Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  The second, more democratic element of moral judgment, almost completely ignored in psychological science, is the gut. Emotions provide rapid intuitions about fairness, harm, virtue, kindness, and purity. When you first reacted to the sex-with-chicken example, part of your response was most likely a rapid, ancient feeling of revulsion and disgust at the image of such a species-mixing, impure sexual practice. In one study, my first mentor, Phoebe Ellsworth, and I had individuals move their facial muscles, much as Ekman and colleagues did with the DFA, into the facial expression of anger or sadness. As participants held the expression, they made quick judgments about who was to blame for problems they might experience in the future in their romantic, work, and financial lives—other people or impersonal, situational factors. Those participants who made these judgments with an angry expression on their face blamed other people for the injustices. Those with faces configured into a sad expression attributed the same problems to fate and impersonal factors. Our moral judgments of blame are guided by sensations arising in the viscera and facial musculature.

  Haidt reasons that thousands of generations of human social evolution have honed moral intuitions in the form of embodied emotions like compassion, gratitude, embarrassment, and awe. Emotions are powerful moral guides. They are upheavals that propel us to protect the foundations of moral communities—concerns over fairness, obligations, virtue, kindness, and reciprocity. Our capacity for virtue and concern over right and wrong are wired into our bodies.

  If you are not convinced, consider the following neuroimaging study of Joshua Greene and colleagues, which suggests that the emotional and reasoning elements of moral judgment activate different regions of the brain. Participants judged different moral and nonmoral dilemmas in terms of whether they considered the action to be appropriate or not. Some moral dilemmas were impersonal and relatively unemotional. For example, in the “trolley dilemma” the participant imagines a runaway trolley headed for five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its course. The only way to save them is to hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks, where it will kill one person instead of five. When asked to indicate whether it’s appropriate or not to hit that switch and save five lives, participants answer yes with little hesitation.

  As an illustration of the emotionally evocative scenarios, consider the “footbridge dilemma.” Again five people’s lives are threatened by a runaway trolley. In this case the participant imagines standing next to a very heavy stranger on a footbridge over the trolley tracks. If the participant pushes the rotund stranger off the bridge with his own hands and onto the tracks, the stranger dies, but the train veers off its course, thus saving five lives (the participant’s own weight, it is explained, is insufficient to send the trolley off the track). Is it appropriate to push the stranger off the footbridge?

  While participants responded to several dilemmas of this sort, functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques ascertained which parts of the participant’s brain were active. The personal moral dilemmas activated regions of the brain that previous research had found to be involved in emotion. The impersonal moral dilemmas and the nonmoral dilemmas activated brain regions associated with working memory, regions centrally involved in more deliberative reasoning.

  When the Dalai Lama visited the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and reflected, stunned, upon this most horrific of human atrocities, he offered the following: “Events such as those which occurred at Auschwitz are violent reminders of what can happen when individuals—and by extension, whole societies—lose touch with basic human feeling.” His claim is that the direction of human culture—toward cooperation or genocide—rests upon being guided by basic moral feelings. Confucius was on the same page: “the ability to take one’s own feelings as a guide—that is the sort of thing that lies in the direction of jen.” Martha Nussbaum, bucking the trends of moral philosophy, concurs by arguing that emotions at their core contain judgments of value, about fairness, harm, rights, purity, reciprocity—all of the core ideas of moral and ethical living. Emotions are guides to moral reasoning, to ethical action in the fast, face-to-face exchanges of our social life. Reason and passion are collaborators in the meaningful life.

  ENEMIES NO MORE

  We often resort to thought experiments to discern the place of emotion in social life. Natural-state thought experiments plumb our intuition about what humans were like prior to culture, civilization, or guns, germs, and steel. Ideal-mind thought experiments—used in meditation and in philosophical exercises like the moral philosopher John Rawls’s veil of ignorance—ask us to envision the mind operating in ideal conditions, independent of the press of our own desires or the web of social relations we find ourselves in.

  Emotions have not fared well in these thought experiments. Philosophers have most consistently argued that emotions should be extirpated from social life. This train of thought finds its clearest expression in the third century BC, with the Epicureans and Stoics; it extends to St. Augustine, St. Paul, and the Puritans, and on to many contemporary accounts of ethical living (for example, Ayn Rand). In the words of the influential American psychologist B. F. Skinner: “We all know that emotions are useless and bad for our peace of mind.”

  If this brief philosophical history seems a bit arcane, consider the metaphors that we routinely use in the English language to explain our emotions to others (see table below), revealed by linguists Zoltán Kövecses and George Lakoff. We conceive of emotions as opponents (and not allies). Emotions are illnesses (and not sources of health). Emotions are forms of insanity (and not moments of understanding). We wrestle with, become ill from, and are driven mad by love, sadness, anger, guilt, shame, and even seemingly more beneficial states like amusement. The opposite locks up the Western mind: Imagine referring to anger, love, or gratitude as a friend, a form of health, or a kind of insight or clarity. We assume that emotions are lower, less sophisticated, more primitive ways of perceiving the world, especially when juxtaposed with loftier forms of reason.

  METAPHORS OF EMOTIONS

  Emotions = Opponents

  I’m wrestling with my grief My enthusiasm got the best of me I couldn’t hold back my laughter

  Emotions = Disease

  I’m sick with love

  Emotions = Insanity

  He’s mad with rage

  As Paul Ekman began to publish his work on the Foré, his papers set in motion a scientific revolution that required a radical revision of time-honored assumptions about human nature. This science began to uncover how emotions are wired into our facial anatomy, our vocalizations, our autonomic responses, and our brains. We learned that emotions support the commitments that make up the social contract with friends, romantic partners, siblings, and offspring. Emotions are not to be mastered by orderly reason; they are rational, principled judgments in their own right. Emotions do not subvert ethical living; they are guides to moral action, and they tell us what matters. Emotions like compassion, embarrassment, gratitude, and awe are the substance of high jen ratios and the meaningful life.

  Deeper insights into the origins of the emotions—the very question that spurred Darwin to write Expression and that led Ekman to New Guinea—would come from new insights into the nature of human evolution. This new evolutionary literature, the topic of our next chapter, would reveal that those hominid predecessors guided by emotions such as compassion, embarrassment, and awe fared better in the tasks of survival, reproduction, and raising offspring to the age of viability. Evolution, it would seem, smiles upon those with higher jen ratios.

  4

  Survival of the Kindest

  IN NOVEMBER 1943, S. L. A. “Slam” Marshall, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, arrived with American troops on the beaches of Makin Island to fight the Japanese. After four days of bloody, chaotic combat, the Americans secured the island. In the ensuing calm, Marshall was asked to interview several soldiers to clarify some specifics of the four-day battle, with medals, heroic claims, and rights to w
artime stories at stake. Marshall subsequently interviewed hundreds of soldiers who fought in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, often immediately after engagement. In 1947, he published the results from these interviews in Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command.

  His interviews yielded an astonishing finding: Only 15 percent of World War II riflemen had fired at the enemy during combat. Often soldiers refused to fire at the enemy with superior officers barking commands nearby and bullets zipping past their heads. In the wake of this revelatory finding, the army radically changed how it prepared soldiers to kill. Infantry training exercises played down the notion that shooting kills humans. Soldiers were taught to shoot at nonhuman targets—trees, hills, bushes, cars, hovels, huts. The effects were dramatic. According to army estimates, 90 percent of soldiers in the Vietnam War fired at their enemies.

  If Charles Darwin and his close intellectual peers—Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace—were to discuss this finding with Charlie Rose or on C-SPAN—that in the heat of battle soldiers most typically refused to harm fellow human beings in spite of their self-preservation being on the line—they would reach contrasting conclusions. For Alfred Russel Wallace, a codiscoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, this concern for the welfare of others would be taken as evidence of how God has shaped human beings’ more benevolent tendencies. Wallace argued that while the body was shaped by natural selection, our mental faculties, and most notably our capacity for good, were created by “an unseen universe of the Spirit” (p. 354). It was some kind of spiritual force that kept soldiers from pulling the trigger to end the lives of enemies.

  T. H. Huxley, progeny of one of England’s well-known intellectual families, was evolutionary theory’s fiercest early advocate and public spokesman. In Oxford and Cambridge circles he was nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog. He would have readily attributed Marshall’s findings to the constructive forces of culture. In Huxley’s view, human nature is aggressive and competitive, forged by evolution in a violent, selfish struggle for existence. Altruistic actions oriented toward benefiting the welfare of others—soldiers refusing to harm, daily civilities of public life, kindness toward strangers—must be cultivated by education and training. Cultural forces arise to counteract the base instincts that evolution has produced at the core of human nature.

  Darwin would have reached yet a different conclusion, parting ways with his two colleagues. Had he been able to do so, he might have placed Marshall’s empirical gem in his first book on humans, Descent of Man, published twelve years after the On the Origin of Species. In Descent, Darwin argued that the social instincts—instincts toward sympathy, play, belonging in groups, caring for offspring, reciprocating acts of generosity, and worrying about the regard of others—are part of human nature. In Darwin’s typically modest but provocative prose:

  The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them. The services may be of a definite and evidently instinctive nature; or there may be only a wish and readiness, as with most of the higher social animals, to aid their fellows in certain general ways. But these feelings and services are by no means extended to all the individuals of the same species, only to those of the same association…. after the power of language had been acquired, and the wishes of the community could be expressed, the common opinion how each member ought to act for the public good, would naturally become in a paramount degree the guide to action. But it should be borne in mind that however great weight we may attribute to public opinion, our regard for the approbation and disapprobation of our fellows depends on sympathy, which, as we shall see, forms an essential part of the social instinct, and is indeed its foundation-stone. Lastly, habit in the individual would ultimately play a very important part in guiding the conduct of each member; for the social instinct, together with sympathy, is, like any other instinct, greatly strengthened by habit, and so consequently would be obedience to the wishes and judgment of the community.

  Our moral capacities, Darwin reasoned, are rooted in sympathy. These capacities are constrained by association or familial relatedness (anticipating what would come to be called, nearly 100 years later, kin selection theory). They are strengthened by habit and social practice. Later, in explaining acts of altruism, Darwin makes an even stronger claim:

  Such actions as the above appear to be the simple result of the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive; for they are performed too instantaneously for reflection, or for pleasure or pain to be felt at the time; though, if prevented by any cause, distress or even misery might be felt. In a timid man, on the other hand, the instinct of self-preservation, might be so strong, that he would be unable to force himself to run any such risk perhaps not even for his own child.

  Our evolved tendencies toward goodness, Darwin proposed, are performed with the automatic, well-honed speed of other reflexes—the flinch of the body at a loud, unexpected sound, the grasping reflex of the young infant. They are stronger than those toward self-preservation, the default orientation of timid men. Darwin’s early formulations of the social instincts of humans were clearly tilted toward a positive jen ratio, where the good is stronger than the bad.

  CRO-MAGNON FIELD NOTES

  There are many books I would love to read but, alas, never will: the autobiography of Jesus; a stream-of-consciousness narrative of Virginia Woolf’s last thoughts as she plunged into the River Ouse, weighed down by heavy rocks tucked into her coat pockets. As alluring as those certain best sellers would be, at the top of my list would be the field notes of a Cro-Magnon anthropologist, who would have had the wherewithal to travel through Africa, Europe, and Asia to characterize the social life of our most immediate hominid predecessors some 30,000 to 50,000 years ago.

  A detailed portrayal of the day in the life of our hominid predecessors would shed light on our environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). The EEA is an abstract description of the social and physical environment in which the human species evolved. It is within this environment that certain genetically based traits—for example, to avoid foods with foul odors that signal decay, to respond with charm and sexual readiness when a female is ovulating—led to greater success in the games of survival and reproduction, and became encoded into the human genome, while others led to increased probabilities of fatality and cold shoulders from potential mates, and quickly to the scrap heap of evolution.

  These Cro-Magnon field notes would flesh out Darwin’s early evolutionary analysis of our moral capacities. A clear picture of early hominid social life would tell us of the recurring social contexts that reduce the chances of genes making it to the next generation—the perils of escalated aggression between males, the prevalence of infidelity and strategic cuckoldry, the reduced likelihood of offspring surviving if fathers are not engaged. We would also read of the social tendencies that increase the chances of gene replication—the sharing of food or caring for offspring, social strategies that allow females and males to rise in social hierarchies, thereby gaining preferential access to resources and mates. Knowing these social facets of the EEA would then lay a platform for understanding the deeper origins of where the blush of embarrassment comes from, why we can communicate pro-social emotions like gratitude or compassion by one-second touches to a stranger’s arm, how devoted love is represented in the flow of certain neuropeptides in the bloodstream.

  Absent these Cro-Magnon field notes, we can turn to several kinds of evidence, and a Darwinian capacity for going beyond the information given, to envisage our EEA. We can turn to stud
ies of our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos in particular—with whom the human species shared a common ancestor some seven to eight million years ago. Here similarities in social existence—caregiving or hierarchical organization, for example—tell us about basic primate social tendencies and the organization of the pro-social branches of the nervous system. Differences—for example in pair bonding patterns—uncover likely sources of the specifics of human design, and new dimensions to our emotional life.

  We can turn to the scanty archaeological record of human ancestry. Here exciting debates are clarifying the meaning of piles of animal bones near ancient hearths, shifts in skeletal structure in the predecessors of Homo sapiens, and the first attempts at visual art and music. From these debates we are learning some basic facts about our hominid predecessors.

  Finally, we can rely on the detailed observations of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in remote places in the Amazon, Africa, and New Guinea. These rich descriptions of hunter-gatherer social life—studies of the !Kung San of southern Africa, for example—provide hints into what day-to-day life might have been like for our hunter-gatherer predecessors tens of thousands of years ago.