The Dangerous Economist: Why being kind to others is good for your health (and that can include donating money)

By Marta Zaraska writing for the BBC. She is the author of "Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100."

Adam Smith said when people act selfishly they are led, as if by an invisible hand, to make society better off. So what if you try to help others because you know it will make you better off? Are being kind (altruistic) or selfish?

Excerpts from the article:

"Science reveals that altruistic behaviours, from formal volunteering and monetary donations to random acts of everyday kindness, promote wellbeing and longevity.
Studies show, for instance, that volunteering correlates with a 24% lower risk of early death – about the same as eating six or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day, according to some studies. What’s more, volunteers have a lower risk of high blood glucose, and a lower risk of the inflammation levels connected to heart disease. They also spend 38% fewer nights in hospitals than people who shy from involvement in charities.

And these health-boosting impacts of volunteering appear to be found in all corners of the world, from Spain and Egypt to Uganda and Jamaica, according to one study based on the data from the Gallup World Poll.
Of course, it could be that people who are in better health to begin with are simply more likely to be in a position to pick up volunteering. If you are suffering from severe arthritis, for example, the chances are you won’t be keen to sign up to work at a soup kitchen.

“There is research suggesting that people who are in better health are more likely to volunteer, but because scientists are very well aware of that, in our studies we statistically control for that,” says Sara Konrath, a psychologist and philanthropy researcher at Indiana University.

Even when scientists remove the effects of pre-existing health, the impacts of volunteering on wellbeing still remain strong. What’s more, several randomised lab experiments shed light on the biological mechanisms through which helping others can boost our health.

In one such experiment, high school students in Canada were either assigned to tutor elementary school children for two months, or put on a waitlist. Four months later, after the tutoring was well over, the differences between the two groups of teenagers were clearly visible in their blood. Compared to those on the waitlist, high-schoolers who were actively tutoring the younger children had lower levels of cholesterol, as well as lower inflammatory markers such as interleukin 6 in their blood – which apart of being a powerful predictor of cardiovascular health, also plays an important role in viral infections."
"But it’s not just the effects of formal volunteering that show up in the blood either – random acts of kindness do as well. In one study in California, participants who were assigned to conduct simple acts of kindness, such as buying coffee for a stranger, had lower activity of leukocyte genes that are related to inflammation. That’s a good thing, since chronic inflammation has been linked to conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
And if you put people into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, and tell them to act altruistically, you may see changes in how their brains react to pain. In one recent experiment, volunteers had to make various decisions, including whether to donate money, while their hands were subjected to mild electric shocks. The results were clear – the brains of those who made a donation lit up less in response to pain. And the more they considered their actions as helpful, the more pain-resistant they became. Similarly, donating blood appears to hurt less than having your blood drawn for a test, even though in the first scenario the needle may be twice as thick.
There are countless other examples of the positive health effects of both kindness and monetary donations. For instance, grandparents who regularly babysit their grandchildren have a mortality risk that is up to 37% lower than those who don’t provide such childcare. That’s a larger effect than may be achieved from regular exercise, according one meta-analysis of studies. This assumes the grandparents are not stepping into the parents’ shoes completely (although, admittedly, caring for grandkids often does involve a lot of physical activity, especially when we are talking about toddlers).

On the other hand, spending money on others rather than for your own pleasure can lead to better hearing, improved sleep and lower blood pressure, with the effects as large as those of starting new hypertension medication.
Meanwhile, writing a cheque for a charity can be a good strategy for boosting your muscle power. In one experiment that tested handgrip strength, participants who made a donation to Unicef could squeeze a hand exerciser for 20 seconds longer than those who had not given away their money."
For Tristen Inagaki, neuroscientist at San Diego State University, there is nothing surprising in the fact that kindness and altruism should impact our physical wellbeing. “Humans are extremely social, we have better health when we are interconnected, and part of being interconnected is giving,” she says.

Inagaki studies our caregiving system – a network of brain regions tied to both helping behaviours and health. This system likely evolved to facilitate parenting of our infants, unusually helpless by mammalian standards, and later probably got co-opted to helping other people, too. Part of the system is made up from the reward regions of the brain, such as the septal area and ventral striatum – the very same ones that light up when you get three cherries in a row on a slot machine. By wiring parenting to the reward system, nature has tried to assure we don’t run away from our screaming, needy babies. Neuroimagining studies by Inagaki and her colleagues show that these brain areas also light up when we give support to other loved ones.

Besides making caregiving rewarding, evolution also linked it with reduced stress. When we act kindly, or even simply reflect on our past kindness, the activity of our brain’s fear centre, the amygdala, goes down. Again this could be linked to raising children.

It may seem counterintuitive that childcare might be stress-reducing – ask any new parent and they’ll likely tell you that caring for babies isn’t exactly a trip to the spa. But research shows that when animals hear the whimpers of infants of the same species, the activity of their amygdalae tempers down, and the same thing happens to parents when they are shown the photo of their own child. Inagaki explains that the activity of the brain’s fear centre has to go down if we are to be truly useful to others. “If you were completely overwhelmed by their stress, you probably couldn’t even approach them to help them in the first place,” she says.
All this has direct consequences for health. The caregiving system – the amygdala and the reward areas – are networked with our sympathetic nervous system, which is involved in regulating our blood pressure and inflammatory responding, Inagaki explains. This is why turning your caregiving on can improve your cardiovascular health, and help you live longer.
Adolescents who volunteer their time have been found to have lower levels of two markers of inflammation – interleukin 6 and C-reactive protein."

Adam Smith wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. One point he made there was that we are able to sympathize with other people by trying imagine what they are going through (and I wonder if we need to be good storytellers to be able to do that). Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has been studying how the hormone oxytocin plays a role in making us feel good when we have empathy for others (beware: Zak is a big hugger). See an earlier post Adam Smith vs. Bart Simpson for more details.

There is an interesting book called Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination. It relates storytelling to evolution.

Click here to go the Amazon listing. It is by Christopher Collins, professor emeritus of English at New York University. Here is the description:

"Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics calls for a broader, more integrated interpretation of the reading experience, one that restores our connection to the ancient methods of thought production still resonating within us.

Speaking with authority on the scientific aspects of cognitive poetics, Collins proposes reading literature using cognitive skills that predate language and writing. These include the brain's capacity to perceive the visible world, store its images, and retrieve them later to form simulated mental events. Long before humans could share stories through speech, they perceived, remembered, and imagined their own inner narratives. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Collins builds an evolutionary bridge between humans' development of sensorimotor skills and their achievement of linguistic cognition, bringing current scientific perspective to such issues as the structure of narrative, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the relation of rhetoric to poetics, the relevance of performance theory to reading, the difference between orality and writing, and the nature of play and imagination."

Click here to read a longer description by Collins himself.

Here is the new article from this week The Dalai Lama Explains Why Being Kind to Others is the Secret to Happiness. Excerpt:

"Have you ever wondered why it matters that you care for other people?

It seems commonsense that this is a good way to live life. But there are dominant philosophies today that suggest we need to maximize our own individual self-interest.

This comes from economic theories of capitalism that suggest when people look after their own self-interest, then society is better off.

The Dalai Lama explains why this doesn’t make sense in the beautiful passage below. As he says, it’s an obvious fact that your own sense of wellbeing can be provided through your relationships with others. So it’s best to start cultivating practices of kindness and compassion."

Then the article has a long statement from the Dalai Lama on this philosophy. But some economists might say that you can't run a successful business if you don't care about others and try to learn their wants and desires. Here is what Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”

Do you have to be selfish to make more money?

Want to be happy and successful? Try compassion

The Dalai Lama Says It Is Sometimes OK To Be Selfish

People sometimes pay for for goods even when they don't have to

Why Being Kind Helps You, Too—Especially Now