Dacher Keltner

Dacher Keltner

Dacher Keltner (* 1962 in Jalisco , Mexico ) is an American psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley . He also heads the Greater Good Science Institute, which he founded, and is the publisher of the Greater Good Magazine .

Life and research

Keltner completed his undergraduate studies from 1979 to 1984 at the University of California, Santa Barbara , including one year from 1982 to 83 at the Sorbonne in Paris. After receiving his PhD from Stanford University in 1989, Keltner worked with Paul Ekman , where he learned to read emotions on people's faces. There he was the first to examine the embarrassment , which he regards as a characteristic of people who are shown particular affection.

He used this knowledge in his own research on compassion among people and thus, in his opinion, the decisive quality for human success. He is the director of the Greater Good Science Center , where various researchers study happiness, altruism, and other forms of positive human experience. In his research, Keltner finds creative connections. For example, he assessed the “warmth of smiles” of women graduating from Mills College in 1960 on the photos of their year books and was able to show a connection with the later life course of the women graduates. The results have since been confirmed by later studies by other researchers.

As a general research interest, Keltner names topics ranging from emotions and social interaction to culture, morality and emotion to conflict and negotiation and finally power, social perception and behavior. One of his theses says that the acquisition of power is a social process in which certain behaviors lead to an increase in power of a person, but at the same time his empathy suffers due to the power gained and thus a state of equilibrium is reached. As power-generating behaviors, Keltner regards those in which the test person showed virtues that contradict Machiavellian ideas, i.e. express empathy, gratitude or other positive virtues.

He examines such statements with further creative experiments. For example, three randomly selected test persons are again randomly divided into a “manager” and two “employees”. This “team” is then given the task of drawing up the university's guidelines. After a reasonable time has passed, a plate with four pieces of chocolate is brought out. The observation is aimed at who of the three takes the surplus piece of chocolate. With a clear statistical significance , the randomly chosen “manager” takes out the right to take this piece. Since Keltner defines power as the ability to exert an influence on the life and decisions of others, he deduces from such studies that an increase in power also leads to behaviors that oppose a further increase in power. Conversely, powerlessness ( disempowerment ) also has effects that affect behavior and physical health, and in Keltner's opinion even shorten life.

In addition to his books and articles in specialist magazines, Keltner has published numerous articles in mainstream media including the New York Times , New York Times Magazine , The London Times , Wall Street Journal, and others. In 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

bibliography

items

• Dacher Keltner and J. Haidt (1999). Social functions of emotions at multiple levels of analysis . Cognition and Emotion, 13 (5), 505-522.
• Dacher Keltner (2008) In Defense of Teasing , New York Times, December 5, 2008
• Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman (2015) The Science of 'Inside Out' - Gray Matter ; New York Times July 3, 2015
• Alan S. Cowen and Dacher Keltner (2017) Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients ; in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS); 19th September 2017.

Books

• Understanding emotions (with K. Oatley and J. Jenkins), 2nd edition, 2006 Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
• Born to be good: The Science of a Meaningful Life , 2009, Norton
• Social psychology (with T. Gilovich, S. Chen, S. and R. Nisbett,); 4th edition, New York: WW Norton & Company, 2015.
• The Power Paradox , 2016, Penguin Random House UK ( The Power Paradox , Campus Verlag, 2017)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Claudia Wüstenhagen: Professor Teddy Bear. Dacher Keltner is an optimist. The psychologist is convinced that people are friendly by nature. In his laboratory in Berkeley, he researches how good is rooted in the body - and looks for the true superstars among us. In: ZEIT Wissen 3/2010. Die Zeit , April 6, 2010, accessed on June 18, 2018 .  
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Dacher Keltner. In: Psychology Today website . Psychology Today, accessed June 21, 2018 .  
3. ^ Curriculum vitae: Dacher Keltner. Greater Good Institutes, accessed June 21, 2018 .  
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Eben Harrell: Power Corrupts, But It Doesn't Have To. Interview with Dacher Keltner. In: Harvard Business Review. October 13, 2016, accessed June 29, 2018 .  
5. ↑ Dacher Keltner. The Science of What Connects us :. Institute of Noetic Sciences, accessed on July 1, 2018 (English, Zu Keltner's lecture: Aha! Moments, Awe, and Flow States Deeper into Aha! Moments, Awe, and Flow).