Good Samaritans rally to help woman

in Psychology

Earlier in September, two thieves stole all the money of a 94-year-old Loxley woman. She had saved the money to paint her home. Now some Good Samaritans have come to her rescue.

The house used to be a dingy gray color, but not anymore. People in the community came together over the weekend to repaint the outside of her home. Her neighbors and church members volunteered to do the work, at no charge.

“It just done me good. I was just overjoyed with it. A lot of them I knew, and I a lot of them I didn’t know,” said Hayes.

Hayes says about 100 people came out to do the work.

“They cut down bushes and piled them up. The fire department said they would leave it there two weeks and they would come back and burn them,” said Hayes.

The grandmother says this is a good example of a bad situation turned good.

“It put a deeper love in my heart for them,” said Hayes.

Hayes says this tells her that criminals are not alone in the world, but Good Samaritans are here as well.

Read the full story: Good Samaritans rally to help woman | Fox10tv.com.

Majora Carter’s tale of urban renewal

in Psychology

Majora Carter is a visionary voice in city planning who views urban renewal through an environmental lens. With her inspired ideas and fierce persistence, Carter managed to bring the South Bronx its first open-waterfront park in 60 years, Hunts Point Riverside Park. Excerpts:

Why is this story important?  Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation  begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s  set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come.  Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided?  What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays?  Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was “planning” — in quotes — that did not have our best interests in mind.

As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx Ecological Stewardship Training,  which provides job training in the fields of ecological restorations,  so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs.  Little by little, we’re seeding the area with green collar jobs — then the people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment.

We also built the city’s — New York City’s first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices. Cool roofs are highly reflective surfaces that don’t absorb solar heat and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban “heat island” effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe.

I do not expect individuals, corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. I know it’s the bottom line, or one’s perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I’m interested in what I like to call the “triple bottom line” that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government and the community where these projects go up.

A parade of government subsidies is going to proposed big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste and the impacts on open space.

Now let’s get this straight. I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I’ve embraced my inner capitalist. And you probably all have, and if you haven’t, you need to. So I don’t have a problem with developers making money. There’s enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins — both heroes of mine by the way — have shown that you can actually do that.

I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization.

When I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy.  His response was a grant program.  I don’t think he understood that I wasn’t asking for funding.  I was making him an offer.

What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don’t get me wrong, we need money. But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don’t add wasting our energy, intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count.

By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world.

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

in Psychology

Community builders have to bridge all sorts of divides – of race, religion, money, politics, philosophy. In this TED talk, psychologist Jonathan Haidt gives an overview of how — and why — we evolved to be moral. By understanding more about our moral roots, his hope is that we can learn to be civil and understanding of those whose morals don’t match ours, but who are equally good and moral people on their own terms. Excerpts:

Let’s start at the beginning. What is morality and where does it come from? To find out, my colleague Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines, that you find across cultures and even across species? We found five — five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality.

The first one is harm-care. We’re all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

The second foundation is fairness-reciprocity. There’s actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. We heard about this from Karen Armstrong as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I’ve heard here at TED.

The third foundation is in-group loyalty. You do find groups in the animal kingdom — you do find cooperative groups — but these groups are always either very small or they’re all siblings. It’s only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups — but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don’t have tribes, we go ahead and make them because it’s fun. Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

The fourth foundation is authority-respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species — but authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It’s based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times.

The fifth foundation is purity-sanctity. It’s about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you’re willing to touch or put into your body.

I believe these are the five best candidates for what’s written on the first draft of the moral mind. I think this is what we come with at least, a preparedness to learn all of these things.

(more…)

Daniel Goleman on compassion

in Psychology

Excerpts:

There’s a new field in brain science, social neuroscience. This studies the circuitry in two people’s brains that activates while they interact. And the new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help. That is to say, if we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them. There are these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, that act like a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel “with” automatically. And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering, we’re automatically prepared to help. At least that’s the argument.

But then the question is: Why don’t we? And I think this speaks to a spectrum that goes from complete self-absorption, to noticing, to empathy and to compassion. And the simple fact is, if we are focused on ourselves, if we’re preoccupied, as we so often are throughout the day, we don’t really fully notice the other. And this difference between the self and the other focus can be very subtle.

Some time ago when I was working for the New York Times, it was in the ’80s, I did an article on what was then a new problem in New York — it was homeless people on the streets. And I spent a couple of weeks going around with a social work agency that ministered to the homeless. And I realized seeing the homeless through their eyes that almost all of them were psychiatric patients that had nowhere to go. They had a diagnosis. It made me — what it did was to shake me out of the urban trance where, when we see, when we’re passing someone who’s homeless in the periphery of our vision, it stays on the periphery. We don’t notice and therefore we don’t act.

One day soon after that — it was a Friday — at the end of the day, I went down — I was going down to the subway. It was rush hour and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs. And all of a sudden as I was going down the stairs I noticed that there was a man slumped to the side, shirtless, not moving, and people were just stepping over him — hundreds and hundreds of people. And because my urban trance had been somehow weakened, I found myself stopping to find out what was wrong. The moment I stopped, half a dozen other people immediately ringed the same guy. And we found out that he was Hispanic, he didn’t speak any English, he had no money, he’d been wandering the streets for days, starving, and he’s fainted from hunger. Immediately someone went to get orange juice, someone brought a hotdog, someone brought a subway cop. This guy was back on his feet immediately. But all it took was that simple act of noticing. And so I’m optimistic.

via Daniel Goleman on compassion | Video on TED.com.