Post No.: 0923
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Being prosocial is a form of delayed gratification – doing something good for others now will increase the likelihood of something good coming back around to us one day.
As long as we watch out for those who shamelessly take advantage of others (those who can give or share but don’t – and it’s the intentions that matter most because not everyone can give) then kindness will generate net gains for all overall. This is because when we cooperate and reciprocate with prosocial attitudes, we create synergies and efficiencies and become greater together than the mere sum of our parts. Helping others if we can isn’t zero-sum or negative-sum – helping others creates positive-sum outcomes.
It’s rational in the long run for us to be prosocial and to cooperate rather than fight and try to destroy each other. Prosociality, paid-forwards, creates a more cohesive, peaceful and sustainable civilisation.
Being more prosocial is correlated with greater relationship quality, and accordingly greater well-being. If you want to be happier then focus on the quality of your relationships and be more prosocial and generous in them. We won’t be ‘too kind’ unless we give to the point of starving ourselves.
In cultures that emphasise or prioritise social connections and relationships – money has less influence on one’s happiness than in more individualistic cultures.
(Perceiving) feeling rushed and thus stressed makes us less likely to stop and help others, which isn’t great in this modern fast-paced age. Some things in psychology work bi-directionally though so if you want to feel less rushed – spend some time each day helping others. Sometimes it just takes 10 seconds to show some compassion.
Understanding our interdependence is required because it’s ‘go back to your own country’ one day then ‘clapping for our health workers’ the next once people realise that they depend on these foreign workers! Should it take a crisis like a pandemic to learn to be considerate, or to realise what’s truly important in life? In environments or situations where people rely on each other to survive, they need to find collaborative solutions to keep each other safe and healthy otherwise they risk their own individual survival. It’s harder trying to survive alone. No one makes it alone, especially in the toughest places. It’s better to have some of something than all of nothing.
In an interdependent society, people will want to help you because you’ve helped them, and vice-versa, and this works at all levels, including being more cooperative with one’s government if one feels that they care about us when we’re in need.
Doing our personal bit isn’t always sufficient though. Where there are wider social injustices or structural inequities like poverty and racism, we must join in to help tackle these inequities – most vitally by influencing things at the policy level. This is where our votes matter. For instance we cannot expect families to eat well to nurture their physical and mental well-being if they cannot afford to. It’s not always down to the individuals or the failure of their parents.
From a broader, socio-economic statistical data perspective – social, structural and historical conditions and inequity all affect well-being. How happy people feel therefore isn’t completely their own choice. Some face greater struggles stemming from their circumstances than others. Our choices or ‘choices’ are shaped by our social circumstances. Whenever there’s a gap in happiness between one group and another – we can identify general gaps in their income, education, social connections, access to healthy food, safety and/or sense of security. No study cites gaps in meditation or expressive writing(!) Similarly, when subsets of populations become happier over time, we can trace this to improvements in their work stability, incomes, laws that promote equality and overall cultural, economic and public policy shifts.
Social inequities for disadvantaged groups were amplified during the pandemic. If they’re not structural then they can be nonetheless situational, like a personal trauma event. It’s not that we cannot do things on an individual level to improve our own happiness, like exercising and getting more fresh air amongst nature – we shouldn’t feel resigned or passive. But individual-level behaviours aren’t sufficient when we require interventions at the public policy level. (It’s a similar situation concerning the obesity crisis – individual responsibility matters but the data shows that structural factors matter more.) In the broader picture, it also crucially requires tackling power inequalities and discrimination.
One potential barrier to a more selfless and prosocial world is that more people now operate on a ‘give and take’ trade/market principle, particularly with strangers. Thus if you try to be generous to someone out of the blue and give without the expectation of receiving anything in return – some people will distrust your actions and think you must have a hidden ulterior motive i.e. that you’re seeking something unknown in return. This ironically means that some people would rather trust in overtly selfish people.
And treating people as always self-interested, like by using incentives to shape their decisions, will sometimes induce them to become just that – switching from social norms to market norms makes people less altruistic. An interaction becomes less personal and more like business. Reciprocity in social and market norms are different – the former is about prosociality, the latter is about obligation. Many money dilemmas revolve around the boundary between social and market norms, like whether or not to charge a friend who squats in your flat for a few months?
If people do selfless things for others because it feels good then isn’t that a selfish motive? Altruism isn’t incentivised by extrinsic rewards/punishments though but by intrinsic reasons. (It’s so far unclear, however, whether self-interested giving or external incentives, like giving for the reason of hoping to receive some kind of reward, can crowd-out and subvert the good intentions and emotional and intrinsic benefits of prosocial behaviour in the long term?) Classical economic theory is erroneous when it assumes that all behaviours are based on cold-calculated, cost-benefit decisions from a rational, self-interested perspective. Most people would rather have a healthy fang pulled out without anaesthesia than kill a kitten – even though the first case physically hurts them and the second physically hurts another creature. Meow.
You should perhaps be wary of those who coldly calculate their expected returns from every interaction with you – they’re the type who’ll schmooze up to you if you’ve got riches and fame or they think you’re on the rise but abandon you if you ever lose it all or they think you’re on the fall. These people aren’t your friends at all.
Maybe some people are cynical about altruism because they’ve never been altruistic themselves (everything they do for others is manipulative thus they assume everyone else must therefore act similarly)? Or someone pretending to be purely generous has bitten them before? Some feel they’ll be obliged to reciprocate out of their own guilt for receiving something they feel they don’t deserve (some don’t mind receiving all they can while giving as little as possible in return to others though so at least the aforementioned will try to apply some sense of fairness). For others still, ego and pride is their barrier and they don’t want to accept ‘charity’ or feel patronised… This shows us that some of the obstacles facing kindness and harmony aren’t related to selfishness or a lack of compassion but a lack of confidence to accept, as well as to not mistrust the wrong people when giving.
In the prisoner’s dilemma game, two selfish players create worse outcomes for themselves compared to two cooperating players. Selfish players can win over cooperative players but free-riding selfish people shouldn’t be idolised but punished. They shouldn’t be emulated because we cannot all be leeches on other people’s generosity. Many of us can give more than we take in a direct sense. But if we all took more than we gave then that’s logically unsustainable.
There must also be a general direction of personally taking more from our elders and giving more to the youngsters, thus some asymmetrical relationships are logical for the benefit of a species. Paying things forwards to strangers also spreads the virtuous cycles onto wider circles in a community. And communities formed before trade and currency appeared.
From a purely individualistic perspective, a baby in the womb is a parasite and one that’s born still needs to be fed, washed, kept warm, entertained, etc. for several arduous years, thus one shouldn’t ever have children! Conversely, from a genetic kinship perspective, all humans are really genetically related to each other, thus saving a stranger would save a lot of common genes you share with them.
Regardless of whether our giving is purely selfless or has self-interested motives – it’s good to give whenever we can. If you want a world of unkindness then don’t expect anyone to help you if you’re bleeding on the pavement and don’t look like you can give anyone anything in return for helping you. Even if you do have something to give in return, perhaps they should just, thinking only selfishly and individualistically, wait until you bleed out then loot your dead corpse! The richest person in the world must constantly look behind their back if they’re not liked.
Materialism, at least in some cultures and generally, is potentially driven by low self-esteem; and this starts from young. Due to biases, most people think they always give more than they take too. Self-centredness is antisocial and this leads to loneliness and unhappiness. So help yourself by helping others. Big or sustained gestures are great but even small, non-financial, ones will help us to connect with others, feel less lonely and make us feel good. Our self-worth largely derives from how much of a useful impact we have on others – so give, share and care about others, whether with your money, time or energy, and make that positive impact on others. Being prosocial and spending resources on others generally makes us happier than spending these things just on ourselves. And happier people give more, and giving more makes people happier, in a positive cycle.
Giving leads to happiness possibly because it signifies that we have plenty (we couldn’t give to others if we didn’t have anything to give or if we were desperate and struggling to provide even for ourselves) and because it signifies that we have friends and allies (we wouldn’t be prosocial towards others if we didn’t have anyone we’d want to be prosocial with). These are based on our perceptions because some rich people can still believe they don’t have enough to share, and some popular people can still believe they cannot trust anyone. This giving must be voluntary or we at least mustn’t feel unduly pressured into giving something though. Post No.: 0913 discussed donating to make the biggest impact.
If altruism is considered irrational – mayhap an over-firing by-product effect of kin selection – then some seeming irrationalities can still be beneficial for one’s well-being. It’s like the evolutionary reason why orgasms feel pleasurable is because they encourage reproductive sex, but not all orgasms need to be for reproductive sex (to ultimately pass one’s genes onto the next generation) – adults can still exploit the fact that orgasms feel good even though they know no offspring will result. People can find binky bunnies and other fluffy pets cute and a joy because they possess many of the qualities of human babies (the ‘cute response’) even though they’re not genetically kin and are (in a pure dispassionate sense) a drain on personal resources to keep! (‘Cute aggression’ is when people see something so adorable that, although they don’t wish to cause harm, they feel like they want to literally squeeze it to death!) Recreational sex, nurturing pets, and kindness to strangers, all facilitate bonding in different contexts though, which is critical for a social species like humans. So give, in the same way you have recreational sex or feed bunnies!
Meow.
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