Can I help the world and still be okay?

I would like to pick up where I left off yesterday and give attention to the idea that we should be taking care of the people with self-transcendent values – the people who want to take care of the world.  I have been looking for research that would offer some science-based insight into this dilemma and came up with a study that investigated the relationships among self-affirmation, pro-social behaviours, and self-compassion (Lindsay & Creswell, 2014).  To define the terms for you, self-affirmation refers to tasks that affirm our personal values, and pro-social behaviors are things we would expect people with self-transcendent values to do.  Self-compassion means not only what the name suggests – being kind to yourself – but also being mindfully aware, and recognizing that you are part of the bigger world (referred to as common humanity). These are the ideas they investigated

The researchers brought people into a room individually and gave them a self-affirming or a neutral writing task.  People in the self-affirming condition were asked to write for three minutes about a value that they had chosen as important to them.  Others were asked to write for three minutes about a value that was unimportant to them but might be important to someone else.  Then the researcher would leave the room for a moment and a shelf would “accidentally” fall down.  The researcher watched through a hidden camera and rated how helpful people were in picking up the shelf. When they analysed the data comparing those who had affirmed a personal value to those who had written about an unimportant value, they found that those who affirmed their own value were more helpful in picking up the shelf than those who had not affirmed a personal value.  They also measured changes in self-compassion (before and after the writing task) and found that self-compassion in the affirming group accounted for the differences in helpfulness.  In other words, self-affirmation increased self-compassionate feelings, and that those feelings fostered more pro-social behaviour.

While this is only one study and I know that the participants were only picking up a shelf not changing the world,  I find it hopeful.  It tells me that paying attention to my personal values - reflecting on them - will tend to increase my self-compassion.  I know that self-compassion is related to well-being http://self-compassion.org/the-research/ so this is good news for me.  Now I  also know that self-compassion can help me act generously – good news for the world.

Reference

Lindsay, E.K., & Creswell, J.D. (2014). Helping the self help others: self-affirmation increases self-compassion and pro-social behaviors. Frontiers in Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology, 12, http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00421