Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education
Although the neurosciences have been highly successful both in understanding the pathologies of the human mind and in developing treatments, until recently, the field has largely avoided dealing with complex behaviors such as moral cognition and behaviors linked to altruism and compassion.
To understand scientifically why it is that humans behave in a compassionate or altruistic manner, or in contrast why they sometimes do not, requires a unique collaboration across a variety of disciplines, collaborations between those who study the brain using objective measures and those who study the mind using first-person subjective observation (such as Buddhism and other contemplative traditions that have a long history of investigation into the nature of mind).
The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research (CCARE) is a multi-disciplinary effort devoted to establishing compassion and altruism studies well within the domain of the larger scientific community. CCARE participants include neuroscientists performing human brain imaging studies, cognitive psychologists, neuroeconomists, contemplative scholars and philosophers. Research draws from varied disciplines – looking at evolutionary roots of compassion and altruism to the neuroscientific study of their brain mechanisms, and from philosophical and contemplative perspectives to cognitive and social psychology. Through such diverse research methods, CCARE will strive to gain a deep understanding of compassion and its associated human behaviors in all its richness.
CCARE Website: http://compassion.stanford.edu/
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