Research and Scholarship
Recent research has shown that generosity is associated with empathy. In this research, by Paul J. Zak and colleagues and published in Public Library of Science ONE, the peptide oxytocin or placebo was given to about 100 men and then they made several decisions regarding money. One, the Dictator Game, was used to measure altruism by asking people to make a unilateral transfer of $10 they were given by the experimenters to a stranger in the lab; oxytocin had no effect on altruism.
Another task, the Ultimatum Game was used to measure generosity. In this game, one person was endowed with $10 and was asked to offer some split of it to another person in the lab, all done by computer. If the second person did not like the split, he could reject it (for example, if it was stingy) and both people would get zero. In a clever twist, the researchers told participants they would be randomly chosen to be either the person making the offer or the person responding to it. This required the person making the offer to take the other's perspective explicitly. Generosity was defined as an offer greater than the minimum amount needed for acceptance. Oxytocin increased generosity 80% compared to those on placebo. In addition, oxytocin was quantitatively twice as important in predicting generosity as was altruism.
Read more about this topic: Generosity
Famous quotes containing the words research and, research and/or scholarship:
“I did my research and decided I just had to live it.”
—Karina O’Malley, U.S. sociologist and educator. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A5 (September 16, 1992)
“Men talk, but rarely about anything personal. Recent research on friendship ... has shown that male relationships are based on shared activities: men tend to do things together rather than simply be together.... Female friendships, particularly close friendships, are usually based on self-disclosure, or on talking about intimate aspects of their lives.”
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—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)