On Light the World (a social media campaign encouraging people to help others and hashtag about it during the holiday season), these are my thoughts.
To get people to help others, research shows that sermons are useless. That is, preaching at people that they should help makes no difference in whether they do.
Even preparing a sermon on the Good Samaritan was useless in the observational testing. Having people prepare a sermon on the Good Samaritan in divinity school makes no statistical difference on whether they stop to help someone in need on their way to deliver a practice sermon.
Some things made a huge difference:
Having time. Those students preparing sermons who, as they left to deliver them were told their time slot had moved fifteen minutes or more were much more likely to stop and help. People who plan time to help others are much more likely to help.
Having a social model (having helping part of the social norm) helps. Is socially it is expected and everyone is doing it, you are more likely to help others.
Have a real or practice model (having someone else show you how it is done). Tangible examples give people a handle on service. Both practicing helping and seeing the specifics of what someone else has done makes it more likely you will help.
You want kindness and outreach?
Then you need socialization—making it an observed norm (something you know everyone is doing and expects). With examples (of how it is done).
Light the world creates socialization and examples of things people can do.
It is actually an excellent tool to get people to do things that help others.
And, at the same time it really doesn’t do more than look quaint to people on the true outside. So it doesn’t seem to be advertising for outsiders so much as guidance for those doing it.
But it does give lots of opportunities to …. (Rorschach ink blot goes here).
Reactions to it are truly a Rorschach ink blot test.
Thanks to Lindsay Hansen Park for making me think.
Questions:
Do you think Christ meant it when he said:
16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
How would you encourage people to be kinder?
Is there a better season to try to teach people to be more Christlike?
Wheat & Tares 
“Is there a better season to try to teach people to be more Christlike?”
Yes!! December is the craziest month of the year for me and, I suspect, many other people, at least in the U.S. and perhaps Europe. Preparing for family visits, attending various social functions, church meetings, Christmas devotionals, doing the obligatory shopping, etc., all consume a considerable amount of time. And if you’re a student (which I am not), there are those pesky final exams. But I am a corporate tax attorney, and I rarely can take a day off during December (except for the 25th) because I have so many clients trying to get things done by the end of the year. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Yes, doing things for others is wonderful, and has been an important part of our family’s Christmas tradition for decades. But if you want to pile a new program—and the “Light the World” campaign is a relatively new program, first rolled out in 2016—on top of all of this, I’m afraid all I can do in response is laugh.
Merry Christmas!
We have been emphasising obedience for so long that many/most members think the gospel is about obedience. The last 2 Sundays, with 2 different teachers have been told “obedience is the first law of heaven”, when I said I didn’t think so. Minority of 1.
The Saviour said the first commandment is to love God, and the second is to love our fellows, and everything else hangs off these 2. We are now getting leaders aware of the first 2 commandments So we now say we love God by being obedient, not by loving our fellows.
If it is about obedience, and leadership say do it you do. If they don’t you don’t. Do good stuff in December is the command. The problem is there is no moral judgement involved in obedience. So you can obediently love (not sure how genuine), but you can also obediently discriminate, and even hate.
Had we been teaching Christlike love we would not have to order it for December. We would also have moral judgement, and although we would not have obedience, we might have no more disposition to do evil, individually, and collectively.
As to the question if there is a better season for teaching love, hard to say. The whole Christian world has gotten into the routine for christmas about gifts, love, service for so long that it has become a great tradition. Service to others is rarely convenient and Christmas, as has been pointed out, becomes very busy, but if you think about it, it is also a somewhat self-focused holiday by us, with parties to go to (with lots of high calorie over-eating ), Concerts to attend, and tons of time in the stores (and face it, we often get ourselves a little gift) where we get to dream big. Of course there is the obligatory charity thing we do, whether at church or our work.
As far as how to teach service, a good start might be to take away the 1980’s-era mission statement of the 3-fold mission (ooopps….that’s 4 now) and make service to others THE top priority. It feels like the 4th mission….service to the poor and needy….has always been a begrudged add-on, and never really a top priority. I mean, you ocassionally get a general conference talk on service, but it feels as though the talks are more PR rather than a call to service.
From an article in the Deseret News (July 12, 2016), the church, according to Dallin Oaks gave …..”approximately $1.2 billion on welfare and humanitarian efforts over the past 30 years. ” Contrast that with Jon Huntsman, one single philanthropist (SL Tribune Feb 2, 2018) “Throughout his lifetime, Huntsman donated at least $1.8 Billion to charity…..That total, though, does not count the money he tithed to the LDS church.” So one man from his private fortune can donate more than a multi-million member church?
If I had my wish, I would send missionaries out, not as proselyters, but full-time service youth. Dump the white shirts and ties, no yellow shirts, and get 60,000 plus young people the chance to build water systems, do disaster relief, do medical service work, teach hygiene…language…academics, work at homeless shelters, etc. If you could unleash the goodness of all those youth on the world with a mission of actually improving the world in a real, tangible way, it would be absolutely phenomenal.
“In 2010, Catholic Charities USA reported expenditures of between $4.2 billion and $4.4 billion, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which publishes an annual list of the 400 biggest charities in the United States, ranked by the amount of donations they receive.”
Sorry, but that $1.2 billion over 30 years seems pretty paltry by comparison, especially when one considers in-kind contributions that include clothing donated to Deseret Industries. Light the World looks more like a marketing campaign designed, as always, to make the church look good. When the Mormon church takes a small portion of its billions and uses it to, say, pay off the medical debt of struggling members, I will believe that they’re seriously interested in charity. Until then, they seem more interested in making sure Tiffany’s has a nice location for a SLC store.
Reading this post and the comments have been the most inspiring experience I have done in a while. Thank you so much.
Stephen, this helps me understand the tension and turmoil I have experienced for years. I have been confused and disappointed by “Mormon helping hands” service projects. In general, I felt like we took on jobs that required a certain level of skill and knowledge, we didn’t have that skill or even supervision by those that had it, we did a poor job, and they wanted us to wear bright yellow “Mormon helping hands” jerkins. While it might not have been the best quality service, but it was service. It needed doing and we did it. I guess this could socialise us to serve outside the church, even when we can’t offer the best. We can offer our best though. Maybe getting skilled help is a secondary thing.
Eric Facer, thanks. This Christmas season is especially busy for our family. Your comment gives me hope because we can serve at any time, not just at Christmas. I never realised that Mormon Helping Hands could be a tangible example or model for members to serve in the community, outside our lds bubble, at any time in the year.
Geoff-Aus, that is the best response to “Obedience is the first law of heaven” I have ever heard. I’m not in your ward, but you have a new ally over the ditch here.
Paul the Latter-Day Apostle, I love what you said about missionary service. The most meaningful experiences on my mission were when we served others. I didn’t feel like I had time to do a lot of it though. There were all these numerical goals, and we wanted to teach people and baptise people. In the end, while we frequently did serve, most of my time was spent on endless hours of door-knocking and street contacting which are much less meaningful to me than when we cared for people. If I were in charge, I think that shaking up the missionary program to include far more service would be wonderful. I think that teaching would still need to be part of it, but maybe less than 50% of the time/people. This would be amazing, and I reckon the missionaries would be fulfilling God’s promise that the earth would be blessed through his seed, to a greater degree than presently.
Thanks for your thoughts. These are going to keep me going for a while.
Are we going to be getting new yellow shirts that say “Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Helping Hands”?
Also, we have giving machines in my city this year, and the pressure to take someone downtown, pay for parking and invite them to donate to a charity chosen by our church seems a little silly. I prefer to make a quiet donation online to the charity of my own choosing, but that does contradict the social modelling mention in your post above.
And then Judas asked, should not this ointment be sold and the money given to the poor? This thought comes to mind reading several of the comments and critiques written here.
Just Sayin—enjoyed your comments.
Anyone who wants a citation —check my earlier blog posts—I linked to studies in them.
All—appreciate the input.
I am spending a lot of time looking through all of your blog posts and cannot find the reference to this research. Can you please provide it? It’s an appropriate practice to always reference research that you refer to when publishing about it. Thanks again for the valuable insights.
https://www.aeaweb.org/research/good-samaritan-traffic-road-to-jericho is different from my prior links.
However, the prior essay is:
https://wheatandtares.org/2018/05/03/being-the-good-samaritan/
“Published paper on the study is Darley, J. M., and Batson, C.D., “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior”. JPSP, 1973, 27, 100-108.”
I believe what we’re seeing is NOT that sermons don’t matter. What we’re seeing is what occurs with every single subject we study. And nobody would suggest that all of education is worthless.
The problem is one what’s called “transfer of learning” and refers to difficulty we have of transferring principles learned with with one set of examples to other situations that are superficially different but are actually the same underneath.
Our minds think in concrete terms. And so we can hear a tremendous sermon, but if we aren’t presented with the same examples, we will frequently fail to apply what we just heard because we don’t recognize it as the same problem. For example, in the Cambridge Good Samaritan study, they should have probably presented a man that had been beaten, stripped, robbed, and left half dead. And it might have helped if the students saw a stuff-shirt rabbi or priest pass by. Unfortunately, they didn’t. And so it’s difficult to conclude that what the “study” demonstrated more than anything else wasn’t the problem of transfer.
Daniel Willingham, a researcher at the University of Virginia who focuses on the brain basis of learning and memory, writes a great article about the problem of transfer and some things we can do in teaching to help. Here’s his intro.
“Cognitive science has shown us that when new material is first learned, the mind is biased to remember things in concrete forms that are difficult to apply to new situations. This bias seems best overcome by the accumulation of a greater store of related knowledge, facts, and examples. To understand this bias, we need to first distinguish between what I would call genuinely “rote” knowledge and the much more common “inflexible” knowledge. Second, we’ll look at a number of experiments that strongly suggest the mind tends to remember new concepts in terms that are concrete and superficial, not abstract or deep. Third, we’ll review experiments designed to illuminate the nature of expertise, which can be thought of as consisting of “flexible” knowledge. Fourth, we’ll consider what this means for teaching.”
More here: https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/winter-2002/ask-cognitive-scientist.
So, as pointed out, Light the World provides lots of new examples. It also makes things easier–a big part of enabling behavior. See the Fogg model here: https://www.behaviormodel.org/.