Altruism in Sports – Strength Fest 2009

This past week I had the very enjoyable assignment of creating a short video of a four event strongman contest. The event was called Strength Fest 2009 and was held to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Iron Sport Gym which caters to athletes who compete in Strongman and Highland Games competitions. I thought that the readers of DI might find this video generally interesting but, more than that, I wanted to point out an aspect of the sport that I find fascinating, refreshing and which reminded me of a recent post here at Dangerous Intersection. One of the things that always strikes me about strongman competitions is the camaraderie. We are all familiar with teammates supporting each other, but in this case I am speaking about the camaraderie between rivals. Starting at around 2:15 watch how the competitors try to inspire one athlete to complete his lift, going so far as to slap him in the face to help him get motivated! (Watch carefully, he asks for it!)

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New scientific center to study altruism

Consider the mission statement of CCare:

[T]he Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, is an innovative initiative of the Stanford School of Medicine within the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences that will employ the highest standards of scientific inquiry to investigate compassion and altruism.

The Center will draw on many disciplines (including psychology, neuroscience, economics and contemplative traditions, including Buddhism) in order to

To explore ways in which compassion and altruism can be cultivated within an individual as well as within the society on the basis of testable cognitive and affective training exercises.

The center will be run by James Doty, a physician who is also a professor of neuroscience at Stanford. According to a recent article in Science (April 24, 2009, p. 458), the Dalai Lama provided $150,000 of the start-up funding. Unknown to many, the Dalai Lama has long has a keen interest in cognitive science. According to the article in Science, the aim of the Center seems to be finding that part of at least one religious tradition that actually works to make people compassionate:

[t]o take a centuries-old religious practice and extract from it a set of mental exercises with no religious overtones that can be scientifically proven to change the way people treat each other.

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Inequity aversion in monkeys.

Frans de Waal was recently interviewed by Stephen J. Dubner in the Freakonomics blog of the NYT. Dubner co-authored Freakonomics with Steven D. Levitt. De Waal and Dubner discussed the ramifications of an experiment where capuchin monkeys received either a grape or a piece of cucumber in return for a…

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