Are we as kind as we think we are?

1. Are we as kind as we think we are? W. Owen Thornton Master’s Candidate: WLU: Philosophy

2. thank-Yous • Laurier Student Public Interest Research Group for making much of this event possible. • And • The Philosophy Department for paying for the room rental • And specifically I wish to thank Jane Osborne of the Philosophy Department for all of her help and assistance in booking the room and helping with the promoting of the event.

3. Welcome • The basic territory … in a moment • The talk • Origination of www.thehumankindnessproject.com • Why we SHOULD be kind • What IS human Kindness • Four definitions: One Virtue • How both of my “kinds” of kindness matter • Why we fail to be kind “all” the time • How we can overcome the challenges to kindness

4. The Basic Territory • I propose a one-hour presentation with approximately 20 minutes of questions either throughout or at the end. • You can help yourself to the treats throughout the talk • You can make use of the washrooms etc. • I may need to curtail conversation in order to get all the content in. I am here until 10:00 tonight if anyone needs to talk further. • I have contact information available, either from my human kindness or my Master’s business cards. Feel free to take them.

5. The Basic Territory – 2 • I’ve noticed in my rehearsals that I’ve been doing two things. • One, I might bumble along a bit in some sections because I am working with new ideas and expressing them is challenging • Two, I may run ahead of my slides and so if I do, please forgive me for clicking through them. I promise you won’t miss anything.

6. How my blog began • It began with a general curiosity of human nature • It began with acknowledging that sometimes we cannot do the things we need to do for ourselves on our own. • It began with a teddy bear in mind. • The businessman teddy bear story

7. Why we “should” be kind • When you are ill and lying in a hospital bed and someone who cares about you visits or touches your hand the patient has an upsurge in positive chemicals in the brain. (Daniel Goleman – Social Intelligence) • When you sit forwards with your head down and take a saliva swab, then sit back with your hands behind your head and you take a swab of your saliva you have a 20% decrease in cortisol and a 20% increase in testosterone. Cortisol leads to anxiety and then to stress so a reduction in that chemical alone is a stress reliever (CBC Radio One report)

8. But more importantly • What we once considered to anecdotal, we can now prove with tests. When we are kind to one another we are happier and we know this through the chemicals that are in our brains. • Human kindness is about many things. It is about mutual respect. • It is about living in a world we WANT to live in. • And there seems to be something magical about human kindness. It does appear to be catching. • So if you perform acts of human kindness, there’s a greater chance they’ll be performed for you

9. Acts of kindness • But one cannot perform an act of kindness with the direct hope that that individual will reciprocate one-for-one. • Neither can we perform acts of kindness in order that they will cycle back and affect you for the better, either. That’s manipulative to the system and it just doesn’t appear to work. • Well, it may appear to work, but somehow the system catches up with you. I wouldn’t want to risk this at any rate!

10. Acts of kindness – 2 • The game we hope is played is that the person we perform an act of kindness for will perform one for someone else who will perform one for someone else who will … • And that you do this because, one day, it may all impact you, but your “motive” is to do acts of kindness ONLY for the general betterment of the world: because it is “RIGHT” to do this! • I believe this works. • But more importantly …

11. The goal of Kindness • We live in a world where we cannot always get what we want on our own. • Sometimes we need a helping hand. • Sometimes we can ask for help. • But sometimes we don’t know who to ask • Sometimes we just get stuck. • And wouldn’t it be a lovely world if sometimes things just fell onto our laps because someone performed an act of kindness.

12. Switching gearsFour kinds of kindness • There are two kinds of kindness I’m talking about specifically. And there’s a third one you’ve all heard, so I’ll name that one too. • (And because there’s a third kind, this breeds a fourth!) • And this leads me to a Virtue! • I believe there are spontaneous acts of kindness and that there are proactive acts of kindness. • Spontaneous acts of kindness are the kinds of things where we hold open doors for others or bring them a coffee, or pick up some papers when they drop them.

13. Spontaneous kindness • These little acts of kindness are important simply because they make our lives a bit easier every day. It’s great to be in a long line of cars and let someone onto the road … that makes life better. It makes the person you let onto the road want to help someone else … or at the very least, it makes them a kinder driver. • My brother-in-law is currently taking a basic Psyche course at UWO and when I told him a story like this, he said, these kinds of changes only last 20 minutes or so. Twenty minutes of being willing to help, of being nice to one another … that’s not bad

14. Proactive Kindness • Maybe those little 20 minute segments of the high we have from spontaneous acts of kindness help us to conduct major acts of kindness … proactive kindness. • If you’ve ever had a big dream and you don’t have a clue as to how to get there … that’s where these acts come in. • These are the acts where we say something like, “I wish I knew a professional editor to help me with my fiction book!” or “I wish I knew someone at XYZ Company where I could get an interview for a job!”

15. And it just so happens … • It’s the wonderful chance opportunities that we have when we can actually make something like that happen for someone. Where we call up Bob or Jan and ask them if they would be willing to look at that book for our friend … or if they would meet with them about a job at XYZ Company. • These are the kinds of things we saw … big things that we can do for someone … things they might not be able to do for themselves … these are the things we saw in the movie Pay it Forward!

16. RAOK • Random Acts of Kindness is a term many of you may have heard. I’ll suggest here that Random Acts of Kindness are interpreted as such by recipients of kindness from people who have deliberately performed the fourth kind of kindness … the ying to the Random Acts of Kindness’s yang ….

17. Deliberate Acts of Kindness • I think RAOK are the result of someone who is performing Deliberate Acts of Kindness or DAOK. • It is my hope to bring kindness into awareness. I think this is where life gets good … where life gets better … I think when kindness becomes deliberative that that’s the kind of world I want to live in. • And should we ever succeed at DAOK on a regular enough basis, then we might actually achieve our ultimate goal

18. 5. The Virtue ofHabitual Kindness • I think Habitual Kindness is where we all think we are, but that this is a false acknowledgement. This is what I want to get into … this is what I want to explore with you tonight. • I think Habitual Kindness is a part of our habitual programming where we automatically and always get it right such that we know when and where to perform spontaneous and proactive acts of human kindness

19. The Problem • The problem is … I believe we think we have the Virtue of Habitual Kindness but in reality we are not at this state. I think it gets shunted aside for reasons I’m about to demonstrate. • I think this “Apparent” Virtue is easy to defeat by the way our minds work and how we live our lives in today’s society. • So … let’s explore this, shall we?

20. Where kindness goes astray • There are four things I want to share with you now. I want to talk about them a bit, and I want you to carry them with you throughout the rest of the talk.

21. Four levels of ability • We have: • 1. Unconscious Incompetence: we don’t know there are cars with standard transmissions and we don’t know how to drive them. • 2. Conscious Incompetence: we know there are such things as cars with standard transmissions, but we don’t know how to drive them.

22. Four levels of knowledge -- 2 • 3. Conscious competence. We know there are cars with standard transmissions but we have to think about how to drive them. “Okay … I step on the clutch, change the gear up from two to three … now slowly release the clutch and … I’m going faster!” • 4. Unconscious competence. We know there are such things as cars with manual transmissions and we know how to drive cars like this so well we no longer have to think about it. We can sing to the radio while driving, or have a conversation.

23. why we are notas kind as we think we are • I believe that when it comes to human kindness that we think we are at 4. Unconscious competence. • This is where the our minds lie to us: We think we possess the Virtue of Human Kindness • The problem is we are often at 2. Conscious incompetence. We know how to be kind but we don’t really practice it very well • Maybe we get spontaneous acts right … sometimes

24. My hope • It is my hope … the goal of my web blog to move us all from 2. Conscious Incompetence to 3. Conscious competence. • And if I can do this … and if I can help us find ways to continue to bring human kindness into our daily, regular awareness, then we might all move to state 4. Unconscious competence where … • I believe this is the locale of The Virtue of Human Kindness • I need to prove this theory but first …

25. DEF: Kindness Awareness: • I think we get sidetracked from practicing the Virtue of Human Kindness VERY easily. I think if we’re not in “kindness awareness” (and kindness awareness is a HARD place to stay in) we simply forget about kindness. • Kindness Awareness is required to operate at 3. Conscious Competence level. • Kindness Awareness is a state where we look for opportunities to be kind and we have some kind of erratic system to help us to remember to BE kind on a regular basis. • Strange words, eh? Use an erratic system to help us be kind on a regular basis?

26. Erratic? • Any system that attempts to keep you in a mode of “Kindness Awareness” can become like driving a standard. • And any time we have an activity that is in our #3. conscious competence realm is a threat to move into our #4. Unconscious Competence realm we have a problem in that we can start to take situations where we go on autopilot. • OWEN: say more here. • We can miss a gear and grind the transmission. • So Unconscious competence is both a good place to be AND a bad place to be.

27. But wait … didn’t I say … • The (4) unconscious competence level is where The Virtue of Human Kindness must reside. But just existing in (4) unconscious competence without Kindness Awareness means that human kindness can drift into the background. So we need to borrow Kindness Awareness from (3) conscious competence and promote it to level (4) unconscious competence, where Kindness Awareness acts as a regulator or monitor, to keep the Virtue of Human Kindness always on.

28. What? • Do any of you remember old gas stoves? I have one in my house. They have a constant pilot light, that’s always on, and when you turn on the element, the pre-ignited flame dances across a gap to the element and the element “flames on”. • Kindness Awareness acts as the pilot light. It is always on and this quality gives us the ability to have the Virtue of Human Kindness as an operating mode at level four: Unconscious competence.

29. The problem? • The problem is that when we pre-maturely believe that we have our pilot light for human kindness permanently lit, and we then move human kindness from conscious competence to unconscious competence, we are too susceptible to having a gust of wind blow out the pilot light. • Key here, then is that with the pilot light blown out, we still think were in position 4 instead of position 2. • I will show you how this happens in a moment.

30. Another example • Say you are driving a standard at the unconscious competence level. Every once in a while you miss a gear or you stall the car on a hill. Suddenly driving a standard has fallen out of the unconscious competence level and is now at the conscious competence level, if only for a moment. • Somehow, I think that Kindness awareness works like the missed gear … • You realize you’ve just missed an opportunity to be kind and your unconscious competence human kindness radar becomes reactivated.

31. Why does it work this way? • Human kindness is not a tangible, or static thing. It is intangible and fluid. If it were tangible and static, it might be more predictable, more easy to spot. • Opportunities to be kind strike us at times when we’re not suspecting. We get caught off guard. • Opportunities to be kind are not regular. In identical situations, one person could need our help, and another might be offended by the gesture. Appropriate Kindness is hard!

32. So what is the story here?We get caught up … A STORY • People are working with mixed up sentences and are being asked to put the sentences back together. • One half of the people are working with words that might make them think of being old, like “old, grey, retirement and Florida.” • The other half of people work with mixed up sentences that don’t have these words in them. • Once they have been working with these sentences for a while, they are asked to leave. • NOW the experiment really begins.

33. … in our lives • The people who have worked with these mixed up sentences now walk to the elevators. • Those who worked with the “old” words walked to the elevator more slowly than those who did not. • When asked if they knew they worked with these words, the people were completely unaware that they had worked with them. • Yet their earlier actions had somehow changed their walking speed.

34. And so … • We can fall victim to subtle environments. Remember. From slide five we learned How you sit can determine the chemicals or hormones in your body. • We might have been able to say, “That we think the things in our environment don’t impact us.” • We would be wrong. • THEY DO! • So we have to watch our environment. It can blow out our pilot light/human kindness awareness

35. And if thingswe’re not aware of … • If things we’re not aware of impact us like that, and every experience we have like that lasts 20 minutes … then we’re going to find it difficult to be kind

36. And little things impact us • In a study in a time when there were phone booths where a call cost a dime … • A dime was left in the coin return slot for some people and was found. • A dime was NOT left in the coin return slot for others. • Now, in all cases, as these folk turned away from the phone booth a confederate to the test dropped a stack of papers.

37. Dropped papers • Of the 8 men and 8 women who found a dime, 6 men helped and all 8 women helped. • Of the 9 men and 16 women who did not find a dime, none helped. • RachanaKametkar: “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character*” page 465. She also cites the following Princeton Study on pages 463-465.

38. A result? • Does this not make an argument for why we should desire to practice, at least spontaneous acts of human kindness? • Think of the state of mind of the 25 people who didn’t help, should they find themselves in a position to be able to practice proactive human kindness? Do you think they would be willing to participate? They certainly are not helping on the spontaneous level. • And NOT finding a dime is not a negative consequence: It is merely a neutral one. • So how susceptible to the “universe” at large are we?

39. But it gets worse for us • Even when we might think we are operating at the unconscious competence level in some regard, we can get fooled. This is why I think we need to have some kind of “bounce-back” mechanism (Kindness Awareness in my case) to help us operate between Conscious and Unconscious competence. • Here’s a story to this effect.

40. Princeton Study • Do you know the story of The Good Samaritan? • Man beaten, robbed and left for dead • Two pious men walk past the dying man • A Samaritan, someone hated by the Jews in that era bandaged the man, took him to an inn and paid for his stay while he recovered.

41. Princeton Study • So seminarian students are asked to deliver a talk on the Good Samaritan Story. • Some are told that they are now, already late to deliver their talk in a nearby building. • Others are given time to amble over to the building to deliver the talk. • Between the building they are in and the one where they are to deliver the talk is a homeless man, lying on the path … the beaten man of the very parable they are supposed to deliver a talk about

42. Princeton Study • Of the group that was late, 10 percent stopped to help. (some stepped over the body!) • Of the group that had time to spare, 63 percent stopped to help. • MalcomGladwell, The Tipping Point, p 163-165.

43. Double whammy • 1. we would think seminarians would have their radar to assist those who cannot help themselves “on” at all times. • 2. they currently have that radar activated by the fact that they are thinking about a talk on that very subject. • Yet they fail to do the right thing with what we would consider to be two parts of their mind working on this exact kind of situation. • How then, can we hope to be kind?

44. About kindness • Kindness “feels” like an extra … a “something we do when we get ‘around-tuit’” • If it’s not a priority … like helping the homeless or downtrodden would seem to be for A: seminarians in general and B: Seminarians who are about to deliver a talk about the homeless or downtrodden specifically • Then what kind of chance do we have?

45. We have a problem with • URGENCY • In Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People he discovered a remarkable thing. (page 151)

46. What he expected

47. What he discovered

48. And where does Human Kindness Lie on this Grid?

49. Why? • Why are we like this? Why are we susceptible to anything that comes along? (and if it is neutral or bad, we will be less likely to practice human kindness for the next 20 minutes). • This means that if nothing good happens to us, we are probably NOT thinking about human kindness at all!

50. Why? – 2 • Why do we let urgency drive us when we know Important but Not Urgent things should be the Number two’s in our lives?