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The Power of One: The Psychology of Charity
Mother Teresa famously said: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” There are worse people to turn to for lessons in human charity, and here Calcutta’s celebrated missionary also showed an astute grasp of cognitive psychology—and its paradoxes. Our compassion and generosity should grow as the number of poor and suffering multiplies, but the opposite seems to occur. Some numbers are just too big and abstract to grasp, so they lose their power. Modern charities might take a lesson from this quirk of human thinking.
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Is Religion Just An Assortment of Gut Feelings?
The vast majority of the planet’s 7 billion people ascribe to some kind of religious belief—that is, a faith in things that cannot be proven. This makes no sense from a scientific and psychological point of view, because supernatural beliefs—in contrast to our evolved thinking in general—serve no apparent purpose. They don’t help us comprehend and navigate the world. Why would the human mind create them, and allow them to persist? Two cognitive psychologists now offer an intriguing explanation for this philosophical puzzle. Nicolas Baumard of the University of Pennsylvania and Pascal Boyer of Washington University in St.
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When Patients Do Nothing: Illness and Inertia
One of the most daunting public health challenges is getting people to take care of themselves in the most basic ways. It’s not that people with cardiac risk don’t know about exercise and its heart benefits. Or that people with diabetes are unaware of insulin treatment. Or that the elderly don’t know about the flu and flu shots. It’s that they don’t take the first steps in helping themselves get and stay healthy, like seeing a physician and having a checkup and filling a prescription. In this sense, the biggest health risk for many is doing nothing, and the cost of this medical non-compliance could be as high as $100 billion a year in the US alone.
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Budgets and Biases: Summing Up American Values
Our lawmakers may have averted the fiscal cliff on the first of the year, but the threat of sequestration still looms over the nation. If the Congress and the White House cannot agree on the particulars of deficit reduction by March, draconian across-the-board cuts will slash both national security spending and core domestic programs, ranging from education to public health to environmental protection. Every federal budget is, underneath those numbers, a set of values—many related to protecting Americans from harm. But the mandate to cut spending means choosing among those values and safeguards.
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The (Really Scary) Invisible Gorilla
The Invisible Gorilla is part of the popular culture nowadays, thanks largely to a widely-read 2010 book of that title. In that book, authors and cognitive psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris popularized a phenomenon of human perception—known in the jargon as “inattentional blindness”—which they had demonstrated in a study some years before. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times some basketball players tossed a basketball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court, in plain view, yet many of the volunteers failed even to notice the beast.
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Contemplation: A Healthy State of Mind
Most dieticians will tell us that the first step in achieving a healthy body weight is buying a good bathroom scale. The second is using it, regularly. Knowing our weight keeps us honest, and this basic bit of information is a key motivator for the nutrition and exercise changes needed to stay fit over the long haul. And it’s simple and effortless. Except that it’s not. Many people do not have a scale, and what’s more, do not want one. Or if they have one, they never use it. There are many explanations for such avoidance. Some people hold on to a bygone image of themselves, believing that they are still fit and healthy. They don’t want this cherished delusion shattered.
