Ariel Knafo and Robert Plomin, "Parental Discipline and Affection and Children's Prosocial Behavior: Genetic and Enviromental Links," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, no. 1 (2006).

"Prosocial Behavior from Early to Middle Childhood Genetic and Environmental Influences on Stablility and Change," Development Psychology 42, no. 5 (2006).

Join the Campaign for 100,000 Happier Parents by signing this simple pledge.

Become a fan of Raising Happiness on Facebook.

Follow Christine Carter on Twitter

Subscribe to the Happiness Matters Podcast on iTunes.

Sign up for the Raising Happiness CLASS!