Selective information

His findings indicate otherwise. Chimpanzees, as well as children too young to have learned the rules of politeness, spontaneously engage in helpful behaviors, even when they have to stop playing or overcome obstacles to do so. The same results have been duplicated with children in Canada, India, and Peru, as well as with chimpanzees at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and other research centers across the world. The chimps helped not only people they knew, but human strangers too. COMPASSION, IT TURNS out, is innate. Human beings and other animals have what Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, calls a compassionate instinct. All compassion involves some benefit for the helper, Steve Cole says. In fact, the happiness we derive when we act on behalf of the greater good shows up in our cells as a bolstered immune response, he says. What part did marriage play in those dreams and hopes? What did you expect from marriage? Perhaps your answer includes one or more of the following: Marriage was that security. All of these are fringe benefits of marriage, but none is strong enough to stand as its foundation. Many people are propelled toward marriage without really understanding all they are committing themselves to for the rest of their lives. That's why couples experience surprises and upsets throughout the duration of their marriage. Various writers have given definitions of Christian marriage. Wayne Oates says: Marriage is a covenant of responsible love, a fellowship of repentance and forgiveness. David Augsburger defines marriage by first asking, Is marriage a private action of two persons in love, or a public act of two pledging a contract? Power distance Variation in the extent to which members of a culture or an organization (especially those with less power) accept an unequal distribution of power.

Power Distance Around the World Countries shaded in darker colors have a higher power distance, valuing hierarchy and respect for authority. An image shows a colored world map representing power distance around the world. A scale is shown at the bottom left corner titled power distance showing five shades of color; Legitimizing Hierarchy A central idea we have touched on throughout this textarticle is that much of our social reality is based on a cultural worldview--a socially constructed view of reality. This means that for advantaged groups to stay in power and for group hierarchies to persist, individuals across society need to believe in the legitimacy of their leaders and the institutions that keep them in power. Building on this idea, social dominance theory says that people use several strategies to maintain faith that the existing hierarchy is real and legitimate: While we might feel just as happy eating ice cream as we do volunteering at a beach cleanup, at a cellular level happiness that comes from meaningful service to others is correlated with positive health benefits. Better health through taking action on behalf of the collective--that's good news indeed for engaging people in fixing the Earth. TRENDING HOPEFUL The asteroid that hit the Earth 66 million years ago triggered a massive 11-magnitude earthquake that, in turn, set off a wave of volcanic eruptions that lasted 300,000 years. These seismic shifts killed off the dinosaurs and gave birth to hydrothermal vents filled with fish and snails and tubeworms who thrive in oven-hot temperatures completely in the dark, giving birth in sulfuric acid at the bottom of the ocean. Everywhere I look I see the impossible made possible. A DECADE AGO, I felt utter despair over the catastrophic rise in the murder rate of elephants. Between 2007 and 2014, 30 percent of savanna elephants (144,000 animals) in Africa died, primarily at the hands of poachers. This horrific situation is made even sadder by the fact that elephants are such remarkable animals. They're highly intelligent, social, caring, and they're deeply attached to members of their extended families. Then he goes on to say, Neither. It is something other.

Very much other! Basically the Christian view of marriage is not that it is primarily or even essentially a binding legal and social contract. The Christian understands marriage as a covenant made under God and in the presence of fellow members of the Christian family. Such a pledge endures, not because the force of law or the fear of its sanctions, but because an unconditional covenant has been made. A covenant more solemn, more binding, more permanent than any legal contract. Some psychologists, marriage counselors and ministers have suggested that marriage is a contract, and many people are quick to agree. But is this really true? In every contract there are certain conditional clauses. Legitimizing Myths One strategy is to believe in legitimizing myths--overly simplistic beliefs about why people succeed or fail in society. One myth is that anyone can get ahead in life if she or he simply works hard enough. Because of this myth, people who are advantaged in society may, ironically, be more likely than underprivileged groups to claim that they are unfairly discriminated against (Thomsen et al. Consider the following experiment, in which college students were asked to role-play a situation in which they were applying for a managerial position (Major et al. White participants who learned that they had been passed over for the job by a Latino manager who favored a Latino applicant were more likely to claim discrimination than were Latino participants passed over by a White manager who favored a White applicant. System justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994) highlights another way people maintain faith in hierarchy: believing in stereotypes that seem to explain why some individuals are more advantaged than others. For example, if someone high in power stereotypes homeless people as being dim-witted, lazy, and dangerous, then he can explain why they suffer without questioning his faith that hierarchy is fair and good. Without those stereotypes, he might have to face the harsh reality that the hierarchy is biased or flawed and that people do not always get what they deserve. System justification theory The theory that negative stereotypes get attached to groups partly because they help explain and justify why some individuals are more advantaged than others. In response to losing family members in such a violent way, elephants suffer from the psychological symptoms of post-traumatic stress, depression, unpredictable aggression, and antisocial behavior, according to a heartbreaking 2014 study published in Nature. People have been decrying elephant poaching for decades, but the complexity of the issues that drive it--poverty and lack of sustainable livelihoods for people living in close association with elephants in African countries;

In 2014, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen launched the Great Elephant Census project. Ninety researchers covered 285,000 miles (459,000 km) across twenty-one African countries, creating a pan-African aerial survey and a massive raw data set. The resulting census map provides a detailed analysis of emergency situations where elephants face local extinction or staggering declines, and other areas where populations are increasing. It would be naive to suggest that big data allows us to know better, and that knowing better on its own would stop poaching. That isn't the case. But having more robust evidence, and transparency to see patterns, trends, and hotspots, triggered meaningful change. The Great Elephant Census project didn't start or end with this much-needed map. It's also established relationships within collaborative networks to fight against poaching in Africa and the illegal trade chains in Asia. A contract between two parties, whether they are companies or individuals, involves the responsibility of both parties to carry out their part of the bargain. These are conditional clauses--if clauses (if you do this, the other person must do this). There are no conditional clauses in the marriage relationship and the marriage ceremony. The marriage ceremony vows do not state, If the husband loves his wife, then the wife continues in the contract. Or, If the wife is submissive to her husband, then the husband carries out the contract. Marriage is an unconditional commitment into which two people enter. In most contracts there are escape clauses. An escape clause says that if the party of the first part does not carry out his responsibilities, then the party of the second part is absolved. If one person does not live up to his or her part of the bargain, the second person can get out of the contract. In marriage, there is no escape clause. Idealizing High Status It's easy to understand why members of advantaged groups would want to maintain their legitimizing beliefs. As we noted in our discussion of social identity theory earlier in this article, it's quite common for individuals to show ingroup bias, a preference for their own group over outgroups.

The more remarkable observation is that some members of disadvantaged groups actually show a preference for the higher-status group over their own group (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). For instance, some studies show that Arabs living in Israel and Latinos living in Los Angeles (who both value group hierarchy and believe that the hierarchy in their respective societies is legitimate) were more favorably disposed toward the higher-status majority group than toward their own (Levin et al. Mitigating Comparisons Disadvantaged groups also justify hierarchy by believing in complementary stereotypes that portray groups with a mix of positive and negative characteristics (Kay & Jost, 2003; For example, after reading stories about people who are poor yet happy (versus sad), or rich yet corrupt (versus honest), people saw the system as fairer. We seem to like it when groups that are socially disadvantaged appear satisfied with their lives and groups that are especially well off look miserable or untrustworthy. Complementary stereotypes Both positive and negative stereotypes that are ascribed to a group as a way of justifying the status quo. To acknowledge instead a sense of disadvantage requires a comparison with others who are more advantaged. Recognizing that saving elephants can't happen without the support of Chinese consumers and the Chinese authorities, a massive public-awareness campaign was launched, including a major campaign by Yao Ming, the superstar basketball player. The Guardian newspaper teamed up with the media outlet chinadialogue to provide a year of in-depth reporting on the elephant crisis in Chinese languages. Attitudes within China began to shift. When surveyed, 95 percent of respondents in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (China's three biggest cities) revealed that they wanted the government to ban the ivory trade in order to protect African elephants. On December 31, 2017, China officially made all trade in ivory illegal. It was a huge step in the right direction, and one that is yielding results. Elephant poaching in Africa has dropped dramatically, according to a 2019 report in Science. While big data enabled a detailed analysis of the problem, collaborative networks brought together vital expertise to understand the root causes and create relationships for coordinated responses. In this era of knowledge-driven economies, big data and collaborative networks are dramatically changing the way we understand and can respond to environmental crises. Trends determine the food we eat, the clothing we wear, the way we work, the music we listen to, and so much more. Then if marriage is not a contract, what is it? It is an unconditional commitment into which a man and woman enter for life.