Connecticut Political Commentary, News and Analysis
Monkey See, Monkey Do
It seems that there’s now scientific evidence that practicing those random acts of kindness leads to more random acts of kindness and so on, like our never ending Breck commercial. WIRED, reports:
In a game where selfishness made more sense than cooperation, acts of giving were “tripled over the course of the experiment by other subjects who are directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more,” wrote political scientist James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University.
Their findings, published March 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are the latest in a series of studies the pair have conducted on the spread of behaviors through social networks.
Fascinating chart in the article. Interesting, too how people react when others perform random acts of kindness. One day I walked up to a cashier’s line with a DVD, and the guy following me was carrying this huge box with something electronic in it. I told him to go ahead of me. The cashier’s eyes got big and she said, “Are you sure?” I pointed to the guy’s box and to my DVD and said “Yeah, big box, little box. Check him out first.” She was so shocked that when my purchase was rung up, she gave me it at a discount for being “courteous” because the cashier was actually the store manager filling in for a few minutes for the regular gal. Even so, she was still surprised and asked me why I’d let the other guy go first. I simply told her I wasn’t in a rush and hoped he would pay it forward and be kind to someone else. She sounded suprised at that.
