10 Points on the Science of Spreading Good

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March 21, 2012

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Spread love everywhere you go: First of all in your own house ... kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness.

- Mother Teresa -

10 Points on the Science of Spreading Good

"Good deeds are contagious. We naturally imitate the people around us, we adopt their ideas about appropriate behavior, and we feel what they feel. Acts of charity are no exception. In our 2010 generosity experiment, we showed that every extra dollar of giving in a game designed to measure altruism caused people who saw that giving to donate an extra twenty cents. Furthermore, the network acts like a matching grant: that same experiment showed that contagious generosity spreads up to three steps through the network (from person to person to person to person), and when we added up all the extra donations that resulted at every step, we found that an extra dollar in giving yielded three extra dollars by everyone else in the network." Internationally recognized political scientist James Fowler shares the science of spreading good. { read more }