Does this turn Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand upside down? See I Study Stress. This Cure Surprised—and Helped—Me by Rebecca Heiss.
"In the self-help field, we tend to promote the usual stress-management arsenal: meditation apps, massage therapy, breathing exercises, yoga classes. These aren’t wrong, but they rely on the individual to solve their own stress. In reality, these tools can sometimes exacerbate the problem, as people see their failure to self-regulate as proof there is something broken or wrong with them.
A study of workplace interventions to reduce stress, published in Industrial Relations Journal in 2024, revealed a startling truth: Of the 90 different stress-reduction strategies tested in corporate settings, which included meditation, massage and breathing exercises, only one consistently mitigated the negative effects of stress: serving others."
I am always interested in issues like this. If people are helping others are they doing it because they truly are altruistic or is it in their self interest? What if you make yourself better off by helping others? Was it truly an act of kindness? And what about the invisible hand, where Adam Smith says we make society better off when we are acting in our self interest?
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.Click here to read a longer description by Collins himself.
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."
Here is an excerpt from an article titled The Dalai Lama Explains Why Being Kind to Others is the Secret to Happiness. The link is not working and it was originally from a site called IDEAPOD.
"Have you ever wondered why it matters that you care for other people?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 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."
“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”
Related Posts:
Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Thorstein Veblen (and Adam Smith, too!) (2007)
Adam Smith vs. Bart Simpson (2011) (Relates to Smith's book on sympathy The Theory of Moral Sentiments)
The Dalai Lama Says It Is Sometimes OK To Be Selfish (2013)
Is altruism a result of selfishness? (2017)
Want to be happy and successful? Try compassion (2017)
Do you have to be selfish to make more money? (2018)
Does collective self-deception mask selfish behavior? (2018)
Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad (2019)
People sometimes pay for for goods even when they don't have to (2019)
Why being kind to others is good for your health (and that can include donating money) (2020)
There is a positive relationship between prosociality and labor market success (2021)
The Invisible Hand Increases Trust, Cooperation, and Universal Moral Action (2022)
The Instinct to Share Our Good Fortune (2023)
You Don’t Have to Be a Jerk to Succeed (2024)
Are Moral People Happier? (2024)
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