[GiftEconomy] The secret Santa who pays it forward

[Kellia Ramares]

Lynne McTaggert's blog
http://www.theintentionexperiment.com/the-secret-santa-who-pays-it-forward.htm

December 23rd, 2010 by admin · 25
Comments<http://www.theintentionexperiment.com/the-secret-santa-who-pays-it-forward.htm#comments>

Marie, an employee of a software company, had an epiphany one day at her
company’s vending machine.  She decided that every time she came for her
afternoon Coke, she’d leave money in the machine for the next person, with a
note and a card: *Your can of Coke has been paid for.  Take this Smile card
and pay it forward*.

>From the moment Marie began her campaign, frantic emails began circulating
around the office in an attempt to pinpoint the identity of the company’s
secret Santa. A Neighborhood Watch scheme was set up with two or three
employees on constant lookout.  At this point, Marie decided that it was
time to escalate operations.  She moved to another floor, where she
surreptitiously left a daily supply of donuts. For months everyone was
talking about it.  It completely changed the conversation. More important,
though, it entirely changed the atmosphere of her office.

“When generosity is the basic social capital, you see things from a broader
perspective,” says Nipun Mehta, who runs CharityFocus and distributes Smile
cards. “You come from a different place of openness. You’re more likely to
see multiple views. It deepens trust. The cup of gratitude overflows, and
turns into action in so many ways.”

*Social contagion
*Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Harvard who specializes in networks,
recently discovered a pay-it-forward phenomenon in communities.  The
participants were randomly assigned to a sequence of different groups in
order to play a series of one-shot games with strangers in which people
could decide how much to put into a public ‘pool’ of money.

This enabled Christakis and his partner, James Fowler, to draw up networks
of interactions, so that they could explore exactly how the behavior spreads
from person to person along the chain.  They discovered a scientific
demonstration of what Marie carried out:  giving creates a contagion of
giving, a network of “pay-it-forward” altruism. The actions of participants
affected the future interactions of other people along the network.

“If Tom is kind to Harry, Harry will be kind to Susan, Susan will be kind to
Jane, and Jane will be kind to Peter,” writes Christakis. “So, Tom’s
kindness to Harry is seen in Jane’s kindness to Peter, even though Jane and
Peter had nothing to do with Tom and Harry and never interacted with them.”

*Three degrees
*All it took was one act of kindness and generosity to spread through
multiple periods of play and up to three degrees along the network. “Each
additional contribution a person made to the public pot in the first period
of play is tripled over the course of the experiment by other people who are
directly or indirectly influenced to contribute more as a consequence,”
Christakis and Fowler write.

So, for every act of kindness or generosity you do for a friend, he or she
pays it forward to their friends and their friends’ friends and their
friends’ friends’ friends.

Christakis has proven that which Marie had instinctively figured out:
kindness and generosity create a cascade of cooperative behavior, even in
the most hardened of hearts.

*All in the small
*As Mehta says, don’t think in terms of big donations, but just the smallest
things that you can do in the here and now.  May you pay it forward in tiny
acts of kindness this holiday season and watch them spread throughout the
world.


-- 
Kellia Ramares
Oakland, CA
Kickstarter Page http://kck.st/btAWg6
Web Site : http://endmoney.info/
Facebook: TheEndOfMoney
Twitter: EndofMoney

Why must we pay to live on a planet we're born on?
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