Benefits of volunteering time to the Citizendium community
All of the registered members of our Citizendium community undoubtedly have some idea of why they volunteer their time helping each other develop our encyclopedia. In addition to any rational idea we might have for volunteering our time, we all must also have a feeling that comes with it, an emotional reason, perhaps one we find difficult to articulate.
If you were to ask Cassie Mogilner, Zoe Chance and Michael Norton, psychological experimental scientists at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Yale School of Management and the Harvard Business School, respectively, they might tell you this:
“Many people these days feel a sense of “time famine”—never having enough minutes and hours to do everything. We all know that our objective amount of time can’t be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), but [our] new study suggests that volunteering our limited time—giving it away—may actually increase our sense of unhurried leisure.”
Their thinking is that by giving away time, as in volunteering, you stimulate your feelings of being competent and efficient, accompanying which time seems to stretch out in your mind. You gain time, subjectively, by giving time.
Since we all live in our subjectivity, I’ll go for that kind of “time affluence”.
Get rich in time, join Citizendium, those of you reading this who haven’t already gotten such riches.
PRESS RELEASE: Anna Mikulak
Association for Psychological Science