MindCraft Challenges

Challenge: Follow Rachel Baumsteiger’s prosocial intervention steps:

• Learn about prosociality (we did this in class)>
• Elevation—Watch a prosocial story from ESPN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaXVk5GBx-s
• Spend at least a minute each writing about:
• People you admire
• How you would change the world if you could
• 3-5 values (examples: courage, independence, discipline) that are meaningful to you
• Your imagined self in five years in your best possible future—describe what your life would be like
• A plan for how you could help others more over the next week
• Implement your plan. Take notes at the end of each day about how your prosocial actions impacted others. Were you more prosocial?

Read More
A Prosocial Elevation Intervention
https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2019.1639507
Elevation increases tedious helping
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609359882
Elevation makes violence less enjoyable
https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000214

Perception can be trained: People who practice certain video games, who receive intense training in Buddhist meditation, or who engage in immersive visualization during Christian prayer show improved performance on basic visual perception tasks. Notably for this challenge, the Christians who intentionally immersed themselves in a Biblical scene during prayer reported feeling God’s presence more in their daily lives.

Challenge:
In Steps to Christ, Ellen White describes prayer this way: “Prayer is the opening of the heart to God as to a friend. Not that it is necessary in order to make known to God what we are, but in order to enable us to receive Him. Prayer does not bring God down to us, but brings us up to Him.” While praying this week, first read and visualize a passage (such as Ps. 23 or Is. 61:1-3) that provides a scene depicting God’s presence, then pray while visualizing talking to God as to a friend. Does this change your experience?

Read More:
Christian prayer and perception:
https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342090
Buddhist meditation and perception:
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610371339
Video games and perception:
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014345

Even though the firing rate of a single neuron limits its information-carrying capacity, the neurons in our brains work together to allow us to store and process massive amounts of information. One mystery of neuroscience is why human behavior and thought are as slow as if we were running our thoughts on neurons in serial (one after another) rather than in parallel. One possible reason is that human thinking requires comparing and updating many models of the world.

Challenge:
How would your life be different if you respected the slow and limited processing speed of the human mind? Plan a ‘slow moment’ (actually five minutes) to reflect on a memory, count your blessings, or otherwise savor your world. Try your ‘slow moment’ twice every day for a week. See the “Read More” section for the actual intervention with older adults.

Read More:
The paradox of slow human behavior:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.11.008
Many scholars debating a model of a multi-level, multi-timescale, iteratively refining model of the mind:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477
A savoring task (see the Intervention section):
https://doi.org/10.1177/0733464817693375

One way to break the influence of stereotypes on a situation is to make stereotypes less likely to be activated and used as explanations for an individual’s actions. Perspective-taking is a way to break the automatic use of stereotypes as a default explanation.

To take someone else’s perspective, psychological scientists ask people to:

• visualize, read about, or listen to the person whose perspective they are going to take
• either imagine what the other person is currently thinking or
• imagine what they would be thinking if they were that person

Challenge:
Try taking the perspective of somebody from a group who is very different from you. Does this help you think about them as a person rather than a category?

Read More:
A review of perspective taking, including limits on who benefits from perspective taking:
https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12116
Perspective-taking to block racially-biased responses:
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022308