Marriage and Community Ties | This is Your Brain on Empathy - 5/28/07

[Smartmarriages]

- THE MARRIAGE PENALTY
- IF IT FEELS GOOD TO BE GOOD. . .

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Two articles today in the Washington Post give a hint of what Scott Stanley
will present in his "Paradox of Sacrifice" research keynote Fri, June 29 in
Denver.   Interesting that these 'unrelated' articles (on different pages of
the paper with no reference of one to the other) were both written by the
same guy, Shankar Vedantam.  Maybe we should invite him to share the podium
with Scott! Also interesting that the Washington Post editors felt the
articles were so important they placed one on the front page, the other on
page 3.   -diane 

- THE MARRIAGE PENALTY
The Marriage Penalty
The Washington Post
By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, May 28, 2007; pg A03

((This article is all the more interesting when you realize Scott's
alternate keynote title was "We, We, We, All the Way Home - Alone,
Together". Much to ponder. - diane))

It's almost June, which means we should soon start to hear the peal of
wedding bells.

As all those happy couples with June weddings bid adieu to well-wishers and
set off on a honeymoon, consider this: The honeymoon is a relatively recent
invention, dating back to only the 19th century. Before that, couples were
not supposed to go off on their own to celebrate -- and marriage was not
primarily about a private relationship between two people.

Marriage, in fact, used to be an institution that sought to extend community
ties. From princes and princesses in Europe who married each other to
matches arranged between the less well-off, marriage was largely about
broadening one's network of allies, friends and benefactors.

Not anymore. Modern marriage, sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia
Sarkisian have shown, is really about two people setting themselves apart --
not just from the larger community, but from other relatives, including
parents and siblings. The sociologists are not talking just about the
starry-eyed couples of June, who have eyes and attention only for each
other, but also married couples generally.

Contrary to the received wisdom of Republicans and Democrats and virtually
every authority in the country who views marriage as the linchpin of social
and community ties, Gerstel and Sarkisian have found that marriage actually
tends to reduce community ties.

"Marriage and community are often at odds with one another," the
sociologists said in a recent article in the journal Contexts. "Instead of
bolstering community involvement, marriage diminishes ties to relatives,
neighbors and friends."

Married people are less likely than the unmarried and the divorced to live
with, visit, call or write relatives, according to data drawn from two
national surveys: the 2004 General Social Survey and the 1992-94 National
Survey of Families and Households.

The difference is especially large for heterosexual married men, who are
likely to rely on their wives to stay in touch with even their own
relatives.

The divorced appear to have stronger community ties than people who stay
married, but have weaker ties than those who never married -- suggesting
that marriage, even after it dissolves, still has the residual effect of
reducing ties to relatives and the broader community.

Those who never marry, the sociologists found, are more than twice as likely
as married people to socialize with friends, and are also more likely than
married couples to socialize with neighbors, and to provide emotional
support and practical help to friends and neighbors.

Married couples with small children are something of an exception. These
couples tend to reach out for help to extended kin, friends and neighbors,
thereby enmeshing themselves in reciprocal networks of friendship and
obligation that have long underpinned community ties. However, in terms of
spending time with friends and neighbors, Sarkisian said, these couples face
the same "marriage penalty" as childless couples.

Gerstel, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Sarkisian, at
Boston College, are not bashing marriage; they are not advocating that
people should not marry. But they are all for de-romanticizing marriage;
like any institution, they say, it comes with advantages and disadvantages.
And they argue that society should rediscover the importance of community
ties -- the current societal expectation that a spouse can provide all the
emotional sustenance a person needs is bad not just for people's ties with
community, but for marriage itself.

"We perceive independence as being key, but humans have so many stages in
our life where we are not independent, and our dependence on others should
be nurtured," Sarkisian said.

Some preindustrial societies actively discouraged couples who sought to go
off on their own. Some institutions in Western countries, the sociologists
added, still see marriage ties as inimical to a person's commitment and
involvement to society as a whole -- a good example being the Catholic
Church's requirement that priests and nuns be celibate.

One of the benefits of modern marriage -- its tendency to make people
financially better off -- may be partly behind the phenomenon that Gerstel
and Sarkisian describe. Community ties have historically been about
interdependent relationships; as nuclear families have become more
independent, they have less need for others, and thereby feel less obligated
as well.

Marriage does seem to increase some aspects of community participation -- it
prompts men, for example, to become more involved in religious activities.
But marriage also reduces political involvement -- single women, especially,
are far more likely than married women to "attend political meetings or
rallies, sign petitions and raise money for political causes," the
sociologists found.

Sarkisian and Gerstel believe that de-romanticizing marriage might provide a
caution to gays and lesbians who seek equal rights to marriage as
heterosexuals. "Gays and lesbians," they wrote, "once noted for their
vibrant culture and community life, may find themselves behind picket fences
with fewer friends dropping by."

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- IF IT FEELS GOOD TO BE GOOD. . .

If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 28, 2007

> The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of
> morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously --
> what another creature is going through was an important leap in the evolution
> of social behavior.  (Like even a spouse??-diane)

The e-mail came from the next room.

"You gotta see this!" Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman,
neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the
brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving
either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.

As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at
each other. Grafman was thinking, "Whoa -- wait a minute!"

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of
others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the
brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the
experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic
selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support
to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who
said, "For it is in giving that we receive." But it is also a dramatic
example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions
about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to
study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results -- many of
them published just in recent months -- are showing, unexpectedly, that many
aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the
result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

What the new research is showing is that morality has biological roots --
such as the reward center in the brain that lit up in Grafman's experiment
-- that have been around for a very long time.

The more researchers learn, the more it appears that the foundation of
morality is empathy. Being able to recognize -- even experience vicariously
-- what another creature is going through was an important leap in the
evolution of social behavior. And it is only a short step from this
awareness to many human notions of right and wrong, says Jean Decety, a
neuroscientist at the University of Chicago.

For the full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701
056.html


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