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Animal abuse should be taken more seriously

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Animal abuse should be taken more seriously

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Often, people dump their unwanted pets onto roads, into oncoming traffic, or in areas where no one else goes. This is a huge problem because it leaves domesticated animals (typically babies) alone in the wilderness. They don't know what to do. They haven't experienced this before. If they're babies, they won't survive for long. People who care about animals should start searching for animals in need. There should be groups of people searching specifically for wounded animals or previously owned pets. Now, that's not the only thing that should be included. The people doing these things should also be punished with increased punishments. People should be punished more harshly for animal abuse. There should be a definitive baseline for this, I'd say 5 years, minimum. If you are an animal abuser, do me a favor and question yourself. If one of your questions is "Am I a bad person?" then the answer is obvious.

Bibliography:

https://revisor.mo.gov/main/OneSection.aspx?section=578.012

https://lthsvanguard.com/3506/opinion/abuse-on-animals-should-be-taken-more-seriously/

https://www.shelteranimalscount.org/animal-abuse-facts-and-statistics-2024/#:~:text=It%20can%20lead%20to%20sickness,%2C%20beating%2C%20stabbing%20and%20throwing.

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Animal abuse facts and statistics 2024 - Shelter Animals Count

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VIEW ORIGINAL ARTICLE > USA TODAY By: Mandy Sleight & Kara McGinley Published: Jan 10, 2024 Animal abuse statistics and facts at a glance Sadly, it’s estimated that […]

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Many people associate the gender of one person with their personality. This is mostly incorrect because even though your gender may affect your way of thinking, it doesn't create your entire personality. People also associate specific things with specific genders (ie. boys are messy, girls are clean). Trying to have gender equality is a direct solution, it gives people confidence boosts and allows them to question; is this really who I am? We as humans, are just that, humans. Whether he/him, she/her, them/they, or whatever you want to call yourself. You are human. Everyone should be allowed to be equal, we are all on a floating rock in the middle of nowhere, the chances in the billions of this happening, yet still, we exist. How do we use this? To ruin our species. Whether it be harassment or a full-on attack, we terrorize other genders. If you endorse this kind of behavior or are someone who bullies the other gender, you have no place in this world.

Bibliography:

https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/what-is-gender-equality/

https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/policy-issues/gender-equality.html

https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender

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Gender equality is imperative to human rights and peaceful societies and has been proven by myriad research to be important for all communities to thrive. United Way of the National Capital Area believes in equity for all, regardless of race, gender, income and ability. Below, we explain what gender equality is, examples of gender equality in action and how it benefits all people.

What Does Gender Equality Mean?

Gender equality definition is the state in which access to rights or opportunities is unaffected by gender. It's not only women who are affected by gender inequality-all genders are impacted, including men, trans and gender-diverse people. This in turn impacts children and families, and people of all ages and backgrounds.

Equality in gender does not mean that women and men will have or need the exact same resources, but that women's, men's, trans people's and gender-diverse people's rights, responsibilities and opportunities will not depend on their assigned gender at birth.

Examples of Gender Equality

What does gender equality look like in the real world? Below, we list and describe an example of gender equality in various scenarios and how it should look in society.

Example 1: Equality at Home

On average, women around the world do three times as much unpaid work at home as men, including household work and caring for children and family members, and many of these women also work full-time or part-time careers. Gender equality in this example would look like splitting up at-home work as evenly as possible between all genders of a household, so that the burden of taking care of the home and family is not solely on women.

Example 2: Equal Pay for Equal Work

The pay gap between men and women remains strong throughout the United States and around the world, especially for women who are mothers or caretakers. Gender equality in the workforce means being paid the same salary for equal work, regardless of gender. It also means that if a woman takes time off from work to take maternity leave, for example, she will not be punished when she returns to work. She will still be considered for the same promotions, pay raises and career opportunities that she would have been given had she not taken the necessary time off to care for her family.

Example 3: Zero Tolerance for Sexual Harassment and Gender-Based Bias

Whether in the workplace, within a religious group, at a community center or any other group setting, people of all genders deserve to feel safe and be free of bullying and microaggressions, sexual harassment and prejudice based on gender. A society that appreciates and upholds gender equality does not allow for offensive comments, harassment, etc., to be tolerated in any form.

Benefits of Gender Equality

Gender equality makes communities safer, healthier and happier. Countries with greater gender equality are more connected and benefit immensely. Below, we list and describe specific societal benefits of gender equality.

Example 1: Economic Equality

When all genders receive equal job opportunities, society benefits. Studies show a diverse workplace is a more productive workplace, and this diversity includes gender diversity. This success in the workplace translates into the economy, as well. When equal job opportunity is given to all genders, poverty rates are reduced, communities are uplifted and a nation's GDP is significantly improved.

Example 2: Improved Education

Gender equality in education benefits every child within the school system. Girls who receive an education have a higher likelihood to be healthier and more productive, earning higher incomes and building better futures for their families. This in turn contributes to a stronger economy that benefits all genders and leads to better health within a community. According to UNICEF, when a girl receives a secondary education, her lifetime earnings dramatically increase, the national growth rate rises, child marriage rates decline, child mortality rates decline, maternal mortality rates fall and child stunting drops.

Example 3: Better Health

Studies show gender inequality has a negative impact on many health outcomes, including in regard to family planning, maternal and child health, nutrition, pandemic disease and more. When health systems are transformed to provide equal access to health care for all genders, studies show there are better health outcomes, including reduced depression and PTSD, reduced mortality rates, better self-rated health and reduced alcohol consumption.

How to Promote Gender Equality in Your Community

There are many ways to promote gender equality in daily life, from splitting up household chores equally to fighting gender stereotypes. There are also many groups and nonprofits promoting equity in their communities across the nation, including United Way NCA.

United Way NCA is focused on fostering equity for all community members, including those of all genders. We invite you to get involved in promoting gender equality in our community by giving, advocating, volunteering and by joining our Affinity Group, Women United, who plan and execute community projects benefiting girls, women and families throughout the National Capital Area.

To learn more, visit unitedwaynca.org. When none are ignored, all will thrive.

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What Is Gender Equality? Definition, Examples | United Way NCA

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What does gender equality mean? United Way NCA advocates for gender equality in the Washington, DC area to help empower persons of all genders. Learn more!

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Points of view should be taken into account.

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Points of view should be taken into account.

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Many people get angry at others without looking at it from their perspective and questioning what they've experienced. This thought process makes me think that humanity has little empathy left. Maybe we should start to use a new method of judgment. Whenever you feel your blood boil or your patience starts to tick away, try to calm yourself down for a second to ask these questions. Do I want to do this? What have they been through? Try to mention it to them in a calm tone and try to fix the problem or listen to why they did what they did. It could've been a mistake or a habit they should've left unnoticed but picked up on. You don't know everything. You aren't the center of attention. Don't be so egotistical.

Bibliography:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/constructive-controversy/201906/the-importance-of-taking-the-perspective-of-others

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/perspective-taking-brain-hack-can-help-make-better-decisions/

https://cbs.umn.edu/student-services/student-engagement/competency-areas/perspective-taking

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In business and in life, many of our interactions benefit from perspective taking, or our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. In a unique corporate partnership with SEB, a leading Swedish corporate bank, The Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, explores the neural basis of perspective taking and its effects on collaboration and business outcomes. In this piece, Wharton marketing professor and neuroscientist Michael Platt, Vera Ludwig, Elizabeth Johnson, and Per Hugander shed light on the neural basis of perspective taking and why it may lead to more innovation and better business outcomes.

What Is Perspective Taking?

According to Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of Spotify and Tradedoubler, "The value of your company is equal to the sum of the problems you are able to solve." But how can we build this problem-solving capability into our organizations? Neuroscience suggests that one key strategy may be taking the perspective of others. Not only does this crucial skill provide us with additional information about complex situations, it also activates brain regions linked with creativity and innovation.

Indeed, many frameworks and tools for solving tough and complex problems are centered around the ability to take the perspective of others. Innovation frameworks start with taking the customer's perspective; collaboration and negotiation frameworks are centered around understanding others' viewpoints; and dialogue models recommend postponing judgment in order to take different perspectives for solving numerous challenges from business issues to marital problems.

When considering how often perspective taking appears in the problem-solving literature, it is surprising that so few leaders invest time and effort in developing this skill. Even though organizations frequently use the aforementioned tools and frameworks, including the well-known approach of Design Thinking, the results may be suboptimal if individuals are not skilled in perspective taking itself.

Improving Perspective Taking within Organizations

Based on the premise that perspective-taking ability can be improved through practice, in 2018, SEB, a Swedish corporate bank, launched a cutting-edge initiative. The aim is to enhance perspective-taking skills and to apply them to SEB's most important business challenges (featured in Amy Edmondson's case study " Leading Culture Change at SEB "). Since then, many leaders within SEB have participated in a systematic group training process to build perspective-taking skills. According to the case study, the ability to solve problems and make decisions improved, as did inclusion, cross-collaboration, and risk management.

A survey conducted by the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative (WiN) with SEB managers in summer 2020 indicated that leaders who had completed several training sessions before the COVID-19 pandemic reported that they were better able to respond to remote and distributed work necessitated by social distancing measures. For example, one participant commented:
"Being part of the ... process before the COVID-19 outbreak has made it easier for our management group to tackle challenges related to a distributed way of working. We have more or less been able to perform on the same level as before the outbreak."
In the following paragraphs, we shed light on why perspective-taking training may be beneficial, taking into account neuroscientific findings, and we show evidence that perspective taking and its underlying neural mechanisms can be enhanced through practice. Importantly, perspective taking may improve business outcomes not only by giving us access to more information than we would have without it, but also by ramping up activity in core brain regions involved in creative problem-solving and innovation.

What Happens in the Brain When We Take a New (or Someone Else's) Perspective?

When we are trying to solve a problem, the frontoparietal attention network activates, meaning that areas at the front and the side of your brain are at work. However, when we take the perspective of another person, we engage a different network, often called the "mentalizing," or theory-of-mind, network. This has two key components: the temporoparietal junction, located just above and behind the ear, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind the middle of your forehead. These areas help us understand what others know, want, need or find important.

Importantly, the "mentalizing" network partially overlaps with the so-called default mode network. This term was initially chosen because researchers at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that this network became active when people took a break from active problem-solving. After years of research, we now know that this network is activated during exploration, imagination, innovation, thinking outside the box, and engaging in mental time travel by thinking back to the past or imagining possible futures. For those reasons, we often call it the "exploration" network. Thus, perspective taking engages both the mentalizing and exploration networks, perhaps because getting inside someone else's head requires getting outside our own.

Our lab at Penn is one of the few that has studied the exploration, or default mode network, using techniques other than brain imaging, and has investigated what happens when we turn this network up or down. We have shown that the exploration network is engaged when we search for new alternatives or deviate from routines. Boosting activity in this network provokes selection of options we typically wouldn't take into consideration. Temporarily turning off a key part of the default mode network impairs learning about new options through exploration, though memory for old routines remains intact.

When the exploration network is turned down, we might have difficulties learning new jobs or generating new ideas. These findings align with a survey conducted at Wharton. The authors found that during the current pandemic workers were just as productive working at home (and sometimes more so) as they were when working in the office prior to the pandemic. Unfortunately, they were much less innovative. These findings cohere with the idea that both our "mentalizing" and "exploration" networks are less engaged when working remotely, perhaps because there are fewer opportunities for high-quality social interactions. While productively executing routine tasks is still possible, innovation is compromised.

Thus, turning up the exploration network through regular perspective taking might allow us to come up with better ideas and hence make better decisions. Experimental studies show that triggering an exploration mindset leaves people more creative, but precisely how long these effects last remains unknown.

"Perspective taking may improve business outcomes not only by giving us access to more information than we would have without it, but also by ramping up activity in core brain regions involved in creative problem-solving and innovation."

Practice Makes Perfect When It Comes to Perspective Taking

Neuroscience data shows that investing time and energy into social interaction changes the brain in ways that should enhance perspective taking. Several studies conducted at Oxford University found that the social brain network - which includes areas involved in mentalizing - in monkeys grows when the animals are challenged with learning how to get along with larger numbers of social partners. And people with larger and better-connected social brain networks actually have more friends. Tania Singer's team in Germany showed that, just like in monkeys, the social brain network grew in response to nine months of exercises that included perspective taking. Thus, the mentalizing network is like a muscle: The more you use it, the stronger it gets.

Perspective Taking Examples and Activities

One exercise Per Hugander developed to improve perspective taking encouraged participants to reflect on recent, specific examples of perspective taking and share them with colleagues. In a second exercise, participants were encouraged to visualize potential situations in the future when they might benefit from perspective taking (e.g., a conversation with a spouse or at a business meeting). Hugander instructs people to pay particular attention to details and write them down. These exercises are repeated bi-weekly.

These procedures are useful because imagination and memory can activate brain regions similar to those activated during a real experience, and our brains learn to repeat thoughts and actions that lead to good outcomes. In essence, the human brain is nature's greatest statistical pattern learning device. This means that the more you exercise perspective taking (whether remembered, imagined, or real), the more it will be reinforced. Over time, perspective taking is likely to become more automatic.

Other stimulating perspective taking activities like drawing our problems, as well as our opportunities, in the form of pictures, having conversations with strangers, trying out new things, and reading novels that transport us into the mind of a character, all seem to activate our exploration and mentalizing networks. WiN Executive Director and Senior Fellow Elizabeth Johnson, who is a visual neuroscientist, routinely leads sessions on visual perspective taking for learners of all levels (undergraduates, MBA students, alumni, and corporate executives) at Philadelphia's Barnes Foundation, an extraordinary art collection and educational institution. In her exercise, small teams discuss how each individual perceives an artwork. In the course of discussion, they begin to integrate the perspectives of others and how this may differ from their own. Through this process they discover new ideas, connections, and a willingness to expand their views, and these benefits often extend beyond the museum context. These are all powerful ways to push us to think outside the box, thereby enhancing innovation and decision-making.

Putting It All Together

Perspective taking might not only provide new data in complex situations, but it can also activate networks in our brains that are associated with creative thinking and exploration. One can speculate that this is one reason why the likelihood of innovative ideas increases during perspective taking. In the long run, frequent and skilled perspective taking may enhance the ability to innovate, collaborate and make good decisions.

In ongoing studies, postdoctoral fellows Vera Ludwig and Scott Rennie are working with Hugander using new tools developed at WiN to measure the impact of perspective-taking training on turn-taking while speaking and emotional synchrony during online videoconferencing. Given that many teams will continue to work remotely after the pandemic, these studies will provide vital data for understanding how to optimize online teams, which has been notoriously challenging during remote work.

If you as a leader want to start strengthening your perspective-taking skills, or help your team improve theirs, the WiN-SEB team has published a Nano Tool providing step-by-step instructions with concrete exercises that require as little as five minutes each.
Michael Platt is a neuroscientist and director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, a professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of The Leader's Brain. Vera Ludwig is a research associate in the Platt Labs and the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. Elizabeth Johnson is the executive director and senior fellow at the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. Per Hugander is a strategic adviser and previous head of leadership and organizational development at SEB, as well as the founder of iero leadership development and previous adviser to tech scaleups such as Truecaller, Fishbrain, and Lifesum.

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Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions

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Wharton marketing professor and neuroscientist Michael Platt and his co-authors explain the neural basis of perspective taking and why it may lead to more innovation and better business outcomes.