Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Nick Treglia: The trouble with fairness and the search for truth – 1819 News

Overnight, it seems Americas grasp on reality just disappeared. We read headlines daily, wondering what on earth is happening, as things that would normally be met with scorn, or at least concern, are celebrated and promoted at the highest levels of our culture and government.

There is no better illustration of this than the dumpster fire that is childrens education, where common sense was traded for insanity, ranging from pornographic childrens books in libraries to teachers secretly transitioning students. Perhaps the worst of this mess is the childrens drag queen story hour, which sounds like a sting operation.

This degenerate behavior is tolerated and even celebrated with no thought given as to why a grown man has the urge to read to children in a wig and fake breasts. Let me tell you, we didnt have any of this grooming crap until NBC canceled To Catch a Predator.

Why are we not allowed to ask why someone wants to behave this way? Why must we pretend this is normal human behavior? Call me old-fashioned, but the list of things needed for school story hour consists of:

A non-pornographic book

An hour

It is absolutely insane that we allow these nuts into our schools. These are the kinds of people who, 30 years ago, lurked outside school in the free candy van. Now were letting the fox in the henhouse.

Those who oppose this kind of behavior are attacked as bigots, extremists, or white supremacists. Such baseless arguments appeal solely to emotion, and it is embarrassing that we allow these claims to prevail and this insanity to continue.

But the insanity is by design. As George Orwells famous 1984 line reads: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. By demanding that you consciously ignore your revulsion and doubts, those with an agenda change the meaning of words through conditioning. If you are told that modern art is beautiful enough times, you will begin to believe it.

I believe such things as truth, beauty, and appropriate childrens literature exist, and I also believe man instinctively recognizes those things. But when your truth doesnt line up with The Truth, and you can just change what The Truth is by transforming the language through an appeal to fairness a potent tactic in this nation especially then we are being deceived.

We worry too much about being accepting, inoffensive, and fair in todays culture, having little regard for what is actually right. There are right and wrong ways to do just about anything, so it follows that the same is true of living a human life. Mankind has understood this and sought the right way to live for thousands of years; go read Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics for an excellent example.

But somewhere along the way, we lost the plot as our relationship with good, evil, and the truth got more nuanced. Movements cropped up promoting radical acceptance of all lifestyles, no matter how disordered. What was billed as an effort to make society fairer and more accepting turned into a licentious fiasco with no end in sight. I guess what they say is true: if you give a mouse a cookie, hell transition your kids.

It is time for capital-T Truth to reassert itself in our society and discourse. We should vigorously promote what is good and right while treating what is vile with contempt.

Nick Treglia is a student at Samford Universitys Cumberland School of Law.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to[emailprotected].

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Nick Treglia: The trouble with fairness and the search for truth - 1819 News

Human Behavior

Science has an answer for why people still wave on Zoom – Press Herald

It happens at the end of most virtual meetings: One person waves goodbye, and colleagues follow suit. Why we still do this, nearly four years after remote work went mainstream, is one of the mysteries of the modern workplace.

To some experts in human behavior and communication, the so-called Zoom wave emerged due to our need to recreate the social connections that the pandemic ruptured. For others, its a simple way to signal the meeting is over before digitally departing. Some wave just to be polite, others enjoy it. Whatever the reason, its as much a remote-work ritual as wearing sweatpants with a business-friendly top (known as the Zoom mullet).

I am a big fan of the wave, said Erica Keswin, a workplace strategist and author. People like to know when something begins and ends. Those beginnings and endings are what I call prime rituals real estate, and rituals give us a sense of belonging and connection.

Shes not alone. A survey this month by the professional network Fishbowl found that 55% of workers wave. Thats down from the 57% who said they did so last year in a survey by Zoom and the 3 out of 4 who said so in 2021. That gradual decline, as the pandemic receded and millions of workers returned to offices, doesnt surprise Susan Wagner Cook, associate professor at the University of Iowas Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and director of the schools Communication, Cognition and Learning Lab.

As peoples need for connection declines, they are less likely to wave, said Cook, who has spent years studying why and how humans use hand gestures from the friendly wave to the unfriendly middle finger to communicate and connect.

Cook and other experts dont foresee the wave going away completely, though. One big reason is something called motor resonance when a person waves, its almost automatic to wave back. Multiple social-psychology studies show that were more likely to be empathetic and cooperative toward people that weve synchronized movements with, and empathy and teamwork were things many organizations struggled to instill during the stressful days of COVID-19 lockdowns.

In a video call, last impressions are as important as first impressions, and waving sends a signal that others can feel safe in our presence, said Darren Murph, a hybrid-work adviser who now handles strategic communications at automaker Ford.

The dynamics of virtual versus in-person meetings also play a role in the wave, according to Jesper Aagaard, an associate professor of psychology and behavioral sciences at Denmarks Aarhus University. After a face-to-face meeting, theres a so-called interstitial period, where people linger and chat as they walk out together. But video calls end abruptly, so we need to say our farewells all at once. This, in turn, lends an exaggerated and cartoonish quality to the Zoom wave, Aagaard said.

Its the awkwardness of the wave that puts some people off, but by not waving, workers risk being seen as rude.

It bothers me when I wave and people dont wave back, says Molly Beck, founder, and CEO of enterprise communications software maker WorkPerfectly. I would compare it to when you hold the door for someone and they dont say thank you.

In other words, Cook said, the cultural cost of being perceived as impolite outweighs this momentary feeling of, Am I a weirdo?'

Some workers are conditional wavers. Cali Williams Yost, a flexible work strategist, says she waves when Zooming with new contacts, almost as a nice to meet you gesture. But if its the same group every week, rarely does anyone wave, including me.

For others, its the type of wave that matters. I recommend the fast wave, as if another car was letting you go first at a busy intersection, not the type of slow wave if you were on a parade float, Beck said. And while shes waving with one hand, Beck leaves the call with the other.

Its a little embarrassing, aggressively corny, and serves no purpose other than sincerely acknowledging the other people in the call, journalist Justin Pot wrote in a 2021 blog post about Zoom waves on the website of Zapier, a fully remote maker of business software whose staff often deploy the Zoom wave. But thats why its great. No one should feel bad for doing it.

Not everyone agrees, but workers likely wont be saying farewell to the Zoom wave anytime soon.

Humans adapt to media, and some of the habits which have evolved to manage the strangeness of videoconferencing have endured, said Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford Universitys Virtual Human Interaction Lab, who has studied another remote-work phenomenon: Zoom fatigue, the exhaustion suffered from videoconferencing all day. The long wave may be with us for some time.

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Science has an answer for why people still wave on Zoom - Press Herald

Human Behavior

Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter? – Livescience.com

In March 2019, researchers off the coast of southwestern Australia witnessed a gruesome scene: a dozen orcas ganging up on one of the biggest creatures on Earth to kill it. The orcas devoured huge chunks of flesh from the flanks of an adult blue whale, which died an hour later. This was the first-ever documented case of orca-on-blue-whale predation, but it wouldn't be the last.

In recent months, orcas (Orcinus orca) have also been spotted abducting baby pilot whales and tearing open sharks to feast on their livers. And off the coast of Spain and Portugal, a small population of orcas has begun ramming and sinking boats.

All of these incidents show just how clever these apex predators are.

"These are animals with an incredibly complex and highly evolved brain," Deborah Giles, an orca researcher at the University of Washington and the nonprofit Wild Orca, told Live Science. "They've got parts of their brain that are associated with memory and emotion that are significantly more developed than even in the human brain."

But the scale and novelty of recent attacks have raised a question: Are orcas getting smarter? And if so, what's driving this shift?

They've got parts of their brain that are associated with memory and emotion that are significantly more developed than even in the human brain.

It's not likely that orcas' brains are changing on an anatomical level, said Josh McInnes, a marine ecologist who studies orcas at the University of British Columbia. "Behavioral change can influence anatomical change in an animal or a population" but only over thousands of years of evolution, McInnes told Live Science.

Related: Scientists investigate mysterious case of orca that swallowed 7 sea otters whole

But orcas are fast learners, which means they can and do teach each other some terrifying tricks, and thus become "smarter" as a group. Still, some of these seemingly new tricks may in fact be age-old behaviors that humans are only documenting now. And just like in humans, some of these learned behaviors become trends, ebbing and flowing in social waves.

Frequent interactions with humans through boat traffic and fishing activities may also drive orcas to learn new behaviors. And the more their environment shifts, the faster orcas must respond and rely on social learning to persist.

There's no question that orcas learn from each other. Many of the skills these animals teach and share relate to their role as highly evolved apex predators.

Scientists described orcas killing and eating blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) for the first time in a study published last year. In the months and years that followed the first attack in March 2019, orcas preyed on a blue whale calf and juvenile in two additional incidents, pushing the young blue whales below the surface to suffocate them.

This newly documented hunting behavior is an example of social learning, with strategies being shared and passed on from adult orcas to their young, Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University's Marine Mammal Institute, told Live Science in an email. "Anything the adults learn will be passed along" from the dominant female in a pod to her offspring, he said.

Taking down a blue whale "requires cooperation and coordination," Pitman said. Orcas may have learned and refined the skills needed to tackle such enormous prey in response to the recovery of whale populations from whaling. This know-how was then passed on, until the orcas became highly skilled at hunting even the largest animal on Earth, Pitman said.

Some of the gory behaviors researchers have observed recently may actually be long-standing habits.

For instance, during the blue whale attacks, observers noted that the orcas inserted their heads inside live whales' mouths to feed on their tongues. But this is probably not a new behavior just a case of humans finally seeing it up close.

"Killer whales are like humans in that they have their 'preferred cuts of meat,'" Pitman said. "When preying on large whales, they almost always take the tongue first, and sometimes that is all they will feed on."

Tongue is not the only delicacy orcas seek out. Off the coast of South Africa, two males nicknamed Port and Starboard have, for several years, been killing sharks to extract their livers.

Killer whales are like humans in that they have their 'preferred cuts of meat.'

Although the behavior surprised researchers at first, it's unlikely that orcas picked up liver-eating recently due to social learning, Michael Weiss, a behavioral ecologist and research director at the Center for Whale Research in Washington state, told Live Science.

Related: Orcas attacked a great white shark to gorge on its liver in Australia, shredded carcass suggests

That's because, this year, scientists also captured footage of orcas slurping down the liver of a whale shark off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. The likelihood that Port and Starboard transferred their know-how across thousands of miles of ocean is vanishingly small, meaning liver-eating is probably a widespread and established behavior.

"Because there are more cameras and more boats, we're starting to see these behaviors that we hadn't seen before," Weiss said.

Orcas master and share more than hunting secrets. Several populations worldwide have learned to poach fish caught for human consumption from the longlines used in commercial fisheries and have passed on this information.

In the southern Indian Ocean, around the Crozet Islands, two orca populations have increasingly scavenged off longlines since fishing in the region expanded in the 1990s. By 2018, the entire population of orcas in these waters had taught one another to feast on longline buffets, with whole groups that previously foraged on seals and penguins developing a taste for human-caught toothfish.

Sometimes, orcas' ability to quickly learn new behaviors can have fatal consequences. In Alaska, orcas recently started dining on groundfish caught by bottom trawlers, but many end up entangled and dead in fishing gear.

"This behavior may be being shared between individuals, and that's maybe why we're seeing an increase in some of these mortality events," McInnes said.

Orcas' impressive cognitive abilities also extend to playtime.

Giles and her colleagues study an endangered population of salmon-eating orcas off the North Pacific coast. Called the Southern Resident population, these killer whales don't eat mammals. But over the past 60 years, they have developed a unique game in which they seek out young porpoises, with the umbilical cords sometimes still attached, and play with them to death.

Related: 'An enormous mass of flesh armed with teeth': How orcas gained their 'killer' reputation

There are 78 recorded incidents of these orcas tossing porpoises to one another like a ball but not a single documented case of them eating the small mammals, Giles said. "In some cases, you'll see teeth marks where the [killer] whale was clearly gently holding the animal, but the animal was trying to swim away, so it's scraping the skin."

The researchers think these games could be a lesson for young orcas on how to hunt salmon, which are roughly the same size as baby porpoises. "Sometimes they'll let the porpoise swim off, pause, and then go after it," Giles said.

Humans may indirectly be driving orcas to become smarter, by changing ocean conditions, McInnes said. Orca raids on longline and trawl fisheries show, for example, that they innovate and learn new tricks in response to human presence in the sea.

Human-caused climate change may also force orcas to rely more heavily on one another for learning.

In Antarctica, for instance, a population of orcas typically preys on Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddellii) by washing them off ice floes. But as the ice melts, they are adapting their hunting techniques to catch leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) and crabeater seals (Lobodon carcinophaga) two species that don't rely on ice floes as much and are "a little bit more feisty," requiring orcas to develop new skills, McInnes said.

While human behaviors can catalyze new learning in orcas, in some cases we have also damaged the bonds that underpin social learning. Overfishing of salmon off the coast of Washington, for example, has dissolved the social glue that keeps orca populations together.

"Their social bonds get weaker because you can't be in a big partying killer-whale group if you're all hungry and trying to search for food," Weiss said. As orca groups splinter and shrink, so does the chance to learn from one another and adapt to their rapidly changing ecosystem, Weiss said.

And while orcas probably don't know that humans are to blame for changes in their ocean habitat, they are "acutely aware that humans are there," McInnes said.

Luckily for us, he added, orcas don't seem interested in training their deadly skills on us.

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Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter? - Livescience.com

Human Behavior

Augmenting the Regulatory Worker: Are We Making Them Better or … – BioSpace

In the precipice of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), discussions surrounding how humans use AI tools are becoming more and more frequent in the industry. In addition to AIs existing challenges surrounding discrimination and data accuracy, GenAI presents a new problem: hallucinations. These hallucinations create realistic-seeming content not based in reality. Because GenAI is only as good as the data it is trained on, high-quality data and human oversight are imperativeto avoid passing off false information as fact. With as many as 77% of biotech and pharmaceutical companies stating that they were monitoring the latest technologies for use in regulatory processes (Why Biotech and Pharma Companies Are Embracing Regulatory Technology Outsourcing), conquering these challenges becomes especially important for successfully augmenting regulatory workers.

Michelle Gyzen, senior director, regulatory affairs and drug development solutions at IQVIA, stated, There are major concerns coming up in client and internal discussions focused on are we making regulatory workers better or worse by augmenting them especially now that the industry is facing adopting GenAI. She further explained that while there has been an enormous amount of data collection and regulatory standardization completed, the industry can still do a great deal more.

The solution is not a plug-and-play module for the industry. Classification models need to be rewritten and data schemas evaluated for accuracy, but most importantly data scrubbing to ensure clean is of utmost importance because the data cannot be trusted otherwise. Addressing these challenges is the first step to the successful use of GenAI. Given how fast AI is evolving and being adopted, addressing the clean data challenges is imperative simply because we still dont know the full scope of capabilities in terms of what AI, and especially advanced AI, can do, Gyzen said.

Because AI learns from historical data, which is unfortunately often discriminatory and biased, there is an inherent unconscious bias lurking in AI. The industry is grappling not only with initial bias, but bias creeping into what was once clean data.

Since GenAI is in its early stages, Gyzen recommends a phased approach to implementation. Gyzen is working internally and externally to ensure data accuracy, interoperability, connecting with various regulatory information management (RIM) systems, and integrating regulatory intelligence with current AI tools. All of these steps must be completed before venturing into GenAI. In her opinion, stringent processes such as this are the only way forward for the industry, especially for regulatory processes. As we evolve with AI, we need multiple layers of validation for regulatory intelligence data in place. This can come in the form of using an automation program to understand the data first and provide summary synopses. But here is the key element: having true human oversight viewing that data not only from a global regulatory perspective, but from a local regulatory intelligence perspective as well. Gyzen echoed the sentiments of other thought leaders present at the 2023 BiotechX USA when she notes, while we are close, the technology is not there yet to take the training wheels off.

Another factor to keep in mind during AI adoption is the human, in this case regulatory workers. Leading with technology for AI adoption is fundamentally flawed. The idea that companies are going to be able to put technology in place and everyone is going change their processes and the way they work is not realistic, so technology needs to be built for humans and the way humans work, Gyzen said. This understanding of regulatory processes and human behavior is what companies need to keep in mind to outline what can be augmented and build processes that enable rather than hinder regulatory professionals.

With half of the industry outsourcing (54%) and the other half building in-house (46%), the industry is clearly split on the best approach for AI technology (Why Biotech and Pharma Companies Are Embracing Regulatory Technology Outsourcing). Although many larger biotechs and pharmaceutical companies have the resources to build their own in-house, they are not necessarily looking to do so. In a live panelist discussion with representatives from Amgen and Allogene Therapeutics at BioTechX USA, it was stated that they are not necessarily looking for in-house production, they just want something that is cost-effective and works. Gyzen agrees, With larger organizations, theres opportunity to partner because they dont necessarily have access, to nor the understanding of, what the entire industry is working on. This is the key value that vendors and outsourcing partners bring: just having a greater understanding of the pulse of the industry. Gyzen finds that smaller organizations benefit from this knowledge as well, but the real value is access to larger data pools and safeguards to protect customer information and data.

At present companies are looking for full integration. This is something that Gyzen routinely comes across in her role. A big part of my role here is interoperability in developing regulatory systems and what that means from a services standpoint. Because IQVIA is partly a services organization, we have multiple customers with multiple types of infrastructure. What Im looking at is ensuring the ability to integrate not only cross-functionally and across multiple systems, but cross-organizationally. As technology evolves, Gyzen highlighted that she focuses on integrating with client systems to create a seamless flow of data through multiple enterprises and organizations across the globe. This is a very challenging task because closed-box systems create a technological bubble.

For companies to successfully evolve as AI moves to GenAI, clean data needs to flow into the appropriate systems. Currently, challenges surrounding not only clean, accurate data, but data access can hinder biotech and pharma companies. As Gyzen states, We live now in a world where the market is so very segmented and so very fragmented that you know we have to come up with a solution if were going to move forward.

The insights team analyzes and comments on industry trends and creates thought leadership content for BioSpace and clients. The head of insights, Lori Ellis, can be contacted vialori.ellis@biospace.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.

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Augmenting the Regulatory Worker: Are We Making Them Better or ... - BioSpace

Human Behavior

What "The Creator", a film about the future, tells us about the present – InCyber

The plot revolves around a war between the West, represented by just the United States, and Asia. The cause of this deadly conflict? A radical difference in how Artificial Intelligence is perceived. That is the films pitch in a nutshell.

This difference exists today, although it is unlikely to lead to a major conflict. In the West, robots are often seen in science-fiction novels and films as dangerous. Just look at sagas like Terminator and The Matrix. Frank Herberts Dune novels are also suspicious of Artificial Intelligence. This is reflected in an event that takes place before the main story line, the Butlerian Jihad, written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, which prohibits the manufacture of thinking machines.

This Western apprehension of AI can be compared to a founding principle of Western philosophy: otherness, where the I is different from you, from us. The monotheistic religions were built on this principle, and Yahwehs I am that I am statement to Moses can be compared with Descartes Cogito ergo sum: Yahweh tells Moses that he is one and the other (alter in Latin) of his future prophet.

Later, Ancient Greece contributed by building a philosophy that asserted the unicity of the self and its difference from others. Platos Allegory of the Cave is a good example: one must be individual and unique to see the benefit of the thought experiment that examines our experience of reality.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, both geographically and conceptually, the Asian world sees artificial intelligence in a different light. For example, in Japan, Shintoism offers an alternative to the Western idea of the individual. In the distribution of kami, a philosophical and spiritual notion of the presence of vital forces in nature, no distinction is made between the living and the inanimate. Thus, an inert object can be just as much a receptacle for kami as a living being, human or otherwise.

The animated inanimate has therefore always been very well regarded in Japan and, more broadly, in Asia. Eastern science fiction reflects this affinity: just think of Astro, the friendly, childlike robot, or Ghost In The Shell and its motley crew of hybrids and cyborgs. In The Creator, Buddhism is omnipresent. In any case, this is the spirit in which Japan is developing machines intended to assist its aging population.

Our current AIs, which are just algorithms, can be considered the first milestones on the path to a potential thinking artificial intelligence that is aware of its own self and the environment and humans that it might encounter. This is what is covered by the idea of strong or general-purpose artificial intelligence.

This AI would resemble intelligence as found in the animal world. This artificial otherness, emerging from the void of its programmings determinism, could then say to humanity: Computo ergo sum! At this stage, humanity will need to question these systems to find out what kind of thinking they are capable of. The challenge lies in distinguishing between an algorithmic imitation of human behavior and genuine consciousness.

Once this occurs, we may well end up as powerless witnesses to the emergence of a superintelligence, the ultimate stage in the development of AIs. An omniscient system which, in time, may see the humanity that gave birth to it as nothing more than a kind of white noise, a biological nuisance. One day, it may well wonder,shouldnt we just get rid of it?.

Science fiction has given us several illustrations of the various states of AI that lie on this spectrum. Smart but unconscious robots can be found in Alex Proyass movie, I, Robot. It is also the initial state of the software with which the protagonist of Spike Jonzes Her falls in love.

On the other end of the spectrum, we find the Skynet of the Terminator series or VIKI in I, Robot. Beyond these systems dictatorial excesses, it is worth describing them as a-personal and ubiquitous, i.e., they tend towards a universal consciousness freed from any notion of body or person, with all the extensions of the global IT network at its disposal. These two criteria contrast with what makes a human, that personalized and localized neurotic social animal.

This is where The Creators originality and value lies: it describes a future world in which, in Asia, humans frequent a whole range of artificial intelligences, from the simplest, locked in their programming, to the most complex, capable of thought and with unique personalities housed within artificial bodies. In this film, none of the AIs lean towards the sort of superintelligence that causes panic in the West. All the AIs in it are like people: they protect and defend that which is important to them and, most importantly, they feel fear and even experience death.

In this way, the Asian front pitted against the Western forces takes the form of a hybrid, or rather blended, army, made up of individuals of both biological and artificial origin. Here, everyone is fighting not only for their survival, but for their community, for respect and the right to be different. Thus, The Creator becomes an ode to tolerance. All these considerations may seem remote to us all. However, they could prove relevant to our present.

Today, the law and common understanding recognize just two categories of persons: humans and legal entities. But if we humans were one day confronted with thinking machines, wouldnt we have to change the law to incorporate a new form of personhood: artificial beings? As long as these were personalized and localized, they should enjoy the protections of the law just as natural persons and legal entities do. At the same time, this new type of person would be assigned yet-to-be-defined responsibilities.

In The Creator, a distinction is made between standby and shutdown, just as there is a difference between a loss of consciousness (sleep, anesthesia, coma) and death. This existential flaw appears as a guarantee of trust. It places the artificial person on the same level as a natural person, with a beginning, actions taken, and an end.

After these thoughts, which point to astonishing futures, what can we say about The Creator when, for the United States, it turns into yet another film trying to atone for the trauma of the Vietnam War? This conflict was one of the first to be considered asymmetric. It saw a well-structured, overequipped traditional army facing an enemy with a changing organization, some of whose decisions could be made autonomously at the local level. The enemy also knew how to take advantage of the terrain, leading the Americans to massively use the infamous Agent Orange, a powerful and dangerous defoliant supposed to prevent Viet Cong soldiers from hiding under tree cover.

Surprisingly, the movie incorporates a number of scenes of asymmetrical combats that oppose Asian soldiers leading defense and guerilla operations against overarmed forces acting under the star-spangled banner. Even more troubling, the New Asian Republics in which AIs are considered as people are located in a Far East where Vietnam is located.

This strange plot allows the British director of The Creator to repeat the pattern of one of his biggest successes, Rogue One, a Star Wars Story: a rebellion that stands up against an autocratic central power and brings it down, even partially.

From this perspective, The Creator is an ode to a society structured around direct democracy, with no central, vertical power. Anarchy? The exact opposite of the future United States as described in the movie and which, however, remains dogged by the demons that seem to rise from the past. Although The Creator begins in 2065, the plot primarily takes place in 2070. On the other hand, the Vietnam War, which lasted 20 years, saw massive American involvement from 1965 to 1973.

As the film sees it, one thing is certain: all throughout, anti-AI westerners are looking to get their hands on an ultimate weapon that Asia and the AIs could use against them. Ultimately, the film reveals an entirely different weapon, one even more powerful than imagined. That weapon is the empathy that humans can develop towards thinking machines. And therein, perhaps, lies the films true breakthrough.

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What "The Creator", a film about the future, tells us about the present - InCyber

Human Behavior

WashU Expert: Some parasites turn hosts into ‘zombies’ – The … – Washington University in St. Louis

From haunted houses to video games, movies and trick-or-treaters, zombies are everywhere this time of year. But zombies arent real or are they?

While the flesh-eating undead portrayed on television are just fiction, there are clear examples of parasites that have evolved to manipulate their hosts, often in ways that affect host behavior to favor parasite survival and spread, said Theresa Gildner, an assistant professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Some even live inside the brains of their host eek!

One way parasites manipulate their host is through influencing the release of neurotransmitters the chemical messengers of the nervous system like dopamine, epinephrine, serotonin and other chemicals that directly impact mood and behavior, Gildner said.

Given how common parasites are in the world and how well they have evolved to manipulate us usually without the host knowing they are being influenced theres a chance many of us are already zombies, Gildner said.

Below, Gildner answers questions about parasitic infections including those that try to hijack the brains of their host and explains why its unlikely you will need that zombie apocalypse survival plan. Read on if you dare.

What are parasitic infections?

A parasite is typically defined as any organism that relies on a host for its essential nutrients, without any benefit to the host, and is therefore considered harmful. There are several types of parasites, including single-celled protozoas that cause Taxoplasmosis and malaria; helminths, parasitic worms like hookworm or tapeworms; and ectoparasites, parasitic species that live outside the human body, like ticks, fleas and lice.

Parasitic infections are extremely common globally, both for humans and animals. If you have a pet, youve probably given them flea or deworming medications to prevent parasite infections. But human parasitic disease is also still widespread, especially in low-resource communities that lack the resources and infrastructure to effectively prevent and treat infection.

With the exception of select parasitic diseases, like malaria, most are not lethal. However, these conditions often impair physical and cognitive function and result in suboptimal growth and development patterns. Overall, parasitic disease contributes to the perpetuation of structural health inequities, especially among marginalized communities where lack of access to key health determinants medical care, functional sanitation systems and adequate nutrition both increase parasite exposure and compound the negative impacts of infection.

Effective preventative measures usually linked with effective sanitation infrastructure as well as medical tests and treatments do exist for many parasite species, but not everyone has access to these resources, including in the United States. So, even though we have the tools to control parasitic disease in many cases, we are still nowhere near close to eradicating most.

Could parasitic infections cause a zombie apocalypse?

Host-manipulating parasites are real, but it seems unlikely that parasites will cause a zombie apocalypse on the scale of those on The Last of Us or The Walking Dead for a few reasons. First, in order to spread easily from person to person, the parasite would need to be specific and well adapted to human hosts. In reality, many parasites have relatively long, complex life cycles that involve spending part of their development in the environment and/or in another species besides humans to successfully mature and reproduce.

Second, for the scenarios depicted in these shows, the parasite would have to incapacitate or kill its host quickly following infection, but this is an ineffective strategy for most parasites since they need time to mature and reproduce in the human host. If the parasite infection was this fast and severe, the infected human might die before coming into contact with other potential hosts, preventing future transmission to new human hosts.

Third, along these same lines, an infection this serious would almost certainly be readily apparent to uninfected people, leading to disease prevention measures such as quarantine that decrease the risk of future spread. Many human parasites therefore seem to impact the human host in more subtle ways, so were typically able to go about our daily lives and unknowingly spread the parasite to other people over a longer period of time.

But examples of zombie-like behavior in animals do occur, right?

There are many examples of parasites that hijack the minds of infected animals and insects to achieve a very specific aim. One well-known mind-altering pathogen is rabies, which impacts mammals like dogs, raccoons and sometimes humans, making them more aggressive. Rabid animals are more likely to bite other animals and people, which allows transmission through the saliva. The virus has also been shown to make the host afraid of water, leading them to avoid consuming water, which might dilute viral load in saliva and reduce disease spread.

Another example is the trematodeDicrocoelium dendriticum, a type of parasitic worm. This parasite ultimately wants to get to a grazing animal so it can complete its life cycle and reproduce, but it must go through an intermediate host the ant to do this. The parasite affects the brains of ants, causing them to climb to the top of a blade of grass at night instead of returning to the ant colony. This behavior increases the likelihood that a grazing animal accidentally consumes the infected ant during the night while it is grazing.

Theres also the Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga, a parasitic wasp that infects spiders. Female wasps will first paralyze the spider and then lay an egg in its abdomen. The egg hatches and larva feeds on the spiders blood while the spider is still alive. The spider will behave normally for several days, but then the wasp larva injects a chemical into the spider that causes it to build a unique type of web and sit motionless in the middle. Then, the larva kills the spider host with poison, eats the spider and builds a cocoon in the middle of the web for protection until the adult wasp emerges and the cycle continues.

The Toxoplasma gondii parasite typically spreads between rodents and cats, although the CDC estimates that more than 40 million people are infected with Toxoplasmosis in the U.S. Generally, rodents become infected after consuming contaminated food or water. Once in the rodent intermediate host, the parasite continues to mature and forms cysts in the rodents tissue. Cats become infected after consuming infected rodent tissue. Mature parasites live inside cats. Infected cats also shed the parasite in their feces, where it continues to mature and become ineffective.

The interesting part of the Toxoplasma life cycle is that some of the parasite cysts form in the rodents brain, potentially concentrated in the part of the brain that regulates fear, some researchers believe. This directly affects rodent behavior, making them less fearful of cats. Some evidence suggests they might even be attracted to the smell of cat urine, rather than fearful, increasing their risk of encountering a cat and being consumed. This is ultimately the best outcome for the parasite: for the intermediate rodent host to be consumed so the parasite can get into a cat and complete its life cycle.

Well, this is terrifying!

The good news is that we have evolved with these parasitic species for a very long time, and our immune systems are generally effective at keeping infections in check. We also have many effective medical treatments available to help treat infection and many people in the world today have access to important resources such as clean water and food, sanitation systems and well-constructed houses that help shield them from serious infections.

However, parasites still infect millions of people around the world, so we still have a lot of work to do to make sure all people have access to the resources and infrastructure needed to prevent continual infection and related poor long-term health outcomes.

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Human Behavior

Is secondhand smoke from vapes less toxic than from traditional … – Missouri S&T News and Research

Posted by Peter Ehrhard On October 23, 2023

Dr. Yue-Wern Huangs graduate student, Ta-Chun Lin, (pictured) coded the respiratory system using AI prompts, and the team is applying for a patent for the device. Michael Pierce/Missouri S&T

According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey in 2020, 33.8% of U.S. middle and high school students report that they have been exposed to secondhand e-cigarette aerosols in indoor spaces. But little is known about how inhaling the heated metals, flavorings and other chemicals in the electronic cigarettes affect health.

So what is the adverse health effect in the secondhand smoke from electronic cigarettes? A Missouri S&T toxicologist is working to categorize the physical, chemical and toxicological properties of secondhand smoke created by electronic nicotine delivery systems when indoors.

Dr. Yue-Wern Huang, a professor of biological sciences at Missouri S&T, and his collaborator Dr. Yang Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, have invented a simulated respiratory system, similar to an artificial lung, that inhales and exhales the same way people take in smoke. His graduate student, Ta-Chun Lin, coded the respiratory system using AI prompts to automate the system to simulate human smoke behavior, and the team is applying for a patent for the device.

Despite extensive studies on primary aerosols generated from e-cigarettes, Huang says that the properties of secondhand smoke are insufficiently understood because the aerosols need to be generated by human subjects using devices.

Usually, to look at this sort of health problem you need to conduct human-to-human research, in this case one person smoking the e-cigarette and one person having the smoke blown at them and inhaling it, says Huang. But we can limit the variables by using the simulated respiratory system to mimic human behavior, since every individual has different health backgrounds and statuses. Our simulated respiratory system is coded to inhale and exhale smoke in four seconds, then pause 30 seconds, to enjoy the smoke, similar to how a smoker would take a puff on a cigarette.

Huang says that the projects original idea comes from testing fabrics for COVID-19 facial protection with Wang. The two noticed that filters would block some types of aerosols much better than others.

I thought it was a crazy idea at first to apply that research to smoking, but he ran with it, says Huang. We are now collaborating on the project, with Yang characterize the aerosols themselves and I am investigating the biological aspects of the organic compounds in things like the liquid flavors and nicotine.

Huang hopes to answer questions such as how does secondhand smoke evolve in controlled environments, will secondhand aerosols induce oxidative stress and cytotoxicity, and what are the roles of metals and flavorings in the secondhand smoke contributing the chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases?

Secondhand smoke still contributes to cardiovascular diseases, reduced cell survival, elevated oxidative stress, and alteration of epigenetic events all can be related to lung disease like idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, says Huang. This work has the potential to produce a transformative understanding of the behavior and control of indoor secondhand aerosols and help the public form informed opinions on e-cigarette usage.

About Missouri University of Science and Technology

Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) is a STEM-focused research university of over 7,000 students located in Rolla, Missouri. Part of the four-campus University of Missouri System, Missouri S&T offers over 100 degrees in 40 areas of study and is among the nations top public universities for salary impact, according to the Wall Street Journal. For more information about Missouri S&T, visit http://www.mst.edu.

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Human Behavior

How apocalyptic cults use psychological tricks to brainwash their … – Big Think

Roch Thriault was an intelligent and charismatic religious extremist who, in the 1970s, founded a commune known as the Ant Hill Kids in the woods around Quebec. Thriault had persuaded a dozen or so followers to live with him free of sin. Thriault told them to wait in the commune and obey his every command to survive the end times, which he claimed would occur on February 17, 1978.

When that date came and went, Thriault doubled down. The problem was that the commune was not free enough from sin. Thriault became increasingly violent, abusive, and unhinged. He would make people eat dead mice and feces. He punished people by breaking their legs or cutting off their toes. He tortured and murdered children.

The strange thing about the Ant Hill Kids is that few ever wanted, let alone dared, to leave the cult. Gabrielle Lavalle fled once after being tortured, only to return because she couldnt cope with life outside the cult. As a punishment, Thriault pinned Lavalles hand to a table with a hunting knife and used a cleaver to forcibly amputate her arm. Lavalle fled again and reported Thriault to the police. He was finally arrested and imprisoned in 1989, ten years after he began his horrific doomsday cult.

Why do these doomsday cults attract such unwavering loyalty among their followers? How is it that a person can persuade people to do terrible things to themselves and to others in the name of some bizarre prophesy? Here we look at three common techniques these cults use.

Doomsday groups often will cut off members of the cult, both from the outside world and even from each other. When you surround yourself every moment and every day with the same message and like-minded fanatical individuals, there is little room for doubt or introspection.

We often hear about how dangerous the echo chamber of the online world is. Our fears, biases, and paranoias are reinforced and given fuel by the constant reinforcement of others. Now, multiply and amplify that effect, and you can imagine a cult. In normal, everyday interactions, you run up against competing ideas. Your friend might ask, Are you sure about that? In a cult, there is no dissent and no checks on the fanatical dogma you are given.

When Thriault first started his Quebec cult, he demanded all his followers cut off ties with their families. As the years went on, the Ant Hill Kids were forbidden from talking to each other unless Thriault was there as well. There were no opportunities to question. Other cults, like Heavens Gate and the Branch Davidians, would live in gated communities where access to the outside world was filtered through their leaders.

The reason that people often join doomsday cults in the first place is due to a manipulative trick known as a love bomb. This is when a cult from the leaders down to the newest recruits showers someone with affection, care, and support. Not only is this intended to make people feel welcome and at home, but it subtly and insidiously establishes a dependency relationship. Everything you need or want has to come through the cult. At first, this is generously given. After a while, its given with a few conditions attached. In the end, affection and love are given only to those who behave exactly as they are supposed to.

A notorious example of this was known as flirty fishing, a technique used by the apocalyptic cult The Children of God (or The Family International), in which members would deliberately enter sexual relationships with potential converts. This fishing was a deliberate nod to Matthew 4:19, where Jesus tells his disciples they will become fishers of men. It is thought that the cults women used flirty fishing with over 200,000 potential converts.

Between them, fear and love account for the vast majority of all human behavior. And, if you believe Machiavelli, fear is the stronger of the two. Almost all doomsday cults inspire a degree of fear. At the smallest level, this is the fear of being ostracized. As we have seen, cults take very deliberate care to make sure that their members believe that there is nowhere else they can live. People are dependent on and defined by their cult. Being cut off from that is a great source of fear.

More than that, though, is the very real physical abuse that doomsday cults use to keep people in check. Thriault would make his followers sit on lit stoves, or he would make them sit naked in the cold and whip them. Jim Jones would publicly beat members of his Peoples Temple cult and limit their food supply.

Of course, one of the defining characteristics of doomsday cults is the ever-present fear of death. Often, this is simply the reinforced idea that the world will end soon. For instance, Heavens Gate, led by Marshall Applewhite, isolated its members and used the fear of an imminent spaceship arrival to control their behavior. The Peoples Temple, though, did something all the more traumatic: They would hold suicide drills. Alan Warren, author of Doomsday Cults: The Devils Hostages, describes them like this:

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Jones had paper cups filled with wine passed out to them after telling them they were celebrating. After a few toasts and everyone had imbibed on their cup of wine, Jones told them they had just drunk poison, and within 30 minutes, they would all be dead. Some of the group panicked and started to cry, but most of them just sat in the venue, silent and contemplating their lives. After 45 minutes passed, Jones told them that this had only been a drill, and none of them were going to die. He just wanted to test their loyalties.

Using these techniques, doomsday cults break down your sense of self and any notion of true or false, right or wrong. They then fill these gaps with cult dependency and the offer of salvation. Youre broken; we can fix you. You have nowhere to go; we can offer you a home. No one wants you; we are your family.

In fact, most kinds of emotional manipulation rely on these techniques. If someone can make you feel insecure, incomplete, and inadequate, then they can present themselves as the solution. That happens not just in cults but also in abusive relationships.

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Human Behavior

Human action pushing the world closer to environmental tipping … – Morung Express

Alison Kentish Inter Press Service

Melting mountain glaciers. Unbearable heat. An uninsurable future. Space debris. Groundwater depletion. Accelerating extinctions. The United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security said this week that these six environmental tipping points can have irreversible, catastrophic impacts for people and the planet.

The University released its 2023 Interconnected Disaster Risks Report on October 25. It states that climate change and human behavior are among the drivers of these tipping points.

Human actions are behind this rapid and fundamental change to the planet. We are introducing new risks and amplifying existing ones by indiscriminately extracting our water resources, damaging nature and biodiversity, polluting both Earth and space and destroying our tools and options to deal with disaster risk, it stated.

In terms of accelerated extinction, it states that the current species extinction rate dire at as much as hundreds of times higher than usual due to human action.

It says the life-saving resource groundwater, which is stored in reserves known as aquifers, is a source of water for over 2 billion people and is used overwhelmingly (around 70%) in the agriculture sector. It adds, however, that 21 of the worlds 37 major aquifers are being used faster than they can be replenished. In terms of space debris, while satellites make life easier for humanity, including providing vital information for early warning systems, only about one-quarter of the objects identified in orbit are working satellites. This means that satellites critical for weather monitoring and information are at risk of colliding with discarded metal, broken satellites, and other debris.

According to the report, climate change and increasing extreme weather events have resulted in skyrocketing insurance prices in some parts of the world. The report warns that rising coverage costs could mean an uninsurable future for many.

Another tipping point, unbearable heat, is a cause for major concern. The report states that, currently, around 30 percent of the global population is exposed to deadly climate conditions for at least 20 days per year, and this number could rise to over 70 percent by 2100.

And a warming earth is resulting in glaciers melting at twice the speed of the last two decades.

Report authors say the six risk areas of concern are interconnected, which means that going beyond the brink of any tipping point would heighten the risk and severity of others.

If we look at the case of space debris, it has to do with the practice of putting satellites into our orbit without regard for handling the debris that comes as a result. At present we are tracking around 34,000 objects in our orbit and only a quarter of these are active satellites. Were planning thousands more launches in the coming years. We may reach a point where it gets so crowded in our orbit that one collision can create enough debris to set off a chain reaction of collisions that could destroy our space infrastructure entirely, said Dr. Jack OConnor, Senior Scientist at UNU-EHS and Lead Author of the Interconnected Disaster Risks report.

We use satellites every day to monitor our world. For example, we observe weather patterns that can give us data to generate early warnings. We sometimes take these warnings for granted, but can you imagine if we pass this space debris tipping point and we are no longer able to observe weather patterns? Now a storm is coming to a populated area, and we cant see it coming, he said.

While the report is sobering, its authors are quick to point out that there is hope. Lead Author Dr Zita Sebesvari suggests using the tipping points interconnectivity as an advantage for finding solutions.

These tipping points share certain root causes and drivers. Climate change is cutting across at least four out of the six points. Therefore, decisive climate action and cutting our emissions can help to slow down or even prevent; accelerating extinction, unbearable heat, uninsurable future, and mounting glacier melting, she said.

The report was published just one month before the United Nations Climate Conference (COP28). Dr OConnor says the report can be instructive for policymakers.

I think the report is connected to the COP process. Reducing our emissions is key, and we will need to integrate this with other contributing factors such as global biodiversity loss.

The authors say passing these tipping points is not inevitable. They say the points are meant to spur action, to adequately plan for future risks, and to tackle the root causes of these serious issues.

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Human Behavior

What We Get When We Give | Harvard Medicine Magazine – Harvard University

From where in the body might kindness flow? Folklore and belief systems far and wide point to the heart. Ancient Egyptian mythology, for example, maintained that the leap to the afterlife required a test. Before the deceased could enter, their heart had to be weighed, placed on a balance under the watchful eyes of the gods.

The dead persons heart wasnt beating, but it wasnt considered dead weight; it held proof of virtue. If the person had lived a life of goodness, their heart would be light as a feather and the gates to the afterlife would swing open. But if their life had been filled with greed, their heart would be heavy. For this person, there would be no welcome to the afterlife; instead, their heart was fed to Ammit, a soul-devouring goddess with the forequarters of a lion, the hindquarters of a hippo, and the head of a crocodile.

This ancient tale is just one example of the hearts symbolic link to goodness. Christian art depicts Jesuss heart aglow, sacred and filled with benevolence. Hindu and Buddhist traditions consider the heart chakra the center of compassion.

And in Dr. Seusss tale, the Grinchs heart is two sizes too small.

With advances in our understanding of anatomy and physiology over the past few centuries, science has shifted the focus for our actions and emotions from the heart to the brain. Yet, in a sense, the ancient Egyptians may have been on to something. Emerging evidence suggests that good deeds can become etched into our bodies, including the cardiovascular system and that our hearts and our health benefit when we are kind to others.

In his book The Healing Power of Doing Good, nonprofit leader Allan Luks quoted survey respondents attempting to articulate the feelings they experienced when doing volunteer work. It makes you explode with energy, one said. Others described a relaxation of muscles that I didnt even realize had been tensed and a euphoric feeling of being zapped by an energy bolt. Luks coined the term helpers high to describe these feelings.

Dopamine is released when we give to others. Scientists have actually witnessed this in the lab.

This sensation has physiological origins. Gregory Fricchione, the Mind/Body Medical Institute Professor of Psychiatry at HMS and director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, describes it as a release of chemical juice. When we help others, he says, neurotransmitters flow up in a tight bundle of axons called the medial forebrain bundle through the subcortex with exit ramps to many of the important structures of the brain the fear-conditioning amygdala, the memory-forming hippocampus, and the motivation-moderating medial prefrontal cortex.

Among these neurotransmitters is dopamine. This feel-good chemical is linked to the brains reward center. And its released when we give to others. Scientists have actually witnessed this in the lab. A few years ago, a small study from an international research collaboration that included scientists from the National Institutes of Health used magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity associated with making a charitable donation. The findings, reported in PNAS, suggested that this action engages the mesolimbic system of the brain, triggering a euphoric rush of dopamine in much the same way that anticipating a reward, like money, does.

Numerous other processes may be implicated in the helpers high, says Fricchione: pain-reducing endogenous opioids, endorphins, and perhaps even the neuromodulating chemicals that make up the endocannabinoid system. Then theres oxytocin, the so-called affiliation hormone, which has plentiful receptors in the amygdala, where it helps suppress fear and anxiety.

Best known for its role in inducing contractions during childbirth and in mother-infant bonding, oxytocin is closely linked to empathy and altruistic behavior.

Oxytocin receptors are found throughout the cardiovascular system, including in the heart. The hormone can cause blood vessels to widen, encouraging blood flow and lowering blood pressure. And its been shown to counteract oxidative stress and inflammation, both of which can contribute to atherosclerosis, heart attack, and stroke a hint of how the transient mood boost one gets from helping others may relate to longer-term health.

The molecules rewarding good deeds with good feelings are linked to ancient, deep-rooted instincts. Perhaps their release is an evolutionary nod that whatever we are doing including giving is good for us. But this possibility raises a paradox that has irked evolutionary theorists dating back to Darwin: If the natural world has been shaped by cutthroat competition, what explains our drive to share limited resources with others?

When Stephen Post was a high school student in the late 1960s, there was a focus on the brutishness of human nature. Trendy books like Lord of the Flies and The Territorial Imperative emphasized peoples more selfish and violent tendencies. There was a bias toward cynicism that I feel was unfounded, recalls Post, who, in addition to directing the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University, heads the board of directors for the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, a nonprofit that disseminates research on the health benefits of kind giving. To be kind was to be deluded. The thinking was, as the French philosopher Sartre argued, if anybody looks at you with kindness, watch out, because theyre after your wallet. But you really cant explain an awful lot of human behavior with that model in mind.

Since then, Post says, science has helped rewrite the story by highlighting the ubiquity of altruism across cultures throughout human history. For example, researchers have identified an intrinsic propensity in toddlers as young as fourteen months to help others with tasks without being influenced by rewards, encouragement, or threats.

Fricchione sees altruistic pro-social behavior as a logical extension of fundamental mammalian behaviors the drive to nurture offspring and attach to caregivers. It would be strange if evolution only provided us with a brain reward-motivation circuitry that supported gimme, gimme, he says. Of course, we know individuals like that, and they make us angry and frustrated, because we feel they arent behaving as good mammals. Evolution has provided us with the structures and functions that remind us that we survive better by cooperating as a group not only when were seeking social support, but when were giving it.

Post agrees that the key is in community. Group selection theory says that a certain amount of our evolution occurred in groups, he says. So, my group is going to do better to the degree that it exhibits compassion and helping behavior.

In 2010, Nicholas Christakis, MD 89, a sociologist-physician who then held faculty positions at HMS and Harvard University, attempted to map out how groups could become kind. Analyzing data from a series of experiments that used a public goods game, in which participants could dole out money, in the form of tokens, to strangers who were also participants in the experiments, he found that those who received funds from others were more likely to give money to other strangers in a future game. An individuals generosity caused a chain reaction that reverberated out, extending to three degrees of separation. Capturing the pay-it-forward phenomenon in the lab, these findings, published in PNAS, drew widespread interest.

How two people treat each other in one part of the city may relate to how two other people treat each other in another part of the city, says Christakis, who now directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. In other words, he says, altruism is contagious. The kindness of individuals cascades, ultimately creating a stronger group that is better equipped to survive.

Christakis sees kindness as one of several pro-social tendencies weve evolved because they are key to maintaining social cohesion, a thesis he describes at length in his 2019 book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. The flip side of this, he adds, is that we find it stressful to be antagonistic or to be alone. Isolation from a group causes wear and tear on our body, explains Christakis. Indeed, according to the American Heart Association, loneliness and social isolation are associated with a 29 percent increased risk for heart attack or premature death, while emotions like anger and hostility are also considered to be coronary disease risk factors.

To Christakis, those health threats are the kind of inverse of evolutions way of telling us to be kind. We have to be kind to other people so theyll want to be in our group, and we have to support the group so that the whole is greater than its parts.

While the health benefits of kindness are probably not incidental, Christakis adds, they are multifaceted. Its not as straightforward as saying that kindness can completely prevent or cure a disease. Pro-social behaviors like kindness are probably exceedingly complex physiologically, acting upon our bodies in multiple ways, not all of which are understood.

How does this complex mix play out in the modern world? One way to find out is to examine the health outcomes of people who complete measurable acts of altruism. In a 2013 randomized controlled trial published in JAMA Pediatrics, a group of teens was assigned to complete volunteer work. After two months of weekly volunteering, the young people displayed significant decreases in risk factors for cardiovascular disease systemic inflammation, total cholesterol levels, and BMI compared to their non-volunteering peers.

Other research has found lower risk of early death among those who volunteer. A 2020 American Journal of Preventive Medicine study of nearly thirteen thousand volunteers over age 50 who were assessed over a four-year period revealed that those who spent more than a hundred hours per year volunteering had a 44 percent lower risk of mortality compared to those who did not volunteer, even after controlling for factors like stress, health behaviors, and personality traits.

One of the authors of that study is Eric Kim, an affiliate scientist at the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Kim acknowledges that the physiological mechanisms linked to the helpers high could drive health benefits, but he also highlights additional drivers. Volunteers tend to get more exercise, use preventive health services more often, and experience better social cohesion, for example.

Kim, who is also an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argues that one of the most important effects of volunteering is that it contributes to a persons sense of purpose. If you have a will to live, that will to live will help push you past all kinds of barriers that emerge when youre trying to enact positive health behaviors, he says.

In a study of nearly fourteen thousand retired adults published in 2020 in Preventive Medicine, Kim and colleagues found that those with a higher sense of purpose in life had a lower likelihood of becoming physically inactive, having sleep problems, or developing an unhealthy BMI. Similarly, a 2016 meta-analysis in Psychosomatic Medicine described a lower relative risk for cardiovascular events among people with a higher sense of purpose, even after controlling for variables like conventional cardiovascular risk factors and psychological distress.

People often ask me how they might increase their sense of purpose, says Kim. The answer is, its very difficult. But one of the most scalable ways, that is kind of on the easier side, is volunteering.

Yet even if its relatively easy to get into volunteering, its not just about going through the motions. Kim points to a 2012 study in Health Psychology that found a lower risk for premature mortality among volunteers but there was a caveat. Surveying participants about their motivations, researchers found that those who volunteered for self-oriented reasons had a similar mortality risk as those who didnt volunteer at all. And in the JAMA Pediatrics paper on teen volunteers, the cardiovascular benefits of volunteering were greater among those individuals whose survey responses displayed an uptick in empathy, defined as caring about what happens to other people.

Acts of altruism can also burden the body. Caregiving, for example, can become an immense stressor contributing to myriad health issues. Thats why Post doesnt think that altruism itself is the best medicine. Altruism really conveys an action; it can be habitual, routinized, or externalized, he says. It doesnt get to the kindness. It doesnt get to the heart. Rather, intentional acts of kindness that do not become a burden are key. Post describes what he calls kind giving or kind altruism, an idea related to the Buddhist concept of loving-kindness that meditation works to finesse. Its not how much you do for others, but the kindness you pour into it, he adds.

Researchers found that those who volunteered for self-oriented reasons had a similar mortality risk to those who didnt volunteer at all.

Christakis points out that a propensity for kindness, like any evolved tendency, varies between individuals. But there are ways to cultivate it. He remembers a radio interview he listened to during a drive from Cambridge to the Longwood campus thirty-five years ago. The interviewee, a Buddhist monk, was asked how he might maintain his state of Zen instead of succumbing to road rage if a driver cut him off on the streets of Boston.

I recall that, without missing a beat, the monk said he would imagine that in that car, theres a woman in the back, and the man is driving desperately because shes pregnant and going into labor, says Christakis. So, the monk had trained himself to reframe what was happening around him in the most positive and favorable light.

Post echoes the importance of cultivating a kind disposition that pervades ones life whether youre donating money, volunteering, or just stuck in a traffic jam. The science bears this out. Its how you can actually de-stress. Its how you can be visionary. And its how you can experience joy and happiness, he says.

Its actually pretty simple, Post adds with a shrug. I mean, you can just be kind.

Molly McDonough is the associate editor of Harvard Medicine magazine.

Images: The Trustees of the British Museum (papyrus); John Soares (Fricchione); Evan Mann (Christakis)

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