Good deeds can have a "contagious" effect, say studies

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The success of the Ice Bucket Challenge is an example of how generosity can be contagious. But why did thousands of people take a cold shower and donate their money to research a rare disease, which would not be of direct benefit to them?

This is the kind of question that scientists like Jamil Zaki, a professor at Stanford University (USA), are trying to answer through research. According to Zaki, one of the ways to understand how good deeds spread in society is compliance, that is, the tendency to align attitudes and beliefs with those around them. .

"Basically, we are a social species, people are very motivated to be part of a group and to share a sense of identity," says the researcher. "One way to do it is to imitate behaviors, opinions and emotions."

The influence of the environment is the key

In the past, the concept of conformity has gained a bad reputation when studies began to induce individuals to engage in harmful behavior or to doubt their own judgment. In a classic experiment, the Polish psychologist Solomon Asch showed a volunteer two cards: one contained a straight line and the other three straight lines of different sizes.

The participant had to identify which of them was the same length as the reference line. When other participants chose the clearly wrong answer, the subject was more likely to follow the majority, going against what their own eyes saw.

Zaki, on the other hand, studies how compliance can lead to positive behaviors. In a series of experiences coordinated by him, participants who watched their colleagues make generous donations to charities decided to open the wallet more than those who observed small donations.

The findings, published by the journal Personality and Social Psychology in 2016, also showed that the impact of observing the generosity of others was not limited to copying their good actions. The positive influence also made the participants more sympathetic to other participants and more empathetic to adverse situations.

Scientists have also been able to map how acts of cooperation can multiply in society. A study by researchers at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego showed that people benefited from donations during a game generously handed out to other participants who, in turn , have benefited a third group.

The research, published in an article from 19459027 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010, shows that initial kindness was able to reach people with up to three degrees of separation from the first benefactor.

Victorious Strategy in Social Terms

But the decision to cooperate with other members of society is not just an act of pure and selfless generosity. According to Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor and director of the University's Evolutionary Dynamics program, it's a winning strategy for evolution. According to the expert, cooperation – be it between humans, insects or cells – almost always happens when we expect to receive something in return.

The first is direct reciprocity: I help and you help me.

The second is indirect reciprocity: I help you, so I earn a good reputation and another person helps me through this reputation. The third is spatial reciprocity: I help my neighbors and thus increases my chances of being helped.

The fourth is the selection of groups, based on the fact that groups of "cooperators" do better than "selfish" groups. The fifth is the selection of kinship: I help my family members because I have more chance to share the genes with them and I want to spread these genes in the population

something different, "says Nowak."

Communication Is Essential

In addition to experiences in which participants must decide if their partners will help in different circumstances, another method to study how people cooperate with each other is theoretically, at through mathematical models.

According to Francisco C. Santos, professor of the Higher Technical Institute of the University of Lisbon, these theoretical studies are based on a branch of mathematics called game theory.

"The theory of games is to use mathematics to study conflicts of interest," Santos explains, for example, if a person is willing to pay a cost to provide a benefit to someone, it is possible to use these data to construct equations that can predict the dynamics that can occur in different scenarios.

"If we can understand the underlying mechanisms of cooperation, this knowledge is useful in promoting cooperation where it does not exist. "

Despite the evolving benefits of adopting a cooperative attitude, it's easy to think of real-life situations in which no one is willing to help people or, worse, circumstances in which egotistical attitudes propagate through society as a virus.Some research shows that acts of indifference can be as contagious as acts of altruism

According to Martin Nowak, kindness only spreads in society when the mechanisms that allow this propagation are strong enough. For example, if the person helping the next one earns enough reputation for others to decide to help, then kindness will spread in this group. "If this mechanism is not strong enough, cooperation will lose and indifference will prevail," says the researcher.