Prosociality: Charting the Course for Cultural Evolution
Let’s be bold. As young people perceive the world around them, they bear witness to environmental catastrophe, economic and social insecurity, and a mental health crisis that is on the rise among the 10–24-year-old demographic, with suicide rates increasing 50% among Black youth in 2020, and attempts increasing 73% between 1991–2017.
Research shows that high levels of stress tend to trigger anti-social self-interest. Chronic states of economic stress exacerbate a culture of racism, mistrust, hostility, and political division.
As we navigate the stormy waters of how increasing economic insecurity impacts students’ lives, 2020 has offered a critical opportunity to chart a new course.
How might we chart a course for cultural evolution? What would the North Star of Human Potential look like, and what role does Education play as the compass to help society navigate the journey?
On the path of cultural evolution, mental health intersects with economics. The economic assumptions that underpin our economy actually communicate and exacerbate a culture of antisocial self-interest.
But even Adam Smith wrote about empathy and self-interest as being equal in human nature. Humanity has survived and thrived because of both our diversity and our prosocial ability to cooperate. As social beings, it has always been in our best interest to cooperate with others. Our better selves thrive when we can cultivate and celebrate our uniqueness as integral to the cultural tapestry. This inclusivity creates a sense of belonging that we all crave and want for our children. We want a prosocial culture, and we want prosocial schools.
Research shows that fundamental economic assumptions of scarcity and self-interest perpetuate anti-social behaviors and a mental health crisis. In 2019, 70% of teens reported that anxiety and depression were major concerns among their peers. According to my high school students this year, that number is closer to 100%.
As an economics teacher, everything is economics. Our cultural paradigm and worldviews about what wealth is, how to get it, and who deserves it, are all deeply ingrained in our understanding of who we are.
And who we are is too often informed by stress and trauma. Trauma impacts how we perceive, and how we perceive influences how we understand and navigate the territory. The territory includes the cardinal directions and topography. The cardinal directions are defined by where we want to go and where we don't want to go. The topography consists of our tumultuous historia-economic cultural context, with earthquakes of environmental catastrophe, economic and social insecurity, and a mental health crisis.
Multiple research studies reveal that economics education perpetuates anti-social self-interest (aka selfishness and greed). How can seeing ourselves as continuously in an antagonistic position with other life forms not be harmful to our mental health? Furthermore, economics curriculum and practice is rife with false assumptions (scarcity), contradictions (it is patriotic to both spend and save), and design flaws (issuing money as interest-bearing loans at the top of a very tall pyramid skews the great free market experiment). All of this creates cognitive dissonance, another cause of stress, depression, anxiety, anger, and psychosis.
Let us not waste time. Rather, with increasing overlapping crisis of mental illness, poverty, enmity, and environmental collapse, it is prime time to re-imagine an economics curriculum that cultivates prosocial skills like compassion, curiosity, intellectual humility, and a sense of coherence.
Humanity has survived and thrived because of our ability to exhibit cooperative, prosocial behaviors. In 1776, Adam Smith pointed toward the ability of our inherent self-interest to benefit society at large. Yet, the conclusion of self-interest being primary to human nature merely rationalizes our economic system. Economics is not neutral. The same self-interested tendencies that created the systems in place are further accentuated by it.
When we change the context, we change our brains.
As the research of neuro-economist Paul Zak tells us: happy brains, well-fed by oxytocin, tend to be more generous. And generosity triggers oxytocin release.
Design for virtuous cycles.
