Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  Darwin’s genius was to describe the patterns of behavior we see today—patterns of affection, submissiveness, laughter, and smiling—and to trace those fleeting but precise, efficient, designed behaviors back in evolutionary time to their deeper roots, to the survival and reproduction-related contexts in which they arose. This kind of evolutionary analysis has revealed that the earliest primate smile is a submissive display subordinates use when nearing dominant primates, and fearing a jugular-threatening attack or the forceful backhand of a hairy arm. If this was the end of our search for the origins of the smile, we would be confronting the following conclusion: that the smile has its origins in the attempt to short-circuit threat, that the smile emerges out of a tremulous anxiety about being destroyed, that it is based in the most powerful strategy weaker individuals can resort to—submissiveness. Happiness, by implication, is simply the by-product of our attempts to navigate threats to our existence.

  Let’s call this thesis the Woody Allen hypothesis, thanks to his characterization of the intertwinement of suffering, happiness, and love so central to his brilliant movies, captured in the quote below:

  To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

  Of course, Woody Allen works this thesis to hilarious effect in his comedy. I’ll line up with his most impassioned fans to see his latest comedy the first night of release to laugh at the absurdity of human happiness, love, and neurotic suffering. The Woody Allen hypothesis might seem solely the provenance of his comedic imagination, but in actuality this hypothesis—that anxiety and dread lie at the core of human happiness—is a long-standing assumption in the West about the elemental ingredients, the basic molecules, of happiness. This view holds that at the core of our experience of positive emotions are threat and anxiety; our positive emotions are layered on top of, emerge out of, are antidotes to, negative emotions like despair, fear, and anger.

  For example, Silvan Tomkins, who helped forge the scientific study of emotion in the early 1960s, argued that positive emotions evident in smiles and laughs emerge with the cessation of negative states, such as anger and fear. As one example, laughter and our sense of amusement emerge out of the termination of anger. Someone angers you, your heart rate rises and your muscles tense, you’re ready to throw a punch, and then in an instant, it’s over, and you are suffused with a feeling of levity and amusement, the antimatter of anger.

  One can push this reasoning back further, to earlier intellectual predecessors with farther reach. For Freud, many pleasurable experiences, flights of the imagination—the creation of fiction, unnervingly insightful dreams, or uplifting, perspective-altering jokes—as well as many acts of altruism are really mechanisms that fight off basic human anxieties about our inappropriate sexual urges, or unacceptable inclinations toward aggression and destruction. You write an uplifting piece of fiction or give left-over food to a panhandler: The motive driving those acts is the reduction of neurotic anxiety.

  One can forgive Freud these notions in light of the Victorian culture that surrounded him and which was the fertile ground of his theorizing. One finds the Woody Allen thesis in more recent scientific inquiry. Terror management theory, a widely influential theory in social psychology, holds that many noble acts—intellectual creativity, philosophical and spiritual traditions, participation in old cultural forms like collective celebrations or our devotion to artistic and political groups—arise out of an anxiety about our inevitable demise, for these acts convince us of the possibility that we live beyond our own physical death. It is assumed in the study of parent-child attachment that the fundamental emotion that drives attachment processes between parents and children, friends and intimates, is anxiety. It is the dread of being abandoned to the perils of solitude that prompts infant smiles, coos, squeaks, and giggles, which bring parents near, and the touch and intimate, idiosyncratic nicknames and voices of romantic partners.

  The Woody Allen hypothesis has deep roots in Judeo-Christian thought about original sin and the fall from grace. Within this framework, human nature is evil, sinful, and decaying. True happiness arises not in the present life but in the escape from the body and its corruptions. Happiness is found in a spiritual state freed from the sins of the flesh, in the afterlife—in communion with God. Happiness arises in the abandonment of the present moment, and when we are free of our earthly desires. In terms more friendly to psychological science: Happiness is to be found only in the quiescence of negative states like greed, anxiety, and anger.

  As we conclude our search back in time for a precise understanding of the evolution of that most common of facial displays—the smile—we encounter a different view of the roots of happiness. We have one question left to answer: How did the first primate smile, the silent bared-teeth display, so intertwined with submissiveness, evolve into the Duchenne smile, our display of happiness? We return to Signe Preuschoft’s subtle observations, which help illuminate how the smile was freed from anxiety and defense and became the display it is today.

  Specifically, Preuschoft finds that in more hierarchical macaques, such as the rhesus macaque, there is a narrow use of the silent bared-teeth and relaxed open-mouth display. The silent bared-teeth display—the predecessor to our smile—is used only as an appeasement display. In these status-conscious monkeys, the smile is intertwined with anxiety and defense.

  There are more egalitarian macaque species, however, such as the Tonkean macaque. In these macaques, hierarchies are flatter and power is equally distributed. This social condition more closely resembles the hierarchies observed in our hominid predecessors and contemporary hunter-gatherers—power differences are reduced, and equality is more pronounced. In egalitarian primates, food sharing is pervasive, alliances among subordinates are common, and social life consists more of negotiation than assertion of force. Preuschoft has found that in less stratified macaques, monkeys put the silent bared-teeth display to many new uses: to reassure, to affiliate, and to reconcile, as well as to appease. This is a standard evolutionary principle—that adaptations such as the silent bared-teeth display are put to new uses in a broader array of contexts to respond adaptively to shifting selection pressures. With the rise of primate equality, the silent bared-teeth display became freed from its one-to-one mapping to fear and submissiveness, and was extended into new social contexts that promote affectionate cooperation and affiliation. This display became a sign of friendly intent, and the trigger of behavioral processes that allow for close proximity and cooperation—grooming, embraces, hand clasping, and the like. In egalitarian primates, the silent bared-teeth display folded into affiliative, pleasurable exchanges.

  The physical signature of human happiness is the D smile. The D smile did not originate in contexts that we today think are fast tracks to happiness. The D smile did not originate in experiences of sensory pleasure—Cro-Magnon individuals savoring fresh meat or the ripest of berries. It did not originate in contexts where our hominid predecessors enjoyed shifts upward in social status. The first D smile did not originate in contexts in which one individual enjoyed the accumulation of important resources. In fact, Christopher Boehm has summarized studies of hunter-gatherer hierarchies, and found that they systematically downplay any sudden abundance in resources through modesty and generosity.

  In our primate evolution, the D smile was the first vocabulary of friendly intent and affection, in particular between near-equals. High jen ratios and the roots of human happiness are found in those moments when individuals moved toward one another toward cooperative and intimate ends. Our ultrasociality required this, as well as an all-purpose signal of cooperative intent, one that is highly visible and unambiguous, and one that could preempt conflict and spread cooperative relations pote
ntly and quickly, faster than a stranger could cock his arm and throw the first punch. Evolution’s answer to the question of how to most powerfully communicate our capacity for jen was like that of the classical Greeks: the smile.

  7

  Laughter

  IN THE 1982 FILM Quest for Fire, three hapless Neanderthal males leave their marsh-dwelling tribe in search of fire—the source of their haphazard provision of food and the hierarchical organization of their group. During their quest the three travelers escape from saber-toothed tigers, encounter towering woolly mammoths, and scare off a potential attack from a small tribe of paunchy, red-haired Neanderthals. In this last escapade, they rescue a different kind of early human. She is a more evolved female Homo habilis, finer in bone structure and facial morphology, lacking the carpet of hair covering the body, and adorned in patterned, tribal paints.

  This female leads the three males on a primordial Jules and Jim road trip to her village. In this adventure, several distinctions between the Neanderthals and the Homo habilis come into sharp focus. The Homo habilis have developed special tools: a small board with a hole in it and a rounded stick to twist to create fire whenever needed—a radical innovation appreciated even by the dim-witted Neanderthals. They have more complex vocalizations than the grunts, groans, and growls of the Neanderthals. They beautify themselves with rudimentary paints. They live in sophisticated huts, organized in patterns comparable to that of the friendliest cul-de-sacs. They cultivate plants and animals—so critical, Jared Diamond argues, to shifts in the evolution of human culture. They prefer face-to-face sex. And they laugh.

  In one scene, the three Neanderthals and their new consort are reclining in the dappled light of a shady tree, grooming, scanning the environment, picking bugs out of the air to eat. Out of the blue a rock bounces off one of the male’s jutting foreheads, prompting a scratch on the head, a cursory look around, and then a return to a quiet state of mindless digestion. The Homo habilis witnesses this simplest form of humor (I spent a good part of my youth bouncing harmless objects—acorns, olives, Good & Plenties—off my brother’s head), and breaks into laughter. The three Neanderthals have no idea what to make of the weird sounds emanating from her mouth.

  The thesis that laughter represents a critical evolutionary shift in hominid evolution is not as far-fetched as one might imagine. It is a point that evolutionists Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson have made. The laugh might rightfully lay claim to the status of toolmaking, agriculture, the opposable thumb, self-representation, imitation, the domestication of animals, upright gait, and symbolic language—an evolutionary signature of a great shift in our social organization, accompanied by shifts in our nervous system. What separates mammals from reptiles are the raw materials of laughter—play, and the ability to communicate with the voice (when’s the last time you heard the family gecko howl for a nibble of your salmon or purr for a scratch behind the ears?).

  More striking is how human laughter differs from that of our primate relatives—gorillas, chimps, and bonobos. In the most rudimentary sense, the laughter of the great apes resembles our own. Their relaxed open-mouth displays and panting vocalizations look and sound quite familiar. They emit these displays in similar contexts as we do—when being tickled and during rough-and-tumble play. As with humans, chimps and apes are most likely to show open-mouthed play faces in developmental periods (adolescence) and times of day (leading up to feeding) where play can defuse conflict. Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns than that of humans. As a result, it is emitted as short, repetitive, single-breath pants, and has little acoustic variety.

  Human laughter, by contrast, is stunning in its diversity and complexity. It is a language unto its own. There are derisive laughs, flirtatious laughs, singsongy laughs, embarrassed groans, piercing laughs, laughs of tension, silent, head-lightening laughs of euphoria, barrel-chested laughs of strength, laughs that signal the absurdity of the shortness of life and the extent to which we care about our existence, contemptuous laughs that signal privilege and class, and laughs that are little more than grunts or growls. It is because of this heterogeneity that laughter has escaped simple theoretical formulation. It is the analysis of this heterogeneity that will lead to an answer about why we laugh.

  LAUGHTER FACTS

  In T. C. Boyle’s Drop City, a community of hippies, devoted to free love, spontaneous ritual, and immersion in nature, moves from their compound, Drop City in Sonoma County, California, to the last outpost of unspoiled nature—arctic Alaska. This journey, an expression of the American spirit, provides ample opportunity for laughter amid the inevitable conflicts of free love and broken-down cars and all too earthly negotiations of who does the dishes in a commune devoted to passion and ecstasy. Boyle’s descriptions of laughter reveal several insights about laughter:

  He heard Star laugh though, a hard harsh dart of a laugh that stuck right in him as he went off into the night, looking for something else altogether.

  Her first response was a laugh, musical and ringing, a laugh that made the place swell till it was like a concert hall.

  And then he began to chuckle, a low soft breathless push of air that might have been the first two bars of a song.

  There was a smattering of nervous laughter when he descended the steps and the laughter boiled up into a wild irrepressible storm of hoots and catcalls and whinnying shrieks as the door pulled shut and Norm put the bus in gear and headed off toward the lights of Canada.

  Star let out a laugh in response to something Jimmy had said, and then they were all laughing—even him, even Marco, though he had no idea what he was laughing about or for or whether laughing was the appropriate response to the situation.

  A new round of laughter. Dale Murray joined in too, whinnying along with the rest of them.

  Suddenly he let out a laugh—a high sharp bark of a laugh that startled the dog out of his digestive trance—and he raised his head and gave Marco a sidelong look.

  “Big spender,” she said, and her laugh trailed out over the river, hit the bank and came rebounding back again.

  He then heard a squeal from Merry, or maybe it was Lydia, and a long sustained jag of laughter from all three of them, as if the very fact of his existence was the funniest thing in the world.

  There were a few sniggers, a nervous laugh or two.

  But they ate caribou tongue and Eskimo ice cream (caribou fat whipped into a confection with half a ton of sugar and a scattering of sour berries; Pan tasted it—“Ice cream, brother, it’s ice cream,” Joe Bosky told him, egging him on, but he spat it right back out into the palm of his hand, and the whole room went down in flames, laughing their asses off, funniest thing in the world, white man).

  Pamela took one look at her and burst out laughing—she had to set down her cup because she was laughing so hard, her eyes squeezed down to semi-circular slits, her hands gone to her temples as if to keep her head anchored on her shoulders.

  A first and perhaps most basic laughter fact is that nearly all laughter—darts, barks, sniggers, whinnies, hoots, jags, shrieks, catcalls—is social. Estimates indicate that laughter is thirty times more likely to occur around others than in isolation. We must move outside the individual’s mind to understand ways in which laughter binds people together.

  Laughter is contagious. Laughter spreads to others, it washes over them, it sticks in people like darts, it fills rooms with a certain quality, it prompts others to begin laughing for no reason intelligible to the conscious mind. In Drop City, laughter routinely boils up into rounds, cascades, and storms. Rooms swell with laughter like music halls.

  Laughter produces a remarkable physical state. People laugh their heads and asses off. During laughter, the body goes limp. The individual is incapable of any sort of motion. I’ve asked my daughters in the midst of a bout of being tickled to try to willfully carry out certain basic movements—whistle, wink, stick their tongue out at me—and they didn’t come close.
In the paroxysm of laughter, the body falls into a quiescent, otherworldly state.

  And perhaps most subtly, laughter is intertwined with our breathing. In Boyle’s descriptions, laughter accompanies pushes of air out of the mouth. With the exception of certain pathological laughs (Merv Griffin, Arnold Horshack on the 1970s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter), almost all laughter occurs as people exhale. This simple laughter fact may seem incidental to our understanding of laughter, but in fact it is fundamental. Here’s why.

  Respiration and heart rate are two of the body’s most essential rhythms. These two rhythms play off each other like the voices of singers in an a cappella group. When you breathe in, your heart rate rises. When you breathe out, your heart rate drops, as does your blood pressure, and you move toward a state of relaxation.

  This lung-heart dynamic has made its way into book titles (Waiting to Exhale), aphorisms (“Take a deep breath”), ethical mottoes in grammar-school classrooms (“Take a breath and count to ten”), the advice coaches give to their players attempting the game-winning free throw (they systematically exhale), and the thousand-year-old breathing exercises of yoga practices. Exhalation reduces fight/ flight physiology, especially heart rate, calming the body down. In fact, a series of studies in the 1970s and 1980s found that simply having individuals engage in deep breathing led to reduced blood pressure, stress, and anxiety, and increased calm.