Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  Then there are the bonobos, now recognized as a separate species from chimpanzees, and widely envied by humans yearning for the next sexual revolution. Bonobo females are sexually active for about five years before they become fertile, and copulate freely with many of the adult males in their immediate social group. Female and male homosexual relations are common. Younger males often engage in sexual activity with older females in what looks like sexual initiation play. Sexual contact among the bonobos is the basis of friendships, conflict reduction, and play.

  The monogamous tendencies documented by our Cro-Magnon anthropologist, by contrast, are unusual for higher primates. They have never been observed, except in hominids, in species where the sexes mix in large groups without territorial boundaries. This sexual organization had several important implications. Females evolved to become sexually active throughout their menstrual cycles. Males and females could maintain exclusive sexual interest in each other. For example, in a survey of world cultures, monogamy was recognized as official policy in only 16 percent of 853 societies sampled, but sexual monogamy was the most common sexual pattern. Males evolved to know who their offspring were and to provide resources and care to them.

  Our Cro-Magnon anthropologist, then, would conclude that the social environment of the EEA would be defined by an acute tendency to care, by highly coordinated, face-to-face social exchanges, by the need to reconcile and the flattening of social hierarchies, by perpetually negotiated conflicts of interests, and by the emergence of the tendency toward sexual monogamy. It is these properties of our early social existence that gave rise to the moral emotions, of interest to Darwin but long ignored by the science of emotion that he inspired. Compassion, embarrassment, awe, love, and gratitude emerged in the recurring social interactions of early hominid social life: the attending to vulnerable offspring, the playful exchanges between kith and kin, the status moves and negotiations, the courtships and flirtations between current and potential sexual partners. These emotions were wired into the body and our social life through processes of natural and sexual selection. They evolved into the language of human social life, the species-characteristic patterns of parent-offspring relations, relations between mates and allies, dominant and subordinate members of hierarchies, and in mating relationships. These emotions became our ethical guides to help us fold into stable, cooperative communities. They operated according to three general principles, revealed in a tournament that pitted the brightest mathematicians and computer hacks against one another in an attempt to discover what strategies prevail in the survival of the fittest.

  THE WISDOM OF TIT-FOR-TAT AND THE GREAT SHIFT

  In The Evolution of Cooperation Robert Axelrod asks the following question: How might cooperation emerge in competitive environments governed by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest? How might compassion, awe, love, and gratitude, powerfully oriented toward enhancing the welfare of others, take hold within social communities governed by the pursuit of self-interest, in such a fashion that they would become favored by natural selection and encoded into our genes and nervous system?

  Axelrod himself was taken aback by striking acts of cooperation that confound assumptions about self-preservation and self-interest. In the trenches of World War I, for example, British and French soldiers were separated from their enemies, the Germans, by a few hundred yards of burned-out, treeless, muddy no-man’s-land. Brutal assaults by one side were typically met with equally fierce, lethal attacks by the other. And, yet, in these nightmarish patches of annihilation, cooperation emerged. The two sides flew certain special flags, signaling nonconfrontation. They made verbal agreements not to shoot at each other. They evolved patterns of firing their weapons in purely symbolic, harmless ways, to signal nonlethal intent. All of these cooperative strategies allowed the soldiers to eat meals peacefully and to enjoy long periods of nonengagement. On special occasions, the warring sides even fraternized with one another. In fact, cooperation became so pervasive that commanding generals had to intervene, demanding a return to deadly combat.

  From historical anecdote Axelrod turned to the prisoner’s dilemma game (see table below) to answer his question about the evolution of cooperation. He conducted a tournament in which players—cold war strategists, psychologists, prize-winning mathematicians, computer specialists, and other aficionados of the game—were invited to submit computer programs that specified what choice to make on a certain round of the prisoner’s dilemma game, given what had happened in previous rounds. In Axelrod’s first tournament, fourteen different strategies were submitted. Each was subsequently pitted against the others for 200 rounds. Here the game really mirrors human social life. Individuals with different strategic approaches went toe-to-toe with one another, much as bullies and altruists do on the grammar-school playground, Machiavellians and kindhearted colleagues do at work, hawks and doves do in foreign policy debate, and presumably our hominid predecessors—genetically prone, through random mutation, to cooperate or compete—did. Who prevailed?

  THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA GAME (PDG)

  PARTNER’S ACTION

  COOPERATE

  COMPETE

  YOUR ACTION

  COOPERATE

  5,5

  0,8

  COMPETE

  8,0

  2,2

  In the PDG, participants are required to make a simple choice: to cooperate or compete with one another. If both participants cooperate, they do well (in our example, they each receive $5). If one competes while the other cooperates, the competitor thrives at the expense of the cooperator (in our example receiving $8 to the cooperator’s zilch). If both compete, they each get $2. From the perspective of maximizing self-interest, the rational thing to do is to compete. The rub, though, is that, as in arms races, the use of shared resources, intimate life, and business partnerships, the mutual pursuit of self-interest leads to worse joint outcomes.

  A tit-for-tat strategy was submitted by Anatol Rapaport. It is disarmingly simple: It cooperates on the first round with every opponent. Then it reciprocates whatever the opponent did in the previous round. An opponent’s cooperation is rewarded with immediate cooperation. The tit-for-tat was not blindly cooperative, however: it met an opponent’s competition with competition. Defection was punished with immediate defection.

  Axelrod held a second tournament that attracted the eager submission of sixty-two strategies. All of the entrants knew the results of the first round—namely, that tit-for-tat had won. All had the opportunity to return to their blackboard, to adjust their mathematical algorithms and carry out further computer simulations, and to devise a strategy that could unseat the tit-for-tat. In this second tournament, once again the tit-for-tat prevailed. The tit-for-tat did not prevail, it is important to note, against all strategies. For example, your more sinister mind might have anticipated that a strategy that starts out competitively and always competes will have the upper hand against the tit-for-tat, because it establishes an advantage in the first round (of course, this strategy scores few points, and suffers profoundly, against other purely competitive strategies). Overall, however, tit-for-tat, so simple and cooperative in its jen-like design, achieved the highest outcomes against the society of different strategies in the tournament.

  Why tit-for-tat? Three principles underlie the tit-for-tat and also underlie emotions like compassion, embarrassment, love, and awe, which promote the meaningful life. A first is what might be called cost-benefit reversal. Giving to others is costly. Devoting resources to others—food, affection, mating opportunities, protection—entails costs to the self. In the long run, generosity risks dangerous exploitation if it is directed at others who do not reciprocate in kind. The costs of giving constrain the tendency toward cooperation.

  Built into the human organism, therefore, must be a set of mechanisms that reverse the cost-benefit analysis of giving. These mechanisms might prioritize the gains of others over those of the self, and transform others’ gains into one’s own. The tit-for-ta
t instantiates this principle of cost-benefit reversal. Its default setting is to cooperate, to benefit the other as well as the self. It is not envious; the tit-for-tat does not shift strategy as its partner’s gains mount. And it forgives; it is willing to cooperate at the first cooperative action of its partner, even after long runs of mean-spirited defection.

  The emotions that promote the meaningful life are organized according to an interest in the welfare of others. Compassion shifts the mind in ways that increase the likelihood of taking pleasure in the improved welfare of others. Awe shifts the very contents of our self-definition, away from the emphasis on personal desires and preferences and toward that which connects us to others. Neurochemicals (oxytocin) and regions of the nervous system related to these emotions promote trust and long-term devotion. We have been designed to care about things other than the gratification of desire and the maximizing of self-interest.

  A second principle is what we might call the principle of reliable identification. This is clearly evident in the tit-for-tat—it is easy to read. There is no trickery to it, no Machivellian dissembling, no strategic misinformation. It would likely take only five to ten rounds against the tit-for-tat to make confident predictions about its future moves. Contrary to what you see on cable poker tournaments (where stone faces and inscrutability are the demeanor of the day), in the emergence of cooperative bonds transparency of benevolent intent is the wiser course. Cooperation is more likely to emerge and prosper when cooperative individuals can selectively interact with other good-natured individuals.

  The implication is clear: Cooperation, kindness, and virtue are embodied in observable acts—facial muscle movements, brief vocalizations, ways of moving the hands or positioning the body, patterns of gaze activity—that are signals detectable to the ordinary eye. These outward signals of virtue, it further stands to reason, have involuntary elements that are not likely to be faked, and are likely to be put to use as people form intuitions about whom to trust and love and sacrifice for. This central premise—that for cooperation and goodness to emerge there must be outward signs of trustworthiness and cooperation—shapes the very design of the nonverbal signs of compassion, gratitude, and love. As science has begun to map the pro-social emotions in the body, new facial displays of embarrassment, shame, compassion, awe, love, and desire have been discovered. Studies of new modalities of communication, such as touch, have revealed that we can communicate gratitude, compassion, and love with a brief touch to the forearm. We are wired to detect benevolent intent in others in the moment-to-moment flow of the microinteractions of our daily living.

  Finally, the tit-for-tat evokes cooperation in others—the principle of contagious cooperation. The tendency to cooperate and give can be readily exploited by individuals who are competitive and self-serving; nice guys do finish last in certain contexts. Kind individuals fare better, however, if they are able to evoke pro-social tendencies in others, thus prompting cooperative exchange. To the extent that goodness evokes beneficent responses in others, it should flourish.

  Compassion, embarrassment, and awe are contagious at many different levels. Perceiving a person’s smile, even below subliminal awareness, prompts the perceiver to feel good and to show shifts away from fight-flight physiology. Perhaps more remarkable are the feelings evoked in hearing of others’ kindness—the swelling in the chest, goosebumps, and occasional tearing. Jonathan Haidt has called this state elevation, and he argues that we’re wired to be inspired by hearing the good acts of others. Through touch, cooperation and kindness can spread across people and physical space within seconds. The emotions that promote the meaningful life are powerfully contagious, which increases their chance for propagation, and their encoding into our nervous systems and their ritualization into cultural practice.

  We have now set the stage for our examination of emotions that promote high jen ratios and the meaningful life. We have reviewed the intellectual backdrop in which this work has taken place, which has assumed that emotions are disruptive, base tendencies, part of a human nature largely oriented toward the gratification of desire. We have considered the specifics of emotions that have been discovered in the past thirty years. We have learned that emotions serve as commitment devices, are embodied in our bodies, and shape moral judgment in systematic fashion. And in this past chapter we have sketched what kind of evolutionary environment might have given rise to emotions like compassion or gratitude, and what general principles these emotions abide by. We will now turn to scientific studies that illuminate this new swath of human design, and that will lend credence to Darwin’s insight about the origins of human goodness: that it is rooted in our emotion, and that these social instincts may be stronger than those “of any other instinct or motive.”

  5

  Embarrassment

  ON JULY 2, 1860, Eadweard Muybridge boarded a stagecoach in San Francisco bound for St. Louis, Missouri, where he was to catch a train and make his way to Europe. There he would search for rare books to fill the shelves in the bookstore that he ran with his brother. In northeastern Texas, things went horribly. The driver of the stagecoach lost control and the coach careened down a hillside. Muybridge was hurled out of the boot of the coach, smashing his face against a tree, damaging a part of his frontal lobes that enables people to draw upon their emotions in making difficult decisions.

  After six vague years in England, Muybridge returned to San Francisco. In 1872, he married Flora Shallcross Stone, twenty-one years his junior. While Muybridge was away on assignment for weeks on end, taking photographs of Yosemite and the Indian wars, Flora frequented fashionable theaters and restaurants with the dashing Major Harry Larkyns. Flora soon bore a baby boy. The little boy was more the source of uneasy suspicion than joy for Muybridge. Muybridge’s concerns were quickly confirmed: He found a photo of the baby with “Little Harry” inscribed on the back. When the baby’s nurse confirmed Muybridge’s suspicions—that Harry Larkyns was the father of the baby—Muybridge was overwhelmed.

  He took a train to Calistoga, where Larkyns was working at the Yellow Jacket Ranch. Once at the ranch, Muybridge strode up to the front door and summoned Larkyns. When Larkyns arrived, Muybridge stated in matter-of-fact fashion: “Good evening, major, my name is Muybridge,” at which time he raised his Smith & Wesson No. 2 six-shooter and shot Larkyns one inch below his left nipple. Larkyns grabbed his wound, ran through the house to his friends outside, and collapsed and died. A witness to the scene disarmed Muybridge and took him to the parlor, where Muybridge apologized to the women present for the “interruption.”

  At Muybridge’s highly publicized trial, which produced an acquittal, several witnesses spoke of the changes the stagecoach accident had produced in his character. After the accident, he seemed like a different man—eccentric, remote, aloof, and cold. His speech and manner of dress were odd. He did not clean himself regularly. He cared little for social outings. He had difficulties keeping track of the contracts that financed his photography. And he demonstrated little or no modesty, no embarrassment at his eccentricities.

  What does embarrassment have to do with incivility, remoteness, and murder? To find answers to these questions, I trained my eye in the frame-by-frame view of human social life inspired by Darwin and pioneered by Muybridge himself in his still photography. I slowed down the blur of two-second snippets of embarrassment and studied its fleeting elements—gaze shifts, head movements down, coy, compressed smiles, neck exposures, and glancing touches of the face. At the time I began my research, the display of embarrassment was thought to be a sign of confusion and thwarted intention. My research told a different story, about how these elements of embarrassment are the visible signals of an evolved force that brings people together during conflict and after breeches of the social contract, when relations are adrift, and aggressive inclinations perilously on the rise. This subtle display is a sign of our respect for others, our appreciation of their view of things, and our commitment to the moral and social order. I found tha
t facial displays of embarrassment are evolved signals whose rudiments are observed in other species, and that the study of this seemingly inconsequential emotion offers a porthole onto the ethical brain, which in Muybridge’s case had been destroyed in northeastern Texas over 140 years ago.

  SLOW WORLD, FRAME BY FRAME

  When Muybridge returned to California in 1866, brain damaged and a different man, he was swept up in a period of radical change. Space and time and the ordinary rhythms of human exchange were being annihilated by the new technologies, the steam engine, the railroad, the factory, and photography. Muybridge became a photographer of this modernization, this deconstruction of human social life.

  Muybridge is best-known for his studies of animals in motion, an obsession that began with his photos of Leland Stanford’s horses on his farm in Palo Alto. In a frenzied eighteen months at the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge shot over 100,000 photos, capturing the frame-by-frame elements of people, often nude, walking, running, doing flips, jumping, throwing discs, descending stairs, and pouring water. He shot nude women throwing balls and feeding dogs, a legless boy getting into and out of a chair, cripples walking, and near-nude men doing rifle drills, laying bricks, and throwing seventy-five-pound rocks. The subjects’ faces are typically turned away. They are lonely forms removed from the warm surround of other people.

  In this frame-by-frame world, Muybridge revealed truths previously inaccessible to the human eye, truths about whether horses’ hooves are all aloft when galloping, about the coordination of arms and legs during a simple stroll, about how the arms thrust backward after throwing a heavy object. Slow-motion scenes in film are similarly revelatory. In one scene in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Robert De Niro, as the 1940s middleweight Jake LaMotta, first realizes his desire for a young teen while staring at her feet, splashing in a pool, foot by immersing foot, in hypnotic slow motion. On the ropes in a bloody championship fight, LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson dwell in intimate eye contact in a few slow-moving frames, realizing respect amid violence, through their swollen eyes, misshapen heads, and the stroboscopic blur of their punches.