How to make the world a better place: handy tips!

In late August of this year, the dating website OkCupid decided to screw with its users. Instead of using its regular algorythm, which calculates the number of "matches" you have with someone based on your answers on a personality/temperament questionnaire, they purposely put together mismatched people to see how the frequency of messages exhanged between the potential couples would differ from that of couples who were supposedly well "matched." Surprise, suprise, couples who were supposedly mis-matched exchanged just as many messages with each other as those who were allegedly great matches for each other. The founder of the dating site, who is a bit of a social scientist, says that this just proves that when someone tells us we're a great match, we behave that way. Or, to state it more broadly, we become what we believe we are. Science has already shown that you have to be careful how you label children, since calling little Jimmy "slow" or "lazy" or "stupid" causes him to think of himself that way and take on the behviour of the label. So maybe it works that way in the rest of life. If someone calls you "generous" or "kind" or "considerate," maybe you absorb that label and can become more generous, kind or considerate, just because you've decided that's who you are. So what's stopping all of us from telling ourselves we're patient and loving and trust-worthy and kind, and then becoming just that? Does it only work, like tickling, if someone else initiates it? To make this world a better place, maybe we have to go around complementing each other on the virtues we'd like to see, in order to increase those virtues in actuality. Worth a try, I guess. Thanks for reading this; you're so smart....