Of course there are also genuine smiles of spontaneous pleasure or amusement. These are the smiles that are most likely to evoke one in return. That action signals the work of mirror neurons dedicated to detecting smiles and triggering our own.18 As a Tibetan saying has it, “When you smile at life, half the smile is for your face, the other half for somebody else’s.”
Smiles have an edge over all other emotional expressions: the human brain prefers happy faces, recognizing them more readily and quickly than those with negative expressions—an effect known as the “happy face advantage.”19 Some neuroscientists suggest that the brain has a system for positive feelings that stays primed for activity, causing people to be in upbeat moods more often than negative, and to have a more positive outlook on life.
That implies that Nature tends to foster positive relationships. Despite the all-too-prominent place of aggression in human affairs, we are not innately primed to dislike people from the start.
Even among complete strangers, a moment of playfulness, even outright silliness, forms an instant resonance. In what may be yet another instance of psychology trying to prove the obvious, pairs of strangers were assigned to play a series of silly games together. During the games one person had to talk through a straw while directing the other, wearing a blindfold, to toss a Nerf ball back and forth. The strangers invariably fell into guffaws at their haplessness.
When strangers played the same silly games without the blindfold and straw, however, they never cracked a smile. Yet the laughing pairs felt a strong, immediate sense of closeness, even after spending just a few minutes together.20
Indeed, laughter may be the shortest distance between two brains, an unstoppable infectious spread that builds an instant social bond.21 Take two teenage girls giggling together. The more giddily playful the two teen best friends become, the more synchronous, animated, and happy they feel together—in other words, they resonate.22 What to a parent may seem an ungodly racket will be, for the teenagers making it, one of their most bonding moments.
MEME WARS
Since the 1970s rap songs have glorified the thug’s life, with its guns and drugs, gang violence and misogyny, and the pimp’s and hustler’s lust for bling. But that seems to be changing, as have the lives of some of those who write such lyrics.
“It seems like hip-hop has mostly been about parties and guns and women,” Darryl McDaniels, the DMC in the rap group RunDMC, has acknowledged. But McDaniels, who himself prefers listening to classical rock rather than rap, adds, “That’s fine if you’re in a club, but from 9 a.m. till I went to bed at night, the music had nothing to say to me.”23
His complaint heralds the emergence of a new breed of rap music, one that embraces a more wholesome, if still grittily frank, view of life. As one of these reformed rappers, John Stevens (known as Legend), admits, “I wouldn’t feel comfortable making music that glorifies violence or such things.”24
Instead Legend, like his fellow rap reformer Kanye West, has turned to lyrics in a positive key that mix confessional self-criticism with wry social commentary. That nuanced sensibility reflects their life experience, which has followed paths markedly different from those of most gangsta rap stars of the past. Stevens has a degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and Kanye is the son of a college professor. As Kanye observes, “My mom’s a teacher, and I’m kind of a teacher too.”
He’s on to something. Rap lyrics, like any poem, essay, or news story, can be seen as delivery systems for “memes,” ideas that spread from mind to mind, much as emotions do. The notion of a meme was modeled on that of a gene: an entity that replicates itself by getting passed on from person to person.
Memes with particular power, like “democracy” or “cleanliness,” lead us to act in a specific way; they are ideas with impact.25 Some memes naturally oppose others, and when they do, those memes are at war, a battle of ideas.
Memes seem to gather power from the low road, through their association with strong emotions. An idea matters to us to the extent that it moves us—and that is precisely what emotions do. The low-road force of rap lyrics (or any song), made all the stronger by oscillator-riveting beats, may gather special force—certainly more than they would if read on a page.
Memes may one day be understood as mirror neurons at work. Their unconscious scripting steers much of what we do, particularly when we are on “automatic.” But the subtle power of memes to make us act often eludes detection.
Consider their surprising power to prime social interactions.26 In an experiment one group of volunteers heard a list of cue words that referred to impoliteness, such as “rude” and “obnoxious,” while another group heard cue words like “considerate” and “polite.” They then were put in a situation where they had to deliver a message to someone who was talking with another person. Two out of three of those primed for rudeness butted in to interrupt, while eight of ten primed for politeness waited the full ten minutes for the conversation to end before speaking up.27
In another form of priming, an unnoticed cue can lead to surprising synchronicities. How else to explain what happened when my wife and I visited a tropical island. One morning we spotted a marvel far out on the horizon: a strikingly graceful, four-masted ship sailing by. My wife suggested I take a photo, so I dug out my camera and snapped one. It was the first time I’d taken a photo in the ten days we’d been there.
A few hours later, as we left for lunch, I decided to take the camera along and slipped it into a backpack. As we walked toward a lunch shack on a beach nearby, it occurred to me to mention that I had the camera along with me. But out of the blue, before I could say a word, my wife asked, “Did you bring the camera?”
It was as though she had read my mind.
Such synchronicities seem to stem from the verbal equivalent of emotional contagion. Our trains of association run on set tracks, circuits of learning and memory. Once any of these trains has been primed, even by a simple mention, that track stirs in the unconscious, beyond the reach of our active attention.28 As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously put it, never put a gun on a wall in the second act of a play without using it by the end of the third—for the audience will be expecting gunshots.
Because simply thinking of an action prepares the mind to perform it, priming guides us through our daily routines without our having to exert mental effort in thinking what we should do next—something like a mental to-do list. Seeing our toothbrush on the bathroom sink in the morning cues us to automatically reach for it and start brushing.
This urge to enact guides us everywhere. When someone whispers to us, we whisper back. Talk about a Grand Prix race to someone driving on a highway, and he will speed up. It’s as though one brain implants similar feelings, thoughts, and impulses in the other.
In similar fashion, parallel trains of thought can lead two people to think, do, or say virtually the same thing at the same moment. When my wife and I suddenly attuned to the identical thought, presumably some shared momentary perception had triggered an identical train of association, bringing to mind the camera.
Such mental intimacy bespeaks an emotional closeness; the more satisfied and communicative a couple, the more accurate their mutual mindreading.29 When we know someone well or experience strong rapport, conditions are near optimal for a confluence of our internal thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and memories.30 We are in what amounts to a mind-meld where we tend to perceive, think, and feel in the same way as the other person.
Such convergence goes on even when strangers become friends. Take two college students assigned to the same dorm room. Researchers at Berkeley recruited new roommates and tracked their emotional responses as they separately watched some short films. One featured Robin Williams in a hilarious comedy; another, a tearjerker, depicted a boy crying at the death of his father. On first viewing the films, the new roommates reacted as differently from each other as any pair of random strangers would. But seven months later, when the researchers invited the roomma
tes back to see similar short films, their reactions had converged strikingly.31
THE MADNESS OF CROWDS
They call them “superhooligans,” the gangs of soccer fans who spark riots and mass fights at European matches. The formula for a soccer riot is the same, no matter the country. A small, tight-knit gang of fans arrives for the match hours early and goes out on a drinking binge, singing their club’s songs and having a rollicking time.
Then as the crowds are gathering for the match, the gangs get caught up in waving team flags, singing boisterous songs, and chanting against the other team, all of which spreads to the gathering mass. The superhooligans gravitate to points where their team’s fans mix with those of their rivals, and the chants change to outright threats. Then comes the flashpoint, when a gang leader attacks a rival fan, triggering others to join in. And the fights spread.
That formula for violent mass hysteria has been repeated over and over since the early 1980s, with tragic consequences.32 In a drunken belligerent mob, conditions are ideal for sparking violence: the alcohol disinhibits neural controls over impulses, and so the moment a leader models the first carnage, contagion primes the rest to follow.
Elias Canetti, in his study Crowds and Power, observes that what coalesces a mass of individuals into a crowd is their domination by a “single passion” everyone shares—a common emotion that leads to united action: collective contagion.33 A mood can sweep through a group with great rapidity, a remarkable display of the parallel alignment of biological subsystems that puts everyone there in physiological synchrony.34
The swiftness of shifts in the activity of crowds looks suspiciously like mirror neuron coordination writ large. Crowd decision-making goes on within seconds—presumably the time it takes for a person-to-person transmission of mirror neuron synchrony to sweep through (though for now that remains a matter of speculation).
Group contagion in its more sedate forms can be witnessed at any great performance, where actors or musicians create a field effect, playing the audience’s emotions like instruments. Plays, concerts, and movies all let us enter a shared field of emotions with large numbers of strangers. Looping together in an upbeat register is, as psychologists like to say, “inherently reinforcing”—that is, it makes everyone feel good.
Crowd contagion goes on even in the most minimal of groups, three people sitting face to face with each other in silence for a few minutes. In the absence of a power hierarchy, the person with the most emotionally expressive face will set the shared tone.35
Contagion will seep through almost any coordinated collection of people. Take an experiment in high-stakes decision-making, where a group met to decide how much of a bonus to give each employee from an end-of-year pool of money. Each person in the meeting was trying to get as large a bonus as possible for one or another employee, while still making the best overall distribution for the group as a whole.
The conflicting agendas led to tension, and by the end of the meeting everyone was feeling distressed. But in a meeting of another group with an identical goal, everyone ended up feeling good about the outcome.
The two meetings were business simulations done in a now-classic study at Yale University, where volunteers were put in groups to make the bonus decisions.36 No one knew that one of the participants in each meeting was actually a seasoned actor whose secret assignment was to be confrontational and downbeat with some of the groups, and helpful and upbeat with the others.
In whichever direction his emotions went, his lead was followed; the group members showed a distinct shift in their own mood, becoming upset or feeling pleasant accordingly. But none of the group members seemed to know why their mood had changed. Unwittingly, they had been looped into a mood shift.
The feelings that pass through a group can bias how all the group members process information and hence the decisions they make.37 This suggests that in coming to a decision together, any group would do well to attend not just to what’s being said, but to the shared emotions in the room as well.
This convergence bespeaks a subtle, inexorable magnetism, a gravitylike pull toward thinking and feeling alike about things in general among people who are in close relationships of any kind—family members, workmates, and friends.
4
An Instinct for Altruism
One afternoon at the Princeton Theological Seminary, forty students waited to give a short practice sermon on which they would be rated. Half the students had been assigned random biblical topics. The other half had been assigned the parable of the Good Samaritan, who stopped to help a stranger by the roadside, an injured man ignored by people supposedly more “pious.”
The seminarians worked together in a room, and every fifteen minutes one of them left to go to another building to deliver his sermon. None knew they were taking part in an experiment on altruism.
Their route passed directly by a doorway in which a man was slumped, groaning in evident pain. Of the forty students, twenty-four passed right by, ignoring the plaintive moans. And those who were mulling over the lessons of the Good Samaritan’s tale were no more likely to stop and help than were any of the others.1
For the seminarians, time mattered. Among ten who thought they were late to give their sermon, only one stopped; among another ten who thought they had plenty of time, six offered help.
Of the many factors that are at play in altruism, a critical one seems to be simply taking the time to pay attention; our empathy is strongest to the degree we fully focus on someone and so loop emotionally. People differ, of course, in their ability, willingness, and interest in paying attention—a sullen teen can tune out her mother’s nagging, then a minute later have undivided concentration while on a phone call to her girlfriend. The seminarians rushing to give their sermon were apparently unwilling or unable to give their attention to the moaning man, presumably because they were caught up in their thoughts and the press of hurrying, and so never attuned to him, let alone helped him.2
People on busy city streets worldwide are less likely to notice, greet, or offer help to someone else because of what has been called the “urban trance.” Sociologists have proposed that we tend to fall into this self-absorbed state on crowded streets, if only to gird against stimulus overload from the swirl around us. Inevitably, the strategy requires a trade-off: we shut out the compelling needs of those around us along with the mere distractions. As a poet put it, we confront “the noise of the street dazed and deafened.”
In addition, social divides shutter our eyes. A homeless person sitting dejectedly on the street of an American city asking for money may receive no attention from passersby, who a few steps away will gladly listen and respond to a well-dressed, outgoing woman asking for signatures on a political petition. (Of course, depending on our sympathies, the attention we give may be just the reverse: sympathy for the homeless person, but none for the political appeal.) In short, our priorities, socialization, and myriad other social-psychological factors can lead us to direct or inhibit our attention or the emotions we feel—and thus our empathy.
Simply paying attention allows us to build an emotional connection. Lacking attention, empathy hasn’t a chance.
WHEN ATTENTION MUST BE PAID
Contrast those events at the Princeton seminary with what happened one rush hour in New York City as I headed for the Times Square subway station after work one day. As usual, a steady torrent of humanity was sweeping down the concrete stairs, rushing to get on the next subway train.
But then I saw something troubling: sprawled across the steps midway down was a shabby, shirtless man, lying motionless, eyes closed.
No one seemed to notice. People simply stepped over his body in their rush to get home.
But, shocked by the sight, I stopped to see what was wrong. And the moment I stopped, something remarkable happened: other people stopped, too.
Almost instantly there was a small circle of concern around the man. Just as spontaneously, messengers of mercy fanned out—one man went
over to a hot dog stand to get him some food; a woman scurried to get him a bottle of water; another summoned a subway patrol officer, who in turn radioed for help.
Within minutes the man was revived, eating happily, and waiting for an ambulance. We learned he spoke only Spanish, had no money, and had been wandering the streets of Manhattan, starving. He had fainted from hunger there on the subway steps.
What made the difference? Just noticing for one. By simply stopping to take in the man’s plight, I seemed to snap passersby out of their urban trance and called him to their attention. As we tuned in to his predicament, we were moved to help.
No doubt all of us upright citizens on our way home from work were susceptible to silent assumptions about that man on the stairs, stereotypes built from walking by the hundreds of homeless who, sad to say, inhabit the streets of New York and so many other modern urban centers. Urbanites learn to manage the anxiety of seeing someone in such dire straits by reflexively shifting attention away.
I think my own shift-away reflex had been altered by an article I had recently written for The New York Times on how closing mental hospitals had converted the city’s streets into psychiatric wards. To do research for the article, I spent several days in a van with workers for a social agency that administered to the homeless, bringing them food, offering them shelter, and coaxing the mentally ill among them—a shockingly high proportion—to come to clinics to receive their medications. For quite a while afterward I saw homeless people through fresh eyes.
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