Invention:
More Green Dots is a social-ecological approach to increasing intervention into prosocial interactions, or kindness, using an activity with green and red dots to track kind and unkind behaviors. For kind behaviors, the giver, receiver, and anyone who witnesses the kindness earns a green dot. Red dots are larger than green dots to indicate the negativity bias that causes people to place more weight on negative experiences. At the end of the activity, green and red dots are totaled up to see the “sum” of a person’s experience. It is imperative that a sense of security and belonging exists in order to successfully promote health and wellness at the individual and community level. This approach looks to implement kindness learning as practice, whilst receiving support for digital tracking methods to increase retention.
Background:
Research shows that individual and community health and well-being depends on members feeling a sense of security, belonging, and trust in their community. This connectedness is communicated through kind interpersonal behaviors, organizational policies and systems, and even built environments. Kindness interventions tend to focus on the individual and the routine integration of kindness learning and practice at the organizational and community levels is lacking. Because kindness is interactional and is communicated between people and groups, a social-ecological approach to intervention is needed.
The relationship between prosocial acts and health have been evaluated through multiple studies over the last few decades. One analysis of 12 studies with a focus on acts of kindness, found that acts of kindness were associated with improved health outcomes. Relying on this finding, multiple methods to analyze the intervention to determine effectiveness of these methods. This new method involves the use of researched pre-evaluation services coupled with digital tracking to foster intervention from afar.
Applications:
- Method of tracking and increasing prosocial interaction within communities
Advantages:
- Increased health and wellness
- Increased kindness among peers within the community
- Improves community connectedness
