Pay It Forward Jerk-Ass

Well the holiday season is over and the good cheer might be gone with it but here's an article from the NY Times Magazine about positive psychology. It's quite a bit more than the concept of positive reinforcement you might have heard about in Psychology 101 as it's really best described as asking the question of "what [makes] life worth living."

The focus of Kashdan’s class that day was the distinction between feeling good, which according to positive psychologists only creates a hunger for more pleasure — they call this syndrome the hedonic treadmill — and doing good, which can lead to lasting happiness. The students had been asked first to do something that gave them pleasure and then to perform an act of selfless kindness. They approached the first part of the assignment eagerly. One student recounted having sex with her boyfriend 30 feet underwater while scuba diving. Another said he “went to Coastal Flats and got hammered.” A third attended a Nascar race in North Carolina, smoked, drank and had sex. Some also watched favorite TV shows; others chatted with friends.

When it came time to talk about the second part of the assignment, the students were excited, too. The Nascar attendee, who was afraid of needles, gave blood. Another collected clothes from family members and donated them to a shelter for battered women. The boy who had gotten hammered bought a homeless person a 12-pack of “Natty Ice” at a 7-Eleven, wondering if it was the right thing to do. A fourth gave her waiter at Denny’s a $50 tip.

The Season of Giving

Here's an informative and interesting read from the NY Times Magazine about charitable giving (and a lot more) by Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. A lot of introspective questions came to mind while reading this article, especially since the holiday season is upon us:

• Am I a good person?
• What could I do to improve the world around me?
• Should I really spend another $60 on yet another Xbox 360 game?
• How does social responsibility extend past the immediate future and outside of my immediate community?
  

This article brings up some really interesting points about the responsibility of individuals to contribute to charity, how the U.S. government should be allocating foreign development aid, and just what motivates us as human beings. Quote from Singer here:

In any case, even if we were to grant that people deserve every dollar they earn, that doesn’t answer the question of what they should do with it. We might say that they have a right to spend it on lavish parties, private jets and luxury yachts, or, for that matter, to flush it down the toilet. But we could still think that for them to do these things while others die from easily preventable diseases is wrong. In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of a humanitarian emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown. Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.

Remember that we can easily help without even giving money by supporting organizations such as one.org