Zen Blog

Looking back at the financial collapse of 2008, I often wonder: How could investors have been so greedy? It seems as if they were so bent on “winning” that they made pretty dumb investments, which cost them—and the rest of us—dearly. In fact, history is filled with examples of people behaving aggressively for short-term gain, only to pay a long-term cost. Why do we keep behaving this way?

My question is at the heart of a new study by Carsten de Dreu and colleagues published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Their findings give us insight into the relationship between aggression, empathy, and decision making.

The Relationship Between Empathy and Decision-Making

In the study, participants played an investment game called “Predator-Prey Contest”—similar to the old board game Risk—which measures how much people will invest to win money off of others versus defending their own holdings. Participants were paired up with different players and given up to 10 euros to invest in each round—half the time playing the role of “attacker,” half the time acting as a “defender” (though these labels were not used in the experiment’s setup to avoid leading people one way or another).

Attackers won a round if they invested more money than a defender and kept whatever they and their defender hadn’t spent. So, for example, if an attacker invested 6 euros and the defender invested 5, the attacker “won” and ended up with 9 euros (the 4 they saved + the 5 the defender didn’t spend). However, if attackers invested the same amount or less than defenders, they lost what they’d invested. The researchers used how much people invested in either role as a measure of their aggressiveness.

The researchers wanted to understand what influenced aggressive investing and how that determined players’ winnings. In particular, they looked at whether being prosocial (other-oriented and empathic) toward others, in general, affected people’s aggression. They also considered whether deliberating longer or being stressed influenced investment choices.

How you’re breathing can tell you something about your current state of mind—maybe you’re feeling pretty good, thinking about happy hour cocktails with colleagues. Or maybe you’re feeling a bit stressed, trying to wrap everything up before the workday ends.

Not to say that all stress is bad, says Emma Seppälä, Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford. But if you’re running on high-octane all the time, you can easily become a candidate for burnout.

The breath restores us, and helps us save our energy for those big moments when we need our mental resources the most.

“We know that short-term stress can be great. It can really help you get through a deadline and mobilize you,” says Seppälä in a recent video for Big Think, “However, if you depend on that day after day after day you’ll find that your body becomes worn out, your immune system is impacted and even your mind, your attention and your memory are impaired through that long-term chronic stress.“

That’s where the breath comes in: it restores us, and helps us save our energy for those big moments when we need our mental resources the most. Below, Seppälä explores the link between emotions and breath, and how you can train yourself to introduce more calm into your day.