Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  The second face of the commitment problem may be more challenging: We must reliably identify who is committed to us, we must find those morally inclined individuals to enter into long-term bonds with, we must know who is (and who is not) likely to be faithful and caring, and disinclined to cheat, lie, and sacrifice us in the service of the pursuit of their self-interest. We must quickly make these decisions to avoid being fooled or exploited by the Lynn Freitases of the world on a regular basis. What helps us solve the commitment problem?

  Emotion. The very nature of emotional experience—its seeming absoluteness, heat, and urgency—can readily overwhelm narrow calculations of self-interest, allowing us to honor the commitments integral to long-term bonds: monogamy, fairness, duties and obligations. The potent pangs of guilt help us repair our dearest relations, even at great cost to the self. The single-minded feeling of compassion or awe can motivate us to act on behalf of other individuals or collectives, regardless of costs or benefits to the self.

  Just as important is the centrality of others’ emotional displays in our attempts to discern others’ commitments to us. As important as language is, it is striking how impotent it is in conveying the commitments that define the course of life—the sense that someone will really love us through thick and thin, the sense that a colleague will be a lifelong collaborator, the sense that a politician is devoted to the greater good. Words are easy to manipulate. Not so, emotional displays. Emotional displays provide reliable clues to others’ commitments because they are involuntary, costly, and hard to fake (as opposed to words, which Lynn Freitas used to dupe me). Emotional displays have much in common with the peacock’s tail or stotting of the red deer: all are metabolically expensive behaviors that are beyond volitional control, and thus less subject to strategic manipulation or deception.

  The general claim that Schelling offered: Emotions are involuntary commitment devices that bind us to one another in long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. As Ekman parsed the intricate realm of facial expression, he arrived at a discovery that would provide anatomical support for Schelling’s commitment thesis, and that would lead to a rethinking of the centrality of emotion to our most important bonds. Of the forty-three sets of facial muscles, most are easy to move voluntarily. For example, the pictures that follow represent common facial actions, pregnant with signal value, that most anyone can produce at the drop of a hat, at the behest of a friend, to pass the time in the hotel bathroom, or to win a drunken bet.

  A subset of facial muscles, however, are wired differently; they are controlled by different neural pathways originating in the brain. For about 85 to 90 percent of people—actors, sociopaths, politicians, late-night televangelists, and people who take the hundred hours to learn FACS excluded—these muscles are impossible to move voluntarily. If you’re feeling bold, want to put some braggart to the test, or are lacking a bit in levity, try yourself or test whether some other poor soul can produce the following muscle actions:

  I’ve asked dozens of children in summer camps, hundreds of undergraduates in lecture courses, dozens of executives in seminars, most of my indulgent friends, and even, I must confess, my two daughters, to try to produce these muscle actions. After many misfires, contorted faces, shakes of disbelief, and the occasional blush, individuals inevitably fail. What these muscles are, Ekman deduced, are the reliable indicators of emotion. These fleeting movements of muscles in the face are the trustworthy signs of specific emotions, such as anger, fear, desire and love, and, by implication, our social commitments.

  Consider sympathy, an emotion central to the stability of the social contract, as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Charles Darwin long ago surmised. Social theorists have homed in on sympathy for some time because it backgrounds the individual’s self-interest, and leads to actions that enhance the welfare of others, even at expense to the self. The question is: How do we discern sincere sympathy, or true commitment to others’ welfare, from the false promises of demagogues, sociopaths, and hucksters? Robert Frank reasoned, in a synthesis of Schelling’s insights and Ekman’s methodological labors, that the clues to another’s sympathy and commitment to cooperation are found in two simple facial muscle movements (AU1 + AU4, in FACS terminology). Feelings of sympathy, and the commitment to cooperative exchange, are registered in an involuntary facial display that is more trustworthy than its cheap, and readily feigned, copies.

  To get a sense of this, compare your reactions to the photos of the two facial displays below. The expression on the left is hard to produce voluntarily. It involves the pulling in and upward of the inner eyebrows, and has been shown in several empirical studies to accompany sympathetic feelings and activation of a region of the nervous system that is associated with caretaking behavior. The facial expression on the right, although quite similar morphologically to the sympathetic display on the left, does not involve activation of these involuntary, reliable facial muscles. It is not a reliable signal of an individual’s interest in your welfare (in fact, the eyebrow raise is a signal with many meanings, including interest, skepticism, weakness, and dramatic emphasis when speaking).

  Darwin had claimed that our emotional expressions are distilled tokens of more complex social actions—striking out, soothing, eating, embrace, yelling to escape, vomiting, self-protection. Ekman had taken this analysis one step further, showing that of the thousands of possible configurations of facial muscles, a select few are reliable clues to the individual’s emotions. This subset of facial expressions, by implication, signals an individual’s social commitments, be it likely attack, the inclination to soothe, to be sexually faithful in romantic bonds, or to show concern over social norms and morals.

  Emotions feel irrational from the individual’s point of view. Emotions can subvert our best attempts at self-control, composure, autonomy, and a narrow self-interested rationality. I’m not at my best at considering the recommendations of a financial advisor, solving crossword puzzles, or sorting out the costs and benefits of my actions when feeling strong emotion.

  Long-term relationships, however, require us to put aside utilitarian, cost-benefit analyses of self-interest. Emotions enable us to enact the costly commitments to another’s welfare, to respect, to maintaining fair and just relations. Emotions are statements to others that we care, and without these statements long-term relations wither and die. Emotions, Martha Nussbaum argues in Upheavals of Thought, are the idiom in which we negotiate our engagements with others. We would live in a lonely, disengaged world were it not for the emotions.

  THE SUBLIME BODY

  Like many members of his illustrious family, William James was a hypochondriac. It may have been his somatic oversensitivities that led James to publish his radical thesis about emotion in 1884. His thesis turned long-standing intuitions about emotion on their head, and in fact, the role of the head in emotion on its head. Most writers had proposed that our experience of emotion follows from the perception of emotionally evocative events. These experiences, in turn, generate bodily responses rooted in our nervous system. Your experience of embarrassment, for example, follows from your recognition that you’ve been conducting an important business meeting with toilet paper stuck to your briefcase, and it is this recognition and experience that generate the physiological response—the rush of blood to your cheeks, neck, and forehead that results in the blush.

  James’s thesis reversed this sequence of bodily response and experience: “My thesis,” James proposed, “…is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.” Whereas for Darwin, our repertoire of emotions is wired into our forty-three facial muscles, for James the topography of emotion maps onto our viscera. Every subjective state, from political rage to spiritual rapture to contentment one feels at the sounds of children playing, is registered in its own distinct “bodily reverberation.”

  Lacking experimental evidence, James turned to thought experiments. One of the mo
st illustrative was the following: What would be left of fear or love or embarrassment, or any emotion, if you took away the physiological sensations such as the heart palpitations, trembling, muscle tensions, warmth or coldness in the skin, sweaty palms, and churning of the stomach? James argued that you would be left with a purely intellectual state. Emotional experience is formed in visceral response.

  The bodily system most relevant to James’s analysis is the autonomic nervous system, or ANS. The most general function of the ANS is to maintain the internal condition of the body to enable adaptive response to ever-changing environmental events. The autonomic nervous system is like the old furnace in a home: It generates energy and distributes it through the body to support our most basic physical activities—digestion, sexual contact, fight or flight behaviors, and just moving the body through space.

  The parasympathetic autonomic nervous system incorporates nerves that originate at the top and near the bottom of the spinal cord. The parasympathetic system decreases heart rate and blood pressure, it facilitates blood flow by dilating certain arteries, it increases blood flow to erectile tissue in the penis and clitoris, and it moves digested food through the gastrointestinal tract. The parasympathetic system also constricts the pupil (for feelings of love, look for smaller rather than larger pupils), and it stimulates the secretion of various fluids in the digestive, salivary, and lachrymal glands (for tears). Scientists believe that the parasympathetic branch of the ANS helps the individual relax and restore resources and bodily function. One branch of the parasympathetic ANS originating near the top of the spinal cord—the vagus nerve—is thought to enable caretaking behavior.

  The sympathetic autonomic nervous system (ANS) involves over a dozen different neural pathways originating in the spinal cord, and most typically gets the body moving fast. It increases heart rate, blood pressure, and cardiac output. It produces vasoconstriction in most veins and arteries. It shuts down digestive processes. It is associated with contractions in the reproductive organs that are part of orgasm. And it sends fatty acids into the bloodstream, to provide quick energy to the body. The sympathetic ANS helps prepare the body for fight or flight responses.

  James’s thesis—that each distinct subjective emotion is registered in a different bodily reverberation—is anatomically plausible. The different emotions like disgust, embarrassment, compassion, and awe may originate in different patterns of activation in the heart and lungs, the arteries, and the various organs and glands distributed throughout the body. The first rigorous empirical support for James’s claim would arrive 100 years later, in an accidental discovery by Paul Ekman. As Ekman toiled away in his laboratory developing the Facial Action Coding System, he noticed something strange. As he moved the different facial muscles to record how they changed the appearance of his face, the different eyebrow positions, nose wrinkles, lip retractions, and the like, these actions actually altered how he felt. When he furrowed his brow, for example, his heart seemed to race and his blood pressure seemed to rise. When he wrinkled his nose, opened his mouth, and stuck out his tongue, his heart seemed to slow, and his stomach felt as if it was turning over. This discovery led him to a striking possibility: that movements of emotional facial muscles stimulate activation in the autonomic nervous system.

  What followed was a rather strange and controversial study by Ekman and his colleagues Robert Levenson and Wallace Friesen. It was one of the first to test James’s thesis about embodied emotion, using what came to be known as the directed facial action (DFA) task. In this study, participants followed muscle-by-muscle instructions to configure their faces into the six different expressions of the emotions that Ekman had studied in New Guinea. For example, for one expression participants were instructed to:

  Wrinkle your nose

  Raise your upper lip

  Open your mouth and stick out your tongue

  Guiding participants to achieve the correct expression required some rather unusual coaching—“no, don’t flare your nostrils, instead wrinkle your nose;” “try not to flutter your eyes when bringing your eyebrows up and in” “as you pull your lips sideways, try not to grit your teeth.” Once participants had moved their facial muscles in a fashion that conformed to the required specific emotional expression, they held the expression for ten nerve-racking seconds. During this brief time Levenson recorded several measures of the autonomic nervous system activity associated with the facial expression, which were eventually compared to an appropriate control condition.

  The prevailing view was that the ANS is too slow and diffuse to produce emotion-specific patterns of activation. In fact, it was this understanding of the autonomic nervous system that led Schachter and Singer to their vaudevillian study of epinephrine shots and anger and euphoria. The results from this first DFA study refuted this position. These findings would have caused James, a rather shy scholar, living in the shadow of his famous brother, Henry, to blush a little in this empirical confirmation of his controversial thesis. Large increases of heart rate occurred for fear, anger, and sadness, but not disgust. This makes sense given the parasympathetic involvement in digestive processes, which slow the heart down. More subtle was that finger temperature was greater for anger than fear, suggesting that our hot and cold metaphors for anger (“hotheaded”) and fear (“cold feet”) arise out of bodily sensations. During moments of anger, blood flows freely to the hands (perhaps to aid in wringing the necks of adversaries), thus increasing the temperature of fingers and toes. During periods of fear, the veins in the arms and legs constrict, leaving much of the blood supply near the chest, which enables flight-related locomotion. It is fair to say, and many critics have, that these distinctions are not the kind of emotion-specific physiological signatures that James envisioned, but these data are certainly a step in that direction.

  Levenson and Ekman subsequently packed their physiological equipment up and conducted a similar study with the Minangkabau, a matrilineal Muslim people in West Sumatra, Indonesia. The physiological distinctions between disgust and fear and anger (disgust involves the slowing of heart rate) and between fear and anger (finger temperature is hotter for anger than fear) were once again observed. This result suggests that these linkages between facial expression and autonomic physiology are universal, or at least evident in radically different cultures. And in other research adults aged sixty-five and above show attenuated ANS responses during the DFA, suggesting that, with age, people can more readily move in and out of different emotional states. This parallels studies finding that, as people age, they report experiencing more freedom and control during emotional experiences.

  James’s unusual thesis inspired other studies of the ANS—of the blush that sears the face, of tears, of goosebumps that ripple down the spine, of the swelling feeling in the chest. These studies reveal that our emotions, even those higher sentiments like sympathy and awe, are embodied in our viscera. As this line of inquiry shifted to the ethical emotions, emotions like embarrassment and compassion, a more radical inference waited on the horizon—that our very capacity for goodness is wired into our body.

  THE MORAL GUT

  Please read the following passage aloud to people whose moral intuitions matter to you. You might try your family while noshing at the dinner table, old friends reclining in asymmetrical repose around the campfire, or your colleagues sitting around a meeting table, pert and ready. At the conclusion of the passage ask whether they think the person in the passage should be punished or not:

  A man goes to the supermarket once a week. On each visit he buys a packaged chicken. He takes it home, draws his curtains, and then has sex with the chicken carcass. He then cooks the chicken and eats it by himself.

  What do you think? Lock the person up? Prevent him from coaching little league? Put the individual in handcuffs at the first sight of smoke rising from his barbecue in his backyard? Just ignore this unsettling oddity of his personal life?

  When I present this scenario to my students and ask for their punitive
judgments, they respond with revulsion. They sit in their seats and recoil reflexively with the full-blown Darwinian, Jamesian emotion of moral disgust written across their faces in raised upper lips and flared nostrils and felt in the visceral turning of the stomach and the slowing of heart rate. Then, like good students of western European culture, they recall their civics lessons about individual rights, freedoms, and privacy. They eventually decide, their viscera notwithstanding, that the individual should not be punished; he should have the right to practice such a culinary (or sexual) act in the privacy of his own home, as long as he has curtains closed and refrains from writing cookbooks or having friends over for dinner.

  People’s responses to this kind of thought experiment have led Jonathan Haidt to a new view of moral judgment, and one that prioritizes the moral gut. Haidt argues that our moral judgments of right and wrong, virtue, harm, and fairness, are the products of two kinds of processes. The first may seem fairly intuitive to you—it has occupied the thinking of those who have theorized about moral judgment for 2,000 years—and that is complex, deliberative reason. When we judge whether an action is right or wrong, we engage in many complex reasoning processes, we consider society-wide consequences, cost-benefit analyses, motives and intentions, and abstract principles like rights, freedoms, and duties. Psychological science has privileged these higher-order reasoning processes in accounts of moral judgment. This is no better typified than by the well-known theory of moral development of Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Beginning with his dissertation, Kohlberg argued that the highest forms of moral judgment require abstract considerations of rights, equality, and harm—achieved, in his research, by only 2 to 3 percent of individuals he studied around the world (most typically highly educated, upper-class males like himself!).