We’ve got big news! The Good Men Project Magazine will be moving its offices to the summit of Mount Everest.
Or, at least, we should be.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina have found that most people link height with goodness. And with that, they tend to be more virtuous the higher up they are.
According to David A. Schroeder of Scientific American:
In a series of four different studies, the authors found consistent support for their predictions. In the first study they found that twice as many mall shoppers who had just ridden an up escalator contributed to the Salvation Army than shoppers who had just ridden the down escalator. In a second study, participants who had been taken up a short flight of stairs to an auditorium stage to complete a series of questionnaires volunteered more than 50 percent more of their time than participants who had been led down to the orchestra pit.
A third study took yet another approach. Participants were to decide how much hot sauce to give to a participant purportedly taking part in a food-tasting study. Those who were up on the stage gave only half as much of the painfully hot sauce to the other person as did those who were sitting down in the orchestra pit.
In a final study, participants watched film clips of scenes taken from an airplane above the clouds, or through the window of a passenger car. Participants who had watched the clip of flying up above the clouds were 50 percent more cooperative in a computer game than those who had watched the car ride down on the ground.
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Schroeder then goes on to explain how the study reveals that when we make decisions about whether or not to help others, it’s not as simple as doing what we think is good or bad. So many other subconscious factors come into play.
Can we try to control these factors to, basically, make everyone a better person? Schroeder suggests that we might be able to, but he doesn’t get into specifics.
The idea of trying to control subconscious thoughts scares me. If we control something, is it even subconscious anymore? What if we just eradicated all of our subconscious thoughts? Can that even happen?
My head hurts.
—Photo Rupert Taylor-Price/Flickr
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