Flickr photo by Timothy Hamilton

Yahoo is trying to spark random acts of kindness around the world through the 600 million people who are part of the Yahoo “community.”

They ask people to visit kindness.yahoo.com and post online status messages describing their good deeds, inspiring others to reciprocate and amplify their actions.

They call their effort “You In?” since they encourage those doing good deeds to add this to the end of their posts.  For example, “I just dropped off a coat from my closet at a homeless shelter, You In?” or “I paid the toll fee for the car behind me, You In?” The messages appear in that poster’s Yahoo! status and can be shared via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Visitors can also see an interactive global map on the campaign’s website at kindness.yahoo.com.

Given that the effort encourages altruism, it is ironic that Yahoo! seeded the program by giving $100 to early participants.

The program builds on the “Pay It Forward” concept (serial reciprocity); and there was already an on-line version of Pay it Forward developed called The Giving Game.

Notable Acts of Kindness under the Yahoo! effort:

- “I traded in a $100 bill for 100 one-dollar bills and wrote a note on each that read: ‘Please take this dollar bill, add one dollar bill, and pass it on.’”

- “I helped an 85-year-old neighbor bring her Xmas decorations down from the rafters — all 12 boxes!”

- “I helped an elderly lady carry her groceries to her car.”

- “I am baking Christmas cakes to share with friends in need of help.”

- “I dropped off supplies at the local Humane Society and at the local women’s shelter.”

Flickr photo by Echobase

American Grace co-author David Campbell appeared on a Pew-sponsored panel called Portrait of the Millennial Generation with Neil Howe, Andy Kohut and Judy Woodruff, among others. Allison Pond, research associate at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, discussed some of Pew’s findings re Millennials and religion. Millennials, in comparison to earlier generations, according to Pond, are  less likely to pray, less likely to assert that religion is important to them, just as likely to believe in heaven/hell or in the afterlife, and more likely to tinker with religion (finding ways to cobble together a spiritual life although they are less connected to religious institutions).

As David Campbell points out on the panel:

If you look over the long haul from the ’60s to the ’70s, you do see a slight increase in the overall percentage of Americans who were evangelicals, and much of that growth was concentrated among young people.

That, however, ceased to be the case over the last 10 or 15 years. You have seen evangelical churches remain on the American landscape. And anyone who has been to the Saddleback Church in California or the Willow Creek Church in Chicago — these are massive megachurches — will know what I mean. It’s not that Millennials are streaming out of these churches, but they’re not being attracted to them the way that young people were in the past. That suggests to me that there’s an opening for religious entrepreneurs to somehow reach that segment of the population. They haven’t yet done so, and evangelicalism as it exists today does not seem to be reaching them.

On a later panel that same day Scott Keeter et. al. discussed differences between the Millennial Generation and earlier generations on abortion (more pro-choice) and religiosity (less religious).   And one questioner alluded to Pew’s findings that Millennials much more strongly believe that  ”Houses of worship should express views on social and political issues”, to which Andy Kohut observed that these differences have to be interpreted in light of Millennials growing up in a context of greater separation of church and state than previous generations.

[In other discussions on the morning panel and afternoon panel there was a discussion of Millennials and community engagement.  For our  (Robert Putnam's and my) take on this, see "Still Bowling Alone?" in the January Journal of Democracy.]

Some of findings to come in American Grace are consistent with Pew’s findings and some appear to differ. Stay tuned.

But one Achilles’ Heel of such efforts is users inadvertently disclosing private information that perhaps they shouldn’t. One site, PleaseRobMe.com trawls live Twitter posts (tweets) to share publicly which users are away from home, in a tongue-in-cheek effort to get users to be more circumspect.  [PleaseRobMe notifies the careless tweeters as well.]

Analysts expect that use of such mobile social applications will rise. With the ubiquity of smart phones and users’ rising comfort with applications that use location-based awareness, to recommend local restaurants, to automatically purchase an item displayed in a window by pointing one’s phone at it and clicking (application is in development), they will also become more comfortable using their location for social applications.

As the Economist notes: “Foursquare, which celebrates its first birthday on March 13th and now covers most big cities around the world, rewards people who register their presence at (or check in to) a particular café or restaurant most often with the title of Mayor. That, in turn, can sometimes entitle them to, say, a free coffee or pizza. On Gowalla, another start-up, users are encouraged to collect as many digital souvenirs as possible by visiting various venues in a city.

“Corporate behemoths also have designs on the location-based market. Last year Google launched a service called Latitude that allows friends to track one another’s movements. The search giant’s recently unveiled (and much-criticised) social-networking service, Buzz, also allows users to tag messages with information about their location. Nokia has bought online-mapping and mobile-networking businesses in recent years to reinforce its offerings. Many observers think Apple has plans to offer geo-targeted advertising on its iPhone. In January the firm snapped up Quattro Wireless, which specialises in advertising on mobile handsets.”

In many of these applications, the act of “checking in” doesn’t involve much of any social capital.  I can announce that I am at the Starbucks at 95th and Broadway, but unless it spurs other acquaintances or friends to come join me, there is no social capital built from checking in.  If we simply monitor where our friends have been frequenting, but this could spur mere voyeurism.  Foursquare tries to encourage interaction by having users get pings when friends or strangers are nearby; in this sense Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley said it enables one to “see through walls” and “around corners.”  Crowley learned from his Dodgeball effort that “not everyone wants to meet strangers”.  They are now allowing developers to create APIs that use the Foursquare for a dating tool or just to meet their good friends or to create Mashups that map their friends’ social patterns.

Regardless of its social capital promise, there is still lots of potential for mining this private information, not just to advertise new products to consumers.  The Center for Democracy & Technology, a privacy think tank, criticized corporate  privacy policies of many such providers and said that the U.S. government needs to play a role.  Some industry self-regulation is occurring: for example, Loopt reminds users that their location is shared with others, permits posting of fake locations, and trolls its postings for any suspect signs that private information is being abused.  In many cases, the younger generation — the “Net Generation” that Jonathan Palfrey describes in Born Digital — have very different conceptions of privacy and use the Internet much more seamlessly, for example creating a custom video where older generations would have written a note or an essay.

Despite these concerns about privacy, innovation in this area surges ahead.  See for example “Wearable Sensor Connects Would-be Strangers” or “Hyperlocal Communication“.  We’ll keep you notified of interesting developments in this space as they evolve.

See a video interview of Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley (1/27/10) and the genesis of mobile social applications.

Read the Economist’s “Follow Me” (3/4/10) and “The Net Generation, Unplugged” (3/4/10), the latter of which cites a Pew Center report to suggest that the NetGeneration may be as interested in “broadcast[ing] their activism to their peers” as getting involved politically themselves via this digital medium.

Now Slate magazine has a fascinating 5-part series by Chris Wilson  on how the US used  social networks to capture Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Who was “ground zero” in the capture, one degree of separation from Saddam?  His bodyguard, known by the Allies as the “fat man.”

So the conclusion from Christakis is not only do your fat friends make you overweight (although Slate doesn’t chalk up Saddam’s chubbiness to his bodyguard), but now that overweight friends can also get you assassinated?

Flickr photo by Indigo Jones

I previously reported Current Population Survey data that showed that the youth voting turnout was up from 2004 to 2008 and that non-whites voted at record rates in 2008.  I just saw the intersection of these two trends: e.g., breakouts of voting turnout by ethnic group and then within ethnic group by age.

The bottom line is that the increase in youth turnout in 2008 was all concentrated among non-whites.  For 18-29 year old (non-hispanic) whites, voting was essentially flat; for 18-29 year old blacks, voting rates increased from 2004-2008 by 18%, for young Hispanics (18-29) by 15% and for young Asians voting rates increased by 26% in just one presidential election from 2004 to 2008!  I haven’t seen these further broken out by education but my hunch is that a disproportionate share of this may be among more well-educated non-whites, based on CIRCLE’s report on this.

For a picture of these trends (not the VTAG), click on this link. CPS Voting Turnout 2004-08 by age and ethnicity

Moreover, if one looks across age groups, one sees in general that the voting increases were much more concentrated among 18-29 year olds; blacks were the only racial group where voting turnout rates increased from 2004 to 2008 among all age cohorts.

Finally, voting turnout age gradients [VTAG] (the rate at which 65+ folks in that racial group vote relative to 18-29 year olds) closed in all racial groups other than whites.  For whites, voting rates remained some 40% higher for 65+ year olds (or a VTAG gradient of 1.4).  Among blacks, the voting turnout age gradient declined from 1.34 to 1.17 (i.e., 65+ year old blacks still are 17% more likely to vote than 18-29 year old blacks), for Hispanics the VTAG  declined from  1.61 to 1.38 and the voting turnout age gradient essentially disappeared among Asians, going from 1.41 to 1.05 from 2004 to 2008.

While these trends are certainly good news from the perspective of reducing the biases in our democratic system, they still leave a system heavily biased towards senior concerns.  If seniors are 60-80% more likely to vote than 18-29 year olds, it is little wonder that AARP has such power and that our national policies distort the benefits of what is paid out to seniors versus what is invested in younger Americans.  [Interestingly, this parallels David Willetts' intergenerational equity argument in The Pinch that I was explaining the other day.]  Of course, these voter gradients (distortions in voice) need to get to 1.0 and the groups have to be of similar size to stop these inter-generational distortions.  And among whites (who are still represent three-quarters of the voting ranks), seniors are still voting 40% more frequently than young adults.  So we still have a long way to go.

Flickr Photo by Baloozer

David Willets, British MP and advisor on community issues to the British heir apparent David Cameron, has a nice piece in the February Prospect magazine called “The Spirit of Cooperation.”

He outlines some of the arguments in his forthcoming The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took their Children’s Future—and Why They Should Give it Back, a book rich with anecdotes and interesting examples of co-operation and social evolution.

Willets’ article highlights how humans are born to cooperate (“the selfish gene”), how these instincts are usually stronger for closer relatives, how cooperation does or doesn’t occur in Prisoner’s Dilemma Games, and even how we can evolve to reciprocal altruism as seen in World War I trenches with the Christmas Truce or snipers on both side  intentionally shooting to miss.

Willetts strives to figure out how to make such reciprocity flourish: the answer to Willetts is small-scale interactions among non-state institutions, and punishing defectors and bad actors.  The role for the state, per Willetts, is “drystone walling — where individual elements are held together by an overall structure” rather than the state  trying expressly to change social behavior.  He also knocks the Left for failing to realize the importance of early childhood experiences in families in developing reciprocity.

Willetts’ major fear is that Britain will become divided by age. “In the worry about the shift of resources from the increasingly workless working class to the increasingly unleisured leisure class” (as the Economist puts it), too many resources have been devoted to what in the US we refer to as Boomers and not enough to their children.

He advocates that we should ‘nudge’ behavior, and urge this Boomer generation to treat future generations generously, the way that past generations treated them.  He uses this notion of intergenerational equity to drive policy goals of cutting the deficit, spurring more inter-generational contact, raising the age for retirement and pensions, getting Boomers to bear their share of climate change.  He even alludes, by quoting a bumper sticker, to the fact that this might ultimately help Boomers themselves: “Be nice to your kids; they choose your nursing home.”

He advocates that David Cameron’s government, through its focus on social responsibility, enforce this inter-generational contract, even if some Conservatives don’t like the concept of a social contract.

For far too many in society, their inter-generational concerns are restricted to their children and grandchildren; Willetts, falling back on Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”, argues that we owe it to future generations (regardless of whether they are related to us or not) to start from a relatively equal position.  It’s an intriguing argument, although if we owe this intergenerational equity to strangers in our own country, why don’t we owe this equity to strangers in Zimbabwe or Sudan.  Why should a starting point be more equalized for British citizens, but still have them start out hundreds of times more advantaged than children in the most destitute places on earth.

Read the Prospect’s interesting “The Spirit of Cooperation” or read the Economist’s review of Willet’s’ new book.

MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team

As many of you know, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team (part of the MIT Media Lab) won the race to locate the DARPA Red Weather Balloon Challenge.    Their system was a reverse Ponzi scheme where those finding the balloon got $2000, and those progressively farther back the invite chain in finding those people got progressively lower payouts;  the surplus got donated to charity.  (Because the payoffs were cut in 1/2 with every additional degree of separation from the balloon finder, there is no way that MIT could owe more than $4000 per balloon, even if path links to MIT were very long, and MIT assumed that many of the path lengths would be short.)

MIT team members reported that they sent out 2 million SMS messages as one of their strategies but that was a complete bust as far as finding the balloons.  Twitter and Facebook on the other hand were far more effective.  They are going to be subsequently distilling their findings on effective viral communication and sharing it at an appropriate venue.

Their victory was a victory of human connections (“social capital“) over number crunching.  A Google Team was racing them using number crunching and image recognition techniques (e.g., crawling the web in real time for images of red balloons) and had spotted 9 of the 10 balloons when the MIT Team found 10.  The MIT Team noted that the balloon finders were using Google Map to determine the coordinates of their balloon sighting (to report to the MIT team) and Google could have captured that information and used it for their own proprietary team but didn’t.

See a blog post about the basic architecture of the MIT reward structure.  DARPA’s network challenge obviously has implications for how to effectively and rapidly spread information in the event of an attack, although clearly the task here (spotting a red balloon) is infinitely easier than other possible challenges which are less observable to the the naked eye (infectious diseases or biological attacks) or actions who cause is less clear (a plane crashing for instance).

DARPA noted how the challenge explored “how broad-scope problems can be tackled using social networking tools. The Challenge explores basic research issues such as mobilization, collaboration, and trust in diverse social networking constructs and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications.”

Read more here.

Flickr Photo by Isabel Garconi

Robert Putnam and I have an Op-Ed in today’s USA Today (12/10/09) summarizing our evidence and others’ on the serious social consequences of unemployment, both to the unemployed and residents in the surrounding community.

The article also highlights research by Cristobal Young (on how most of the free time of the unemployed is spent alone) and longitudinal research by Sarah Burgard and Jennie Brand, showing that those unemployed early in their careers pay a lifelong penalty in levels of civic engagement.

Our research (with Chaeyoon Lim) focuses on how joblessness decreases civic participation, both for the unemployed and even for the employed that live in communities with high unemployment.

Read our Op-Ed “How Joblessness Hurts Us All“.  Our research with Chaeyoon Lim will be a forthcoming academic paper; details will be posted once the article is approved.

They cite Stephen Post’s work, which I have discussed earlier, but also notes a 2002 Boston College study (Paul Arnstein et al.) and a California Buck Institute for Age Research study (Doug Oman et al.).

The article discusses several studies that suggest that the causal pathway may run through lower stress and a “helper’s high”.

See the underlying article:  “In Month of Giving, a Healthy Reward” (NYT, Science Times, Tara Parker-Pope, 12/1/09)

At 18 months of age, Tomasello finds that toddlers almost universally immediately help out an adult who needs assistance because his/her arms are full.  What Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, doesn’t know if altruism is innate; 18 months is typically an age before toddlers are taught how to behave.

Not so fast.  As the Times points out: “It’s probably safe to assume that they haven’t been explicitly and directly taught to do this,” said Elizabeth Spelke, a developmental psychologist at Harvard. “On the other hand, they’ve had lots of opportunities to experience acts of helping by others. I think the jury is out on the innateness question.”

But Tomasello observes these same helping behaviors across cultures, despite the fact that they teach social behavior on different schedules and may have different beliefs about appropriate social rules.  Moreover, the helping that infants observe is not enhanced by rewards, causing Tomasello to doubt that it has been strongly reinforced.

In some cases Tomasello observes helping behavior with regard to information in infants 12 months old, and even chimpanzees under certain conditions exhibit helping behavior at a young age.

More specifically related to “social capital”, Tomasello finds that age 3, children become less indiscriminately helpful and are more likely to reciprocate earlier helpful behavior from another person.  In addition, they start to develop social norms, like the reciprocity at the heart of social capital.  Parents can help foster these norms through “inductive parenting”, helping children to learn the consequences of their actions.

As the Times points out:  “The basic sociability of human nature does not mean, of course, that people are nice to each other all the time. Social structure requires that things be done to maintain it, some of which involve negative attitudes toward others. The instinct for enforcing norms is powerful, as is the instinct for fairness. Experiments have shown that people will reject unfair distributions of money even it means they receive nothing.” [See discussion of dictator games and ultimatum games in this blog post.]

Read the very interesting article “We May Be Born With An Urge To Help” (NYT, Nicholas Wade, 12/1/09) about how humans try to sort out whether to behave selfishly or altruistically.