wordpress – KMZ Digest

The social benefits of psychological generosity

wordpress — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:43:36 +0000

Linda R. Tropp

May 21, 2025

How much do you engage with others when you’re out in public? Lots of people don’t actually engage with others much at all. Think of commuters on public transportation staring down at their phones with earbuds firmly in place.

As a professor of social psychology, I see similar trends on my university campus, where students often put on their headphones and start checking their phones before leaving the lecture hall on the way to their next class.

Curating daily experiences in these ways may appeal to your personal interests, but it also limits opportunities for social connection. Humans are social beings: We desire to feel connected to others, and even connecting with strangers can potentially boost our mood.

www.boundless.org

Though recent technological advances afford greater means for connection than at any other moment in human history, many people still feel isolated and disconnected. Indeed, loneliness in the American population has reached epidemic levels, and Americans’ trust in each other has reached a historic low.

At the same time, our attention is increasingly being pulled in varied directions within a highly saturated information environment, now commonly known as the “attention economy.”

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so many Americans are experiencing a crisis of social connection. Research in social psychology helps to explain how the small behaviors and choices we make as individuals affect our experiences with others in public settings.

Where you focus your attention

One factor shaping people’s experiences in public settings concerns where they focus their attention. Since there is more information out in the world than anyone could ever realistically take in, people are driven to conserve their limited mental resources for those things that seem most crucial to navigating the world successfully. What this means is that every person’s attention is finite and selective: By attending to certain bits of information, you necessarily tune out others, whether you’re aware of doing so or not.

By Mariusz/peopleimages.com

More often than not, the information you deem worthy of attention also tends to be self-relevant. That is, people are more likely to engage with information that piques their interest or relates to them in some way, whereas they tend to ignore information that seems unrelated or irrelevant to their existence.

These ingrained tendencies might make logical sense from an evolutionary perspective, but when applied to everyday social interaction, they suggest that people will limit their attention to and regard for other people unless they see others as somehow connected to them or relevant to their lives.

One unfortunate consequence is that a person may end up treating interactions with other people as transactions, with a primary focus on getting one’s own needs met, or one’s own questions answered. A very different approach would involve seeing interactions with others as opportunities for social connection; being willing to expend some additional mental energy to listen to others’ experiences and exchange views on topics of shared interest can serve as a foundation for building social relationships.

How others interpret your actions

Also, by focusing so much attention on their own individual interests, people may inadvertently signal disinterest to others in their social environments.

As an example, imagine how it would feel to be on the receiving end of those daily commuting rituals. You find yourself surrounded by people whose ears are closed off, whose eyes are down and whose attention is elsewhere – and you might start to feel like no one really cares whether you exist or not.

As social creatures, it’s natural for human beings to want to be seen and acknowledged by other people. Small gestures such as eye contact or a smile, even from a stranger, can foster feelings of connection by signaling that our existence matters. Instead, when these signals are absent, a person may come to feel like they don’t matter, or that they’re not worthy of others’ attention.

How to foster connection in public spaces

_{Acknowledging another human with a smile, even when using an automated system, can help them feel seen and valued}. _{izusek/E+ via Getty Images}

For all these reasons, it may prove valuable to reflect on how you use your limited mental resources, as a way to be more mindful and purposeful about what and who garner your attention. As I encourage my Flickrstudents to do, people can choose to engage in what I refer to as psychological generosity: You can intentionally redirect some of your attention toward the other people around you and expend mental resources beyond what is absolutely necessary to navigate the social world.

Engaging in psychological generosity doesn’t need to be a heavy lift, nor does it call for any grand gestures. But it will probably take a little more effort beyond the bare minimum it typically takes to get by. In other words, it will likely involve moving from being merely transactional with other people to becoming more relational while navigating interactions with them.

A few simple examples of psychological generosity might include actions such as:

Tuning in by turning off devices. Rather than default to focusing attention on your phone, try turning off its volume or setting it to airplane mode. See if you notice any changes in how you engage with other people in your immediate environment.
Making eye contact and small talk. As historian Timothy Snyder writes, eye contact and small talk are “not just polite” but constitute “part of being a responsible member of society.”
Smiling and greeting someone you don’t know. Take the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” to the realm of social relations, by showing your willingness to welcome other people rather than displaying disinterest and avoidance. Such simple acts may help to foster feelings of belonging and build a sense of community with others.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/pleasant-commute-talk-stranger/

Among the most cynical, examples like these may initially be written off as reflecting pleas to practice the random acts of kindness often trumpeted on bumper stickers. Yet acts like these are far from random – they require intention and redirection of your attention toward action, like any new habit you may wish to cultivate.

Others might wonder whether potential benefits to society are worth the individual cost, given that attention and effort are limited resources. But, ultimately, our well-being as individuals and the health of our communities grow from social connection.

Practicing acts of psychological generosity, then, can provide you with opportunities to benefit from social connection, at the same time as these acts can pay dividends to other people and to the social fabric of your community.

theconversation.com/making-eye-contact-and-small-talk-with-strangers-is-more-than-just-being-polite-the-social-benefits-of-psychological-generosity-252477

Sen. Duckworth took her daughters to see ‘Barbie.’ Because she uses a wheelchair, she had to wait outside.

wordpress — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 20:30:12 +0000

Published July 31, 2023

Thirty-three years after the Americans with Disabilities Act legally required access, much of American life is still inaccessible. This is true even for a U.S. Senator. (BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL/AP)

Over the “Barbie” movie’s opening weekend, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, like many Americans, went to see it with her young daughters and a few friends from their play group. “Barbie” has been the No. 1 movie in America since it opened on July 21. Many viewers have put on their pinkest outfits for showings, and Duckworth’s family was no exception.

^{Sara Luterman
Caregiving reporter}

“We got all dressed up in pink, and my girls put on their sparkly shoes,” Duckworth told The 19th.

But there was a problem: When they arrived, Duckworth could not enter the theater. She uses a wheelchair, and the single elevator was broken. She ended up sitting outside while her daughters went up to the movie without her.

“They didn’t have [information about the broken elevator] posted anywhere. If I had known, I wouldn’t have come all that way and disappointed my girls,” Duckworth said. Her ticket was refunded and she was given a pass to come back when the elevator is repaired, but it is unclear when that will be. The 19th called the theater multiple times to ask, but did not receive a response.

Claudia Center is legal director for the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, also known as DREDF. The organization was founded in 1979 by disabled people to fight for their civil rights. According to Center, Duckworth’s experience is not unique.

Violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Center told The 19th, “are exceedingly common. They permeate our environment in all areas of life.”

The problem, according to Center, is enforcement. People can make complaints with various federal agencies online, but enforcement is underfunded, and the sheer volume of complaints means that a response may be slow.

The federal government’s ADA website says that reviewing a complaint can take up to three months, but Center said individuals do not always receive a response in that timeframe, if they receive one at all.

“There are thousands upon thousands of complaints. There is no way for the Department of Justice, at its current level of staffing, to respond to them all,” Center said.

Because of these barriers, some people choose to pursue private action to enforce accessibility, by hiring their own lawyer. But that option is cost-prohibitive and time-consuming.

“You have to find a lawyer — one who will work on some kind of contingency, because most people with disabilities don’t have the money to pay out of pocket. There’s a filing fee to even file a complaint. Everything is very expensive,” she said. There are also no damages that can be awarded, so there is no promised payout for a lawyer later, as there may be in a personal injury case.

Less than 1 percent of housing in America is wheelchair accessible, according to the most recent data available, and many stores, restaurants, movie theaters and other sites of public accommodation are not accessible to people in wheelchairs or with other disabilities.

Some older buildings can be “grandfathered in” and do not need to meet ADA requirements until new construction or renovation occurs. Center calls this “the great compromise” of the law.

“If you build it new, or you redo it, the new construction or the new alteration is supposed to be accessible. The idea is, over time, we’ll have a more accessible society,” Center said. But even that compromise is frequently not met, and much new construction remains inaccessible.

Additionally, businesses that meet some technical requirements may be inaccessible in a practical sense. A movie theater may have wheelchair seating available, but the elevator may be broken, as was the case for Duckworth and her family. There may be a ramp into a restaurant, but the bathroom may be down a flight of stairs.

Unfortunately, there are no legislative or regulatory fixes on the horizon. Congress continues to introduce bills that would further weaken ADA enforcement, which makes it difficult to introduce potentially successful legislation to strengthen protections. Duckworth highlighted the ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017, which ultimately failed, but received bipartisan support.

“The problem is, we’re always playing defense. We spend more time defending the ADA than we do expanding access,” Duckworth said. “There’s not much we can do about this other than highlight this for folks. I would love to be able to pass additional support for the ADA. In 33 years, you shouldn’t be hanging your hat on the building being grandfathered in when you could have put in a fix in that amount of time.”