Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
Almost everyone has heard of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would want done to you.” But not everyone has heard about the Platinum Rule: “Do unto others as they would want done to them.” Because most people tend to follow one rule over the other in trying to live a good life and because I believe we need more “Compassionate Achievers” in the world, I cannot help but wonder: Which rule is better at building compassion? Or to frame it in a more personal way: Who is a more compassionate person…someone who follows the Golden or Platinum Rule? A Platinum Person, I believe, has the compassionate edge for at least three reasons:
(1) Compassion is partially about understanding another’s problem and suffering (the other part of compassion is taking action to address the problem or suffering). The edge in understanding definitely goes to the followers of the Platinum Rule because of their requirement to learn about another’s values and/or cultural background before acting. Before you act in the Platinum Rule, you first seek to understand the values and cultural differences that may be at the heart of what another needs. There is no need for seeking to understand another’s values in the Golden Rule (you do what YOU would want done to YOU) and that leads directly to its second weakness in its compassion comparison with the Platinum Rule.
(2) The Golden Rule is ‘self-centric’ while the Platinum Rule is ‘other-centric’ and compassion is all about the other. The Platinum Rule is learning about “the other” and doing for them what “they would want done to them” based on their unique values and tastes. You can’t get too more focused on the other! As George Bernard Shaw said: “Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.” In contrast, followers of the Golden Rule don’t require any learning about another’s “wants” or tastes because their actions are based entirely on their own perception of how to solve a problem.
(3) The Golden Rule is dogmatic; it never questions the source of how to act—the follower’s own beliefs. E. E. Cummings was right when he wrote “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” While actions based on the Platinum Rule are born of a question (i.e., what would another want done to them?) and therefore makes the people who follow it more open minded, actions based on the former rule are exclusively born out of the follower’s own beliefs thereby making them, in essence, Golden Rulers (they never question the source of their actions).
My hope in writing this piece is that we engage with each other more often and deeply about how to live a life that is good. With our society’s growing levels of incivility and distrust over the last couple of years, we could use a few more discussions and debates about how to live a good life.
Although I believe that a Platinum Person has the edge when it comes to compassion, we could take Occam’s Razor to both rules and make a more direct and simple edict…the Emerald Edict: Do unto others compassion.
I gave two talks this month to two different sets of educators about the role that compassion can play in increasing student learning at any academic level. One set of educators were college professors and staff in Michigan and the other set included K-12 teachers, social workers, school psychologists, and administrators in Rhode Island. While our conversations in both groups focused on how compassion builds successful learning environments for our students, we also discussed the importance that compassion has in building a positive and productive workplace culture for ourselves and our colleagues. Earlier this year, I was interviewed by the host of “Making Positive Psychology Work Podcast” and Psychology Today correspondent Michelle McQuaid specifically about the connection between workplace success and compassion. With many of us ending our summer vacations and heading back to work, I thought it was an appropriate time to share Michelle’s piece in Psychology Today as well as the link to our podcast interview:
Posted Apr 19, 2018
Do you ever wonder if being too kind could be holding you back from success? Let’s face it: It’s a competitive ‘survival of the fittest’ world. So, could being too understanding and considerate of others leave you standing at the bottom of the career ladder watching others climb to the top?
“Success is often associated with the individualistic idea of only looking out for number one,” explained Chris Kukk, Professor of Political Science and Social Science at Western Connecticut State University and author of The Compassionate Achiever, when I interviewed him recently. “However, even Darwin suggested that the most efficient and effective species have the highest number of sympathetic members.”
Chris suggests that rather than compassion standing in the way, it can actually fuel your success. For example, a number of studies have found that compassion not only helps to build your resilience and improve your physical health, but it’s also a consistent characteristic of successful and resilient people. As a result when your organization has a compassionate culture you’re more likely to be engaged, be innovative, collaborate with others, and perform at your best.
Chris also points out that while compassion is often confused with empathy, they’re not the same neurologically or practically. For example, when you experience empathy, you understand what the other person is feeling, so if they’re upset or down, you feel sad, and this triggers the same neuralpathways as if you are in pain. Unfortunately, over time this can drain your energy and motivation. On the other hand, when you show compassion, you experience feelings of warmth, concern, and care for other’s suffering, and you’re motivated to take action to solve their problems or improve their wellbeing. This triggers the release of the same types of chemicals that come with feelings of love – oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, that can help you feel optimistic, positive, and primed for achievement.
“You can think of compassion as the Cadillac version of kindness,” explained Chris. “And it can power you along to achieving a life you’re proud of, much more effectively than any short-lived bursts of energy you may get from other motivators of success such as power or money.”
How can you develop more compassion at work?
Chris has developed a four-step program for cultivating compassion. This is represented by the acronym L-U-C-A: Listen to learn; Understand to know; Connect to capabilities; and Act to solve.
What can you do to nurture more compassion in your workplace?
Click here for the original Psychology Today article.
Click here for the “Making Positive Psychology Work Podcast” interview.
The Compassionate Achiever
at the MxCC Commencement
This is not only the first blog post in quite awhile but it’s also my first blog post featuring a video. I was asked to provide the commencement address at the fifty-first graduation ceremony of Middlesex Community College in Middletown, Connecticut this past May and the only requirement was that I focus the talk on The Compassionate Achiever. Here is the talk (less than 10 minutes):
Book Review of The Compassionate Achiever
by Sandra Bourland
“Compassion grows when we talk less and listen more.”
Talk about a wake up call. When I began reading the book I was worried that I wouldn’t find it interesting. I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a fan of non fiction books, self help etc. I find them boring, I find the material dry and I lose interest pretty fast.
But that one sentence above stopped me dead in my tracks. Funny enough I was watching an episode of Dr Phil where he told one of his guests, that if you immediately reply to someone, or cut them off while they’re speaking, then you weren’t listening at all, you weren’t even trying to understand what they were saying because you were too busy formulating a response to them.
GUILTY!!!!
Not of doing it all the time, but there have certainly been many instances where I acted this exact way.
The Compassionate Achiever goes right to the core of the issue, it provides practical ways in which we can learn to be compassionate even when we’re not in a compassionate state of mind. The author calls it “taking a WIRL (walk, imagine, read and listen).” Boy did that smack me right in the face.
I couldn’t put the book down because I realized that I learned so much about the way I interact with family and friends, what I’m doing right, what I’m doing wrong, and what I can learn to do better. Life would be so much easier if we all became more compassionate towards others, and to do that we have to reach inside ourselves and start with US.
What a wonderful concept. I can’t wait to implement some of these ideas into my own life and see how it changes everything around me 🙂
Original review can be found at the Diary of a Stay at Home Mom.
The Battleship of Compassion: Remembering the U.S.S. Missouri & American Strength
What would you do if you found the body of the failed suicide bomber who tried to kill you and your coworkers? Would you treat the remains with respect and compassion or with revulsion and contempt? Such questions were not hypothetical for the World War II crew of the U.S.S. Missouri and their battle-tested answers have almost been forgotten.
The kamikaze who crashed into compassion. During the Battle of Okinawa on April 11, 1945 the war literally crashed onto the Missouri’s deck in the form of a kamikaze piloted plane. Although the pilot successfully hit his target (only 11-14% of kamikaze pilots did during WWII), the 500-pound bomb his plane was carrying fell into the water just before his suicidal crash. With nearly 400 American ships being hit by kamikaze attacks during the war, the Missouri’s experience wasn’t too unique or unusual.
What made the experience historically special were the crew’s actions, under the leadership of Captain William Callaghan, after finding the body of the Japanese pilot as they were cleaning up the wreckage off their main deck: they gave him a full honor guard burial at sea. Not only did the ship’s doctors stitch and cleanup the body but several crew members stayed up all night sewing a Japanese flag so that he would be shrouded properly. On the morning of April 12, 1965, a 6-man burial detail carried the flag-draped pilot’s body to the rail near where he crashed his plane, a Marine honor guard fired a three-rifle volley salute over him, “Taps” was played by a lone bugler, and as his body was “commended to the deep” the crew stood at attention and hand-saluted him one last time. War brings out the worst in humanity but Captain Callaghan and the crew of the Missouri showed that even in the worst of times compassion and respect are signs of strength and honor.
Dead men walking to peace. The Missouri, also known as “Mighty Mo,” was destined for compassion at the end of the war as well. The surrender of Imperial Japan occurred on the Missouri when their country’s representatives signed the Instrument of Surrender, which finally brought peace between the two nations on September 2, 1945. A unique twist of compassion regarding the ceremony was that the Japanese dignitaries thought that they were never coming back alive from the Missouri and participated in their own funerals with their families just days before: since Imperial Japan instigated the war with America by attacking Pearl Harbor, the Japanese delegates thought that they would be executed for the transgressions of their country. But when General Douglas MacArthur said the following words during his speech, they knew they would see their families again:
“Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve…It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man…”
Where the Japanese believed there would be revenge, the Mighty Mo once again became the stage of American compassion.
We are often told that some of the main lessons of war are that man’s brutality knows no limits and humanity’s drive for self-preservation is our strongest motivation, but there are other—and arguably more important—lessons to learn such as compassion and brotherhood that should never be forgotten. The men of the U.S.S. Missouri were not only destined for but also captained by compassion during World War II. The Missouri’s compassion goes against the idea that you can only have empathy for the people of your own family, tribe or country. Her sailors were American heroes whose compassion took them to new levels of patriotism…they became patriots of humanity. On this Memorial Day, let’s remember the warriors who made compassion a sign and symbol of strength. For a hero is not only made by the life they may have sacrificed but by the life they chose to lead.
Every society has certain books that help define—in broad terms—their cultural identity. Some include holy books such as “The Koran” and/or epic stories such as “The Odyssey” and American society is no different. The United States has a holy book (“The Bible”), a secular book (“On the Origin of Species”), and a founding document (“The Constitution”) that altogether help define American culture. One problem (other than the fact that some will inevitably disagree with my book/document choices) is that we misread important sections of each work in ways that demean others thereby weakening ourselves.
The Good Book—The standard way of reading the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and the way I was taught in Sunday school, has been that Eve was subservient to Adam because she was made from one of his ribs (the “Second Story of Creation” in Genesis 2:21-23). This gets translated into a large segment of American society believing that men are ‘first and foremost’ relative to women not only in the eyes of God but also in the daily lives that we lead. This erroneous translation has had negative practical effects (i.e., women get paid only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men) and horrific consequences: one study calculated that the number of women killed by a male partner between 2001 and 2012 was “nearly double” the number of American soldiers lost during the same time period in both Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s a misreading of “The Good Book” because it emphasizes the “Second Story” over the “First Story of Creation” where it shows that Adam and Eve were created simultaneously on equal ground (Genesis 1:26-28). “The Bible,” like many holy books, is filled with contradictory stories but shouldn’t we emphasize the stories that promote respect and compassion for one another instead of those that appear to highlight the judging and subservience of others?
The Survival Guide—In the late 19th Century there was, as Randall Fuller spotlights in the title of his new manuscript, a “Book that Changed America.” It was Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” By the early 20th Century, according to Fuller, “Darwinian theory had become an indisputable aspect of American cultural life…it provided an ordering principle for a society that seemed to grow more complex each year.” We translate Darwin’s hypothesis into American society by emphasizing self-interest over all else and by following euphemisms such as “if you want to be number one, you have to look out for number one.” The irony is that Darwin did not only NOT coin the term “survival of the fittest” but he argued against the idea in research he later conducted to try and prove his thoughts in “Origin.” Darwin would later write in “The Descent of Man” that “it hardly seems probable that the number of men gifted with such virtues as bravery and sympathy…could be increased through natural selection, that is, by survival of the fittest…I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest.” He actually wrote in support of a “survival of the kindest” theory: “Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Shouldn’t we read what Darwin actually discovered in his research and not simply what he hypothesized about? We have misread Darwin’s initial hypothesis as an answer for how to “order society” that he, himself, did not agree with when he concluded his research. A consequence of such misreading is that we are building a society on the misguided notion that you can be either successful OR someone who helps others…and American children are learning this all too well. A 2014 Harvard Graduate School of Education study of 10,000 middle- and high-school students found that “almost 80 percent” said that their parents and teachers taught them that their personal “high achievement or happiness” were more important than “caring for others.” Do we really want to construct and live in a society of self-absorbed achievers?
The Founding Document—President Trump has consistently made the argument that children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents are not American citizens. There is a ‘slight’ problem with the President’s reading of “The Constitution” and that would be the 14th Amendment, which says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” One consequence of interpreting or ignoring the 14th Amendment is that it betrays who we are as a country: a country of immigrants and a beacon of compassion and hope for the “tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” The Prime Minister of Ireland, Mr. Enda Kenny, said it best this past Saint Patrick’s day with President Trump at his side: “Saint Patrick was an immigrant, patron saint of Ireland and for many people around the globe he’s also a symbol of, indeed the patron of, immigrants…Ireland came to America because…we believed in the shelter of America, in the compassion of America, in the opportunity of America.” To misread the words of the 14th Amendment so that it divides naturally born Americans not only weakens our country but also demeans its legacy and the people who built it.
When we disrespect others because we misread the books that we believe define who we think we are as a people, we are at least ten to twelve chapters deep into our own “Paradise Lost.” If we misread and do not take the time to carefully reflect upon the great books and documents that we use to “order society,” our policy choices will seemingly appear to be always stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. America has successfully navigated its way through history, as Mr. Kenny reminded us, by following its own beacon of hope and compassion. It’s time that we not only follow that beacon again but also use its light to reread the blueprints of how and why our ship was built.
NOTE: This article originally appeared in Thrive Global.
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