Good or evil deeds spur ‘superpowers’

Experiments show impact on willpower, physical strength

The mere act of kindness, or one of evil, can boost willpower and physical strength, a new study suggests.

The results, based on three experiments, show that those who performed good deeds, or envisioned themselves acting charitably, were able to hold a weight or squeeze a hand grip significantly longer than those who didn't perform or think about such deeds.

But evil acts appeared to confer similar and perhaps even greater superpowers. 

"When you think of superheroes or super villains, [you think of people] that can possess huge amounts of willpower and are relatively unfazed by pain," said study researcher Kurt Gray, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "And because of your stereotype of heroes and villains, you kind of embody that, or transform yourself into your perception of hero and villain," when you perform good or evil acts , he said.

Weight lifting
In one experiment, 91 volunteers were asked to hold a five-pound (about 2.3-kilogram) weight for as long as they could, and then given $1 for their efforts. About half were asked if they would like to donate their dollar to the United Nations International Children's Fund, or UNICEF. Everyone in this group agreed to donate, while those not asked of course didn't donate.

All participants were then asked to hold the weight a second time. Those who had donated to charity were able to hold the weight for an average of 53 seconds, or 7 seconds longer than those who did not donate.

In a second experiment with 151 volunteers, participants held the weight while they wrote a fictional story featuring themselves either helping, harming or not causing impact on another person.

Those who wrote about helping someone were able to hold the weight 5 seconds longer than those who wrote about a neutral interaction. Envisioning evil acts seemed to confer even more strength — those who thought about harming someone else held the weight about 8 seconds longer.

The boost in strength from evil might be because participants who thought about hurting someone needed to first conquer their conscience telling them that evil is wrong.

"Evildoers have more [agency], because they need to overcome the voice of their conscience to harm others. It takes even more agency to harm those around you," Gray said. Agency refers to the ability to have self-control, tenacity or strength.

Boosting willpowerThe findings might have implications for all areas of life in which strength or willpower is needed, Gray said.

"This suggests that the way to get more willpower is to just do good or evil, hopefully good," Gray told LiveScience. "So if you want to diet better , maybe do good before you try to avoid that dessert."

 

The rise of the web's digital elites

Ahead of a major series on the BBC about the impact of the web, presenter, social scientist and journalist Aleks Krotoski asks whether the web has already missed its greatest chance.

The web is an extraordinary innovation, with the greatest potential to usher in social change since the invention of the printing press or the steam engine.

Built upon a technology that is apolitical, unregulated and decentralised, it empowers everyone - men, women, children - to be creators of information, rather than passive consumers.

It is also an enormous library of global consciousness, a digital collection of human knowledge from the past and the present and presented in an easy-to-access format.

As a result, we now have the unprecedented power to create our own truth, and share it with everyone in the world. It has ushered in an equality of access that we have never seen before.

But has its potential as a great leveller for the whole world already passed?

'Utopian society'

Twenty years ago, the web was colonised by a group of early adopters who believed that the ideal society was equal - every person had a right to get involved, there should be no hierarchy, and rules would be mutually determined for the common good.

People like American writer Stewart Brand, critic Howard Rheingold, and the Grateful Dead's John Perry Barlow believed the sanctity of the individual was superior to that of the nation state, and that contact with people from across the globe would be enough to solve the world's ills.

Howard Rheingold was an early adopter of the web

These people, many of whom we tracked down for the series in the idealistic haven of San Francisco, had spent more than a decade playing around with alternative, non-physical communities in cyberspace on the proto-internet.

The early communities they established, like the online forum the Well had parallels with other Free Towns in the "real" world, many of which had suffered when the reality of poorly-defined regulations degenerated into exploitation and lawlessness.

But the idealistic web pioneers maintained that the new digital frontier would provide a fertile, intellectual ground on which to create a freer, utopian society.

But as we found as we were speaking to many of these pioneers, history has had a different plan for the web.

The pioneers' loose approach to social behaviour online has clashed with the essential features of our nature - our desire to take control, to own and to profit.

Implicit inequalities emerged early, but once the Web became a space for commercial gain in the mid-1990s and its population exploded, being at the top of the pile - translated as holding the first position in Google's search results - became the benchmark for offline financial returns.

The exponential increase in content on the web during the late 1990s and throughout the last decade has meant that reliable, trustworthy and credible information is increasingly difficult to pin down.

Net hope

At an individual level, we rely on friends and family for what to trust and what to believe, but we also look to experts and other people with high social status to point us in the right direction.

Tim Berners-Lee on the road in Ghana

Jimmy Wales, founder of the online-user generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia, admits that despite being the current poster child of information levelling, Wikipedia has explicit hierarchies that determine whose knowledge is more worthy than others'.

It seems that, for all its talk as a great leveller, the web is as unequal as we are.

Indeed, what we social scientists are discovering when we observe the web as a platform of social interaction is that, despite the medium, human beings seek hierarchies to help us make sense of our world.

It turns out that this is as relevant online as offline. After all, we can only bring to this digital tabula rasa what we already know and what we have gained from our existing experiences.

Despite this, people like former US Vice-President Al Gore is an online optimist.

When we spoke with him, he insisted that the global nature of the world wide web has the potential to change this, as different societies bring their different perspectives to bear on the web community.

Human medium

Indeed, when I joined the inventor of the web - Tim Berner's Lee - in Ghana as he was travelling to remote villages to try to understand what could happen when the African continent, parts of which have only recently been physically connected to the rest of the web with high-speed broadband access, makes its contribution to the international dialogue.

The author believes the web is a reflection of humanity

However, what I realised on this trip is that the imprint that most people in the African states will develop in their first experiences of the web will be based on what non-Africans have created.

Our two decades of shaping this maturing technology his has led us to a tool that has been crafted in our image.

When the Virtual Revolution team went to Abiriw, a rural village in the mountains outside Ghana's capital Accra, I was struck by how the kids in the local community centre used the web - they saw the world of information through the window of Google.

The search engine works on a principle of the "madness" or "wisdom" of crowds, basing its results on which websites receive the most links to their pages.

The majority of the crowd to date has been non-Africans, and so the window that these kids are using for information is non-African. What kind of dogma does that transmit?

And how does this reinforce the inequalities that exist between the developed and the developing world?

Ultimately, the web is a reflection of humanity, not a humanity-changer. We bring to it all of our other human foibles, warts and all.

Arctic polar bears imperilled by man-made pollution

The long term survival of polar bears is being threatened by man-made pollution that is reaching the Arctic.

This conclusion comes from a major review of research into how industrial chemicals such as mercury and organochlorines affect the bears.

The review suggests that such chemicals have a range of subclinical effects.

When added together, these can have a dramatic and potentially fatal impact on the bears' bones, organs and reproductive and immune systems.

The review, an analysis of more than a decade's research into the effect of pollution on bears, is published in the journal Environment International.

A range of man-made pollutants reach the polar Arctic region, carried there in the air and water.

These include toxic metals such as mercury, organohalogen contaminants (OHCs) including organochlorines, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and perflourinated compounds (PFCs), which are used industrially in insulating fluids, as coolants, in foams and electronics and as pest control agents.

Such chemicals are often fat-soluble and accumulate in the fat of many animals, which are then eaten by top predators such as polar bears.

These top predators are then exposed to increasingly concentrated levels of toxins.

But the impact of these toxins on polar bears has been difficult to measure, with the only previous studies done by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme in 1998 and 2004.

That is party because it is logistically difficult to take many and repeated samples of blood or tissue from live polar bears.

Also, only free-ranging healthy animals that are not clinically sick tend to be sampled, making the overall population appear to be healthier than it already is.

ILL EFFECTS Shrinking sexual ability: studies have found correlations between levels of OHCs and smaller and deformed sexual organs in male and female bears Overactive organs: organochlorines increase the activity of liver enzymes, while mercury boosts stress hormones in the blood Mercury damages the bears' nervous systems PCB exposure may lead to decreases in bone mass density

So veterinary scientist and polar bear expert Dr Christian Sonne, of the Department of Arctic Environment at Aarhus University in Denmark, conducted the first review of all pertinent research on the health effects of such contaminants on polar bears.

Previously, Dr Sonne was part of a team of researchers which found that "stress" linked to pollutants and shrinking sea ice appeared to be shrinking polar bears.

His new analysis includes the results of more than 200 organ and skull tissue samples taken from 80 bears in East Greenland between 1999 and 2009, as well as repeated measurements and observations of bears living in the Svalbard archipelago, Norway.

These studies reveal a number of ill-effects associated with industrial pollutants.

However, such studies can only show that contaminant levels are correlated with ill-effects, not that they cause them.

Bears and dogs

So Dr Sonne investigated the direct impacts of Arctic pollutants on two other top predators living in the region, Norwegian Arctic foxes and Greenland sledge dogs.

In 2003, researchers started a two-year study in which they fed Arctic foxes clean or contaminated whale blubber. One fox of a pair of brothers was fed clean food as a control, while the other brother ate contaminated food.

Having eliminated all other influences, such as gender and age, the researchers showed that foxes exposed to environmental levels of pollutants do suffer harmful effects.

For example, PCBs trigger decreases in bone density and damage the liver, mercury and organochlorines cause renal lesions, while OHCs alter the amount of vitamins circulating in the blood.

Similar effects were found in comparable studies on Greenland sledgedogs.

The maximum sea ice extent is declining by about 2.7% per decade

"Polar bear studies are correlative, but that is not conclusive as being 'cause and effect'," explains Dr Sonne.

"So including dogs and foxes as model species is important [because] you use species that are much like polar bears, and the species were exposed to similar food items as polar bears."

The impact on the bears is likely to be greater even than those effects which show up in studies.

"It is really important to understand that all organ systems are tied together," says Dr Sonne.

So individual pollutants may only have subtle, non-clinical effects on particular parts of a bear's body.

But in concert, the overall impact can be devastating, reducing an individual bear's ability to hunt, reproduce and resist disease.

"After being very sceptical, I now feel that the impact on bears may be true," says Dr Sonne.

Climatic impact

He also concludes that climate change will exacerbate the impact of pollutants on the bears.

As the level of sea ice declines with warming temperatures, polar bears are fasting for longer.

That may mean they eat fewer seals and therefore less pollutants overall.

But they will have to burn fat to compensate.

That will release greater concentrations of toxins from their fat stores into their blood, says Dr Sonne.

This will cause further illness, weakening bears that will already be in poorer condition and may be exposed to new and more virulent pathogens capable of surviving in a warmer Arctic.

Dr Sonne's research is published a week after another separate study published in the journal Arctic showed that polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean are occurring more frequently on land and open water, and less on the ice.