We are a non-profit organization Humanity Integrated that is comprised of people who find themselves in the most interesting yet trying times of human evolution – the time of global crisis, which is the first stage of a profound change.
Happy to share with you this profound conversation we had with one of our favorite sages, Elisabet Sahtouris, during the Thanksgiving holidays. Hear her comment on the “ecstasy of unity and connection.” An incredible person, scholar, scientist, and a woman, from whom we draw so much insight and wisdom. An interview worth your time…
We found that happiness can spread like a virus through social networks. In fact, if your friends’ friends’ friend becomes happy, it significantly increases the chance that you’ll be happy.
–Dr. James Fowler, in “Happiness Is… – MSNBC.”
A study by two professors from Harvard and UCSD, Dr. Nicholas Christakis and Dr. James Fowler, found that when a person becomes happy:
Happiness isn’t a solitary experience; it’s dependent on others. Harvard researchers followed 4,739 people for 20 years, measuring how social networks, siblings, friends and neighbors are affected by the happiness of others.
The study controlled factors of age, gender, education and occupation.
Researchers found that close physical proximity is essential for happiness to spread. A happy friend who lives within a half-mile makes you 42% more likely to be happy yourself. If that same friend lives two miles away, the impact drops to 22%. Happy siblings make you 14% more likely to be happy, but only if they live within a mile. Happy spouses provide an 8% boost, if they live under the same roof.
Previous research has shown that people who are happy have healthier hearts, they have lower levels of stress hormones, and they live longer.
–Dr. James Fowler, in “Happiness Is… – MSNBC.”
Text in this post is excerpted from the videos shown above.
Image: "true happiness" by Anton Kudris.
The quotes in this post are all by Martin Seligman, from the lecture “Ideas at the House: Martin Seligman – Well-Being and Happiness,” which can be viewed at the bottom of this post.
Freud and Schopenhauer told us the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable; that the object of human progress, the object of psychotherapy was to reduce suffering to zero. I’m going to argue today that that’s empirically false, it’s morally insidious, and it’s politically a dead end; that there’s much more to life than zero.
30 years ago, the word “happiness” was a tremendously vague word. It meant very many different things to different people, and it could not be measured. But now, we have good measures of the elements of well-being.
Technically, we call these states “positive affectivity” and they are bell shaped. That means, right now, 50% of the people in the world are not cheerful and merry. They are not smiling. It is highly genetic. It is about 50% heritable and most importantly, the best we can to with smiling, being merry, being cheerful, is to raise it by about 5-15%.
In fact, I spent most of my life working on misery and people would ask me: why didn’t I work on happiness? The reason I didn’t, there was a very influential study in the mid-1970s by Phil Brickman in which he found 14 people who had won the lottery and he was able to track their happiness.
It turned out you get very happy when you win the lottery and it lasts for about three months. And then three months later you’re back to where you were, back to your curmudgeonly self. It turns out you can’t change a curmudgeon into a giggler, but you can get those of us who are in the lower 50% of positive affectivity to live at the upper part of our envelope.
Barbara Fredrickson and Marcel Losada go into corporations, 60 American corporations, and they write, they record every word that’s said. And they classify the words into positive and negative words and then they relate this to how the corporation is doing economically. So, it turns out, there is a ratio of positive to negative words said that correlates with economic status of corporations. So:
John and Julie Gottman, two of the leading marital therapists in the world, locked couples in an apartment for a weekend. They listened to every word that was said and computed the ratio of positive words to negative words, and predicted divorce.
One month we said: “Has something awful happened to you?” on the website AuthenticHappiness.org. Within a couple of weeks, 1700 people had answered saying:
One or more of the worst 15 things that can happen to a human being had happened to them. We measured their well-being and their strengths.
Our findings were very surprising:
Now, remember these people survived. They’re on our website. They’ve come to it with- stronger than people who had two. We asked the question then, this is an example of what Nietzsche told us: “If it doesn’t kill us, it makes us stronger.” It seems to be true.
Then, we asked a question: “What strengths predicted the people who would grow?”
And here are the five strengths:
…were the predictors of who would show the most increases in well-being.
We have an exercise that we have young people do. It’s the distinction between pleasure and philanthropy.
I assign my students to do something fun next week, and to do something philanthropic, altruistic. And then, to write up what happens. And what happens, I’ll just tell you emblematically, one of my students, ah, when you do something fun like shopping, going to the movies, hanging out with your friends, it has a square wave offset. That is, when it’s done, it’s done.
When you do something altruistic, something else happens.
For one of my students, her 9-year-old nephew called her on the phone during this assignment. It was her mid-term week, and she needed to tutor him. She’d spent two hours tutoring him in fractions and she said:
“After that, the whole day went better. I was mellow. I could listen to people. People liked me more.”
Then, one of my business students said:
“I’m in the business school because I want to make a lot of money. And, I want to make a lot of money. It’s reasonable. Money brings happiness, it brings security, it brings contentment, it brings control, but I was astonished to find out that I was happier helping another person than I was shopping.”
This, it turns out, to be a human regularity; important to know that. It’s the way we’re built.
Mark Ellenbogen and Christopher Cardoso, researchers in Concordia’s Centre for Research in Human Development are taking a closer look at oxytocin, a hormone traditionally studied for its role in childbirth and breastfeeding, and more recently for its effect on social behaviour. Their latest study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, shows that oxytocin can increase a person’s trust in others following social rejection.
Explains Ellenbogen, “that means that instead of the traditional ‘fight or flight’ response to social conflict where people get revved up to respond to a challenge or run away from it, oxytocin may promote the ‘tend and befriend’ response where people reach out to others for support after a stressful event. That can, in turn, strengthen social bonds and may be a healthier way to cope.”
In a double-blind experiment, 100 students were administered either oxytocin or a placebo via a nasal spray, then subjected to social rejection. In a conversation that was staged to simulate real life, researchers posing as students disagreed with, interrupted and ignored the unsuspecting participants. Using mood and personality questionnaires, the data showed that participants who were particularly distressed after being snubbed by the researchers reported greater trust in other people if they sniffed oxytocin prior to the event, but not if they sniffed the placebo. In contrast, oxytocin had no effect on trust in those who were not emotionally affected by social rejection.
–Taken from the article “Feeling stressed? Oxytocin could help you reach out to others for support” by Concordia University, in Science Daily.
Image: "Hello, Is This Shaniqua?" by Cubmundo.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.
In contrast to “every man for himself” interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.
They call it “survival of the kindest.”
“Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others,” said Keltner, co-director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. “Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct.”
–Taken from the article, “Social scientists build case for ‘survival of the kindest’,” based on materials provided by University of California, Berkeley. The original article was written by Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations.
Image: "His Compassions are Unfailing - Lamentations 3:22 HD Desktop" by canonfather.
Humanity’s and nature’s interconnectedness and interdependence is exemplified in the article “Coal-Burning in the U.S. and Europe Caused a Massive African Drought” by Olga Khazan, which suggests that a major drought that caused great famine from the 1960s to the 1980s in North Africa was not caused by bad farming practices, as was originally thought, but by air pollution emanating from the United States and Europe…
A famine ravaged North Africa’s Sahel region from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, killing 100,000 people and leaving 750,000 more dependent on food aid. Between 1972 and 1974, the U.S. shipped 600,000 tons of grain to the region, which accounted for about half of the total relief at the time. But even as they worked to save Africans from starvation, what Westerners at the time didn’t know is that the United States and Europe played a big role in the drought itself.
New research from the University of Washington shows that air pollution from the Northern Hemisphere indirectly caused reduced rainfall over Africa’s largely arid Sahel region, causing Lake Chad, a major local water source, to dry up, and leading to widespread crop failures.
Originally, the drought was blamed on overgrazing and poor land management, but a forthcoming study in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the environmental catastrophe was partly the result of factory emissions in the Western world. As the University of Washington puts it:
Aerosols emanating from coal-burning factories in the United States and Europe during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere, shifting tropical rain bands south. Rains no longer reached the Sahel region, a band that spans the African continent just below the Sahara desert.
Image: "Drought" by Bert Kaufmann.
“Growing evidence suggests that the quality and patterns of one’s social relationships may be linked with a variety of health outcomes, including heart disease,” says Thomas Kamarck, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.
“The contribution of this study is in showing that these sorts of links may be observed even during the earliest stages of plaque development (in the carotid artery) and that these observations may be rooted not just in the way that we evaluate our relationships in general, but in the quality of specific social interactions with our partners as they unfold during our daily lives.”
Given the size of the effect in the study and the relationship between carotid artery plaque and disease, the findings indicate that those with marital interactions light on the positive may have an 8.5 percent greater risk of suffering heart attack or stroke than those with a surfeit of good feelings.
Taken from the article “Lack of Wedded Bliss Linked to Heart Attack Risk” by Joe Miksch-Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh.
Image: "Marriage Train" by Angie Chung.
“Fostering Innovation Through a Diverse Workforce” is based on an exclusive survey of 321 executives at large global enterprises ($500 million-plus in annual revenues). All respondents had direct responsibility or oversight for their companies’ diversity and inclusion programs. The study was sponsored by AT&T, L’Oréal USA, and Mattel.
According to the survey, a diverse and inclusive workforce is necessary to drive innovation and promote creativity—85% of respondents agreed (48% strongly so) that diversity is crucial to gaining the perspectives and ideas that foster innovation. As importantly, more than three quarters indicated that their companies will put more focus over the next three years to leverage diversity for their business goals, including innovation.
“Companies have realized that diversity and inclusion are no longer separate from other parts of the business,” said Stuart Feil, editorial director of Forbes Insights. “Organizations in the survey understand that different experiences and different perspectives build the foundation necessary to compete on a global scale.”
–Taken from the article “Forbes Insights Study Identifies Strong Link between Diverse Talent and Innovation” by Debbie Weathers.
Image: "2011 Diversity Conference" by Oregon Department of Transportation.
The more time, effort or work you put toward someone, the more you’re personally invested in them, and the more you like them and want it to work out.
Do you think this principle of liking people more via investing more in them can be applied in all social relationships, not just relationships among couples? If so, how? We look forward to your comments below…
Image: "Mark Zuckerberg has changed our lives" by Ulisse Albiati.