Week 4 post 1

Week 4 post 1

Roadmap for the week:

Cooperation and reconciliation 

Robert sampans “collective neighborhood effect”

Neighborhoods high in “collective efficacy” — high social cohesion and willingness to act cooperatively for the common good — have better

-child health

-high school graduation rates

-higher life expectancy 

-reduced social disorder

why is tit-for tat an effective strategy? 

1)its first move is cooperative

2)subsequent moves mirror partner

3)it is easy to read

4)it is forgiving 

-Cooperation—where individuals work together in order to create a benefit for an entire group—seems at odds with what many people assume are the basic forces of evolution (humans are selfish mindset.

-Cooperation is part of nature, down to the cellular level

-These simulations show that ants have evolved a three-lane, two-way traffic system: As many as 200,000 ants a day pour out of their nest in search of food, splitting into two groups to form two outgoing lanes; they return in a single center lane, sometimes carrying more than 30,000 edible grasshoppers or other insects. Couzin theorizes that the ultra-cooperative ability of these simplistic organisms arises from living in large groups for millions of years.

-cleaner fish- eat bacteria off of larger fish

-fly catcher birds screech and then the groups mob the predator 

-we do cooperate in plenty of ways, from writing Wikipedia articles to forming lines for the bathroom. Still, as is clear to anyone who’s ever been stuck in rush-hour traffic or tried to do some last minute Christmas shopping, human cooperation can break down, sometimes suddenly.

Neuroscience of Cooperation

• “We live in a highly social environment
• in which most of the work we do is accomplished through
• collaboration with others, and many of the goods we consume are consumed in the company
• of others or shared with others. Thus, our labor and the fruits of our labor are differentially
• satisfying depending on the relative effort exerted and the relative rewards reaped by
• our peers.”
• -tabibnia and lieberman 2007

-when cooperating the brain shows higher signals of pleasure and happiness than in competition 

I give you some money—let’s say $10—and tell you the following: You’re playing with three other people who you don’t know and may never meet, and each of you has been given the same amount of money. You are all invited to contribute any amount of your money to a common pool. Once everyone has contributed, the game doubles the amount in the pool, then gives each player an equal portion of that doubled amount. What do you do? How much do you put in?

 DISCUSSION; when does cooperation break down? cooperation breaks down when people are no longer willing to listen to and understand the perspectives of others, at that point the persons motives become more selfish. The same goes with more high stress situations, people feel that the punishment will be worse for them and are thinking more about the impacts lack of success could have on them. Lastly i believe coordinating falls apart when people lose the ability to trust each other and each others efforts

*note for some reason this was the only discussion my computer let me put imput on

Navigating Conflict

-sibling relationships are defined by conflict.

-infidelity in conflicts is up to about 25 percent

-instead of dispersing primates get closer to peace make with the individual they had just been fighting with

-instinctual cooperating and peace making

-embarrassment triggers showing apology 

Peace Among Primates

-people used to thing humans were the only primates which would kill its own,That view fell by the wayside in the 1960s as it became clear that some other primates kill their fellows aplenty. Males kill; females kill 

-more peaceful primates have much more peaceful giving environments which invoke less stress whereas the more aggressive ones have the opposite emerge

-primates are able to learn quite quickly so the idea of nature versus nurture is silly, we are separate from our nature

-amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active—aroused, alert, ready for action

-Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter.

-We lack the type of physiology or anatomy that in other mammals determine their mating system, and have come up with societies based on monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry.

Born to Blush

• embarrassment is often absent among people at the other end of the moral spectrum: those prone to violence

-In one experiment, I observed 10-year-old boys attempting to answer questions designed to be too difficult for kids their age Well-adjusted boys, I found, showed embarrassment when they missed the questions, displaying concern over their performance—and, perhaps, a deeper respect for the institution of education. Aggressive boys, in contrast, showed little or no embarrassment, and instead erupted with occasional facial displays of anger. One boy even gave the finger to the camera when the experimenter had to leave the testing room momentarily.

-Ostracism and marginalization are tickets to shortened lives. Among humans, individuals who have fewer and less healthy social bonds have been shown to live shorter lives, have compromised immune function, and be more vulnerable to disease.

-Our sociality, and that of many nonhuman primates, requires a mechanism that brings individuals together in the midst of conflict and aggression.

-subordinate or defeated animal first approaches and engages in submissive behaviors, like bare teeth displays, head bowing and bobbing, and submissive grunts. These actions quickly prompt friendly grooming, physical contact, and mutual embraces, reconciling the warring parties

-face touches, averted gaze, embarrassed smile, and head turns and such which expose the vulnerable parts of a person, all show: vulnerability, weakness, and reconciliation 

Introduction to apology:

• important skill for reconciliation 
• apology as one-of the most effective forms of resolving interpersonal conflicts
• there is a statistically significant positive relationship between the fact that someone has been apologized to and how they describe their own psychological health. 
• the practices that we engage in to improve our happiness don’t necessarily feel good when they’re happening, and apologizing can be hard

5 parts to an Effective apology:

1. express remorse, shame, and/or humility
2. Acknowledge the offense/accept responsibility
3. Offer empathy/explanation 
4. Undo harm: offer compensation/ reparation
5. Reassure that there’s a low likelihood of recurrence

Effective apology’s must also satisfy at least 1 of 7 psychological needs

1. restores dignity
2. Affirms that both parties have shared values and agree that harm committed was wrong
3. Validates that the victim was not responsible for the offense
4. Assures that the victim is safe from a repeat offense
5. Reparative justice (the offender suffers some type of punishment)
6. Provides reparation, some form of compensation for the victims pain
7. Fosters dialogue that allows victims to press their feelings toward the offender and even grieve over their losses

Making Peace Through Apology

The relationship between forgiveness and apology 

-four parts to structure an effective apology

• the four parts are acknowledgment of the offense; explanation; expressions of remorse, shame, and humility; and reparation.

-A valid acknowledgment must make clear who the offender is (or has the standing to speak on behalf of the offender) and who is the offended. The offender must clearly and completely acknowledge the offense. CANNOT BE, (“for whatever I did”) (“mistakes were made”) (“if mistakes have been made”) (“to the degree you were hurt” or “only a few enlisted soldiers were guilty at Abu Ghraib”)

-Next is explanation and An effective explanation may mitigate an offense by showing it was neither intentional nor personal and is unlikely to recur

-explanation will backfire when it seems fraudulent or shallow, as by saying, “The devil made me do it” or “I just snapped” or “I was not thinking.” There is more dignity in admitting “There is no excuse” than in offering a fraudulent or shallow explanation.

-Remorse, shame, and humility are other important components

-reparation is a way for an apology to compensate for the offender’s transgression, 

How apologies heal

-The apology repairs the damage that was done. It heals the festering wound and commits the offender to a change in behavior. When the apology meets an offended person’s needs, he does not have to work at forgiving. Forgiveness comes spontaneously; the victim feels like his offender has released him of a burden or offered him a gift

Exceptions and conclusions

There are situations in which it is useful to forgive without an apology

-One obvious example is where the offending party is deceased. Forgiveness then helps the aggrieved get on with his life

-unrepentant offender shows no signs of remorse or change of behavior, forgiveness can be useful, but reconciliation would be foolish and self-destructive. For example, a woman who has been abused by an unrepentant husband may forgive him but choose to live apart.

What Is Forgiveness?

The Forgiveness Instinct

The desire for revenge isn’t a disease that afflicts a few unfortunate people; rather it’s a universal trait of human nature, crafted by natural selection, that exists today because it helped our ancestors adapt to their environment.

3 truths about forgiveness and revenge:

Truth #1: The desire for revenge is a built-in feature of human nature

Truth #2: The capacity for forgiveness is a built-in feature of human nature

Truth #3: To make the world a more forgiving, less vengeful place, don’t try to change human nature—change the world!

forgiveness apart from what it’s

not, right. So it isn’t necessarily blindly reconciling and sort of once again returning

to a cooperative state with the person, a nor is it involve condoning the action and

resolving them of any responsibility. It’s more of a matter of sort of honestly

reckoning with the harm somebody has perpetrated against you sort of shifting out of a sense

of blame.

People think about a conflict or a grudge that they had, and then there were two conditions.

In one condition, she had them engage in this mental

state of holding the grudge right. We’ve all been there when we’re kind of ruminating

about our frustration towards somebody. And in the other condition she had them go through

this mental exercise of releasing the sense of the grudge right and forgiving. And what

she found is through measures of fight or flight physiology, what she found is that

when we hold the grudge you see increased fight or flight physiology, elevated heart

rate and the like, but when you sort of release yourself from the grudge and forgive you see

a decline in that fight or flight physiological response

The New Science of Forgiveness

• many people hesitate to ask for or grant forgiveness when they feel they have nothing to gain in return.
• forgiveness will not only move us past negative emotions, but move us toward a net positive feeling. It doesn’t mean forgetting or pardoning an offense.
• Unforgiveness, by contrast, seems to be a negative emotional state where an offended person maintains feelings of resentment, hostility, anger, and hatred toward the person who offended him
• ruminating about their grudges was stressful, and subjects found the rumination unpleasant. It made them feel angry, sad, anxious, and less in control. 
• measured levels of cortisol in the saliva of 39 people who rated their relationship as either terrific or terrible, When they were asked to think about their relationship, they had more cortisol reactivity—that is, their stress hormone jumped. Those jumps in stress were highly correlated with their unforgiving attitudes toward their partner
• The physical benefits of forgiveness seem to increase with age
• People over 45 years of age who had forgiven others reported greater satisfaction with their lives and were less likely to report symptoms of psychological distress, such as feelings of nervousness, restlessness, and sadness.
• unforgiveness might throw off the production of important hormones and even disrupt the way our cells fight off infections, bacteria, and other physical insults, such as mild periodontal disease.

Forgiveness and relationships

-Forgiveness within close relationships is not harder or easier than forgiving absent individuals, such as strangers who rob or assault us or people who have moved away or died since hurting us. In ongoing relationships, forgiveness is simply different

-if people were unwilling to sacrifice at times—if they wanted to exact revenge rather than practice forgiveness—they often suffered conflict, negative emotions, and poor abilities to compromise when inevitable differences arose.

-The researchers also found that the relationship between forgiveness and well-being in marriages was stronger than in other relationships. Their findings suggest that the more we invest in a relationship, the more we need a repertoire of good strategies to guide it through troubled times—and the more these strategies will prove satisfying and rewarding. Forgiveness is one of those strategies.

-when people feel positive emotions toward transgressors—such as when they receive apologies or restitution for offenses—they experience changes in physiology, including lowered blood pressure, heart rate, and sweat activity as well as lowered tension in the frown muscles of the face

-—does forgiveness drive happiness or vice versa?—seems at least in part answerable by saying that forgiveness is not necessarily something that just comes naturally to people with high self-esteem and stable relationships. Instead, it is something all different kinds of people can learn. With the right kind of practice, its benefits can be available to most of us.

The Choice to Forgive

-I have found that forgiveness isn’t just wishful thinking. It’s a trainable skill. My colleagues and I have developed a nine-step method for forgiving almost any conceivable hurt.

-forgiveness can reduce stress, blood pressure, anger, depression, and hurt, and it can increase optimism, hope, compassion, and physical vitality

-in a study we conducted with Protestants and Catholics from Northern Ireland who had lost a family member in the violence there, participants reported a 40 percent decline in symptoms of depression after undergoing the forgiveness training. Another study involved people who had suffered a variety of hurts, from business partners lying to them to best friends abandoning them. Six months after their forgiveness training, these people reported a 70 percent drop in the degree of hurt they felt toward the person who had hurt them, and they said they felt more forgiving in general.

1st step: determine what you do not like about the person or situation

-Forgiving someone does not mean forgetting or approving of hurtful events in the past. Rather, it means letting go of your hurt and anger, and not making someone endlessly responsible for your emotional well-being

-moving on is important 

-Forgiveness, like other positive emotions such as hope, compassion, and appreciation, is a natural expression of our humanity.

Happiness practice #4: forgiveness practice

The science of trust

-language and touch are super important to touch.

-took one game of every team in the national basketball association in

the 2008/2009 season, and we coded all the touch that happened during that game, what we

found which is really quite amazing is that, holding constant how well the team was doing

in the game that we coded, how much money they were making, pre-season expectations,

the amount of touch actually predicted how well the team was doing at the end of the

season according to not only winning games which we represent in the graph, but also

sophisticated measures of were they cooperating in the court.

-Oxytocin is produced in the brain’s hypothalamus and stored in the posterior pituitary gland. We know that it helps smooth muscle contractions in childbirth and in breastfeeding mothers. But recently we’ve discovered that its applications go beyond the maternal. It turns out that oxytocin also reduces social anxiety and helps people meet and bond with each other.

-Of the 29 investors who had taken oxytocin, 45 percent transferred the maximum amount of 12 points in each interaction. By contrast, only 21 percent of the placebo-group investors did so. The average transfer made by the oxytocin-group investors was 9.6 points, compared with 8.1 points by the placebo-group investors.

-Oxytocin increased the participants’ willingness to trust others, but it did not make them more optimistic about another person’s trustworthiness.

Trust in Relationships

-Trust isn’t just important for couples. It’s also vital to neighborhoods and states and countries. Trust is central to what makes human communities work.

-there are low- and high-trust regions of the United States. Nevada is a very low-trust region. (Nobody seems to be very surprised by that.) Minnesota is a very high-trust region. The Deep South is a very low-trust region.

-In Brazil, two percent of people say they trust other people. In Norway, 65 percent say they trust other people.

-few people vote, parents and schools are less active. There’s less philanthropy in low-trust regions, greater crime of all kinds, lower longevity, worse health, lower academic achievement in schools.

-over the last 50 years, CEOs in the U.S., on average, have gone from making 20 times what the average worker makes to 350 times what the average worker makes

-if a wife trusts her husband, both of their blood consistently flows slower—not only during their conflict discussion but at other times as well. That’s associated with better health and a longer life.

Awareness of your partner’s emotion;

Turning toward the emotion;

Tolerance of two different viewpoints;

trying to Understand your partner;

Non-defensive responses to your partner;

and responding with Empathy