Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  Human history, Glover contends, can be thought of as a contest between cruelty and compassion, tellingly revealed in wartime sympathy breakthroughs, when the force of compassion overwhelms the edicts of war. You could make the same case about human nature. Fight/flight tendencies of self-preservation are continually at odds with tendencies to care in the electrochemical flow of our nervous systems. The content of the mind shifts between the press of self-interest and the push of compassion. The ebb and flow of marriages, families, friends, and workplaces track the dynamic tension between these two great forces—raw self-interest and a devotion to the welfare of the other. The study of emotion is experiencing its own “sympathy breakthrough” thanks to recent studies of compassion, which are revealing this caretaking emotion to be built into our nervous systems. The study of this emotion holds new clues about the health of marriages, families, and communities.

  THE COMPASSION CONSPIRACY

  As Charles Darwin developed his first account of the evolution of humans in the Descent of Man, he argued for “the greater strength of the social or maternal instincts than that of any other instinct or motive.” His reasoning was disarmingly intuitive: In those collectives of our hominid predecessors, communities of more sympathetic individuals were more successful in raising healthier offspring to the age of viability and reproduction—the surest route to getting genes to the next generation, the sine qua non of evolution.

  Darwin’s elevation of sympathy as the strongest of our instincts, and as the foundation of ethical systems, has not attracted many adherents in the annals of Western thought. More typically, sympathy and compassion have been treated with dismissive skepticism or downright derision. Thomas Huxley argued that evolution did not produce a biologically based capacity to care; instead, kindness, cooperation, and compassion are cultural creations, constructed within religious commandments and rituals, in norms governing public exchange, codified in social organizations, as desperate attempts to rein in, to countervail man’s base tendencies. The regularity of parents abandoning and abusing children, infanticide, torture, and genocide lend compelling, if not overwhelming, credence to Huxley’s counterpoint. Scientists searching for an evolved, biological basis of compassion, by implication, would be grasping at the air, tilting their labs at windmills.

  Other influential thinkers in the Western canon, reveals philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her brilliant history of the study of emotion in Upheavals of Thought, have gone further. The trend in Western thought has been to argue that compassion is an unreliable guide to ethical behavior (see quotations below). Compassion is “blind,” too subjective to be a universal guide to the conscience and ethical conduct. It is imbued with the individual’s idiosyncratic concerns (what’s unwarranted suffering in my eyes is justified in yours). Compassion is “weak” it enfeebles the individual in the hard work of meting out justice.

  A feeling of sympathy is beautiful and amiable; for it shows a charitable interest in the lot of other men…. But this good-natured passion is nevertheless weak and always blind.

  IMMANUEL KANT, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

  If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

  AYN RAND, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World”

  A transvaluation of values, under the new pressure and hammer of which a conscience should be steeled and a heart transformed into brass, as to bear the weight of such a responsibility.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Beyond Good and Evil, section 203

  Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.

  MACHIAVELLI

  These old notions have blinded the scientific study of compassion. New empirical studies, though, have mushroomed, and yet again give the nod to Darwin. Compassion is a biologically based emotion rooted deep in the mammalian brain, and shaped by perhaps the most potent of selection pressures humans evolved to adapt to—the need to care for the vulnerable. Compassion is anything but blind; it is finely attuned to vulnerability. It is anything but weak; it fosters courageous, altruistic action often at significant cost to the self. These discoveries would be founded upon the study of a region of the nervous system that has remained mysterious to scientific understanding until recently.

  LOST VAGUS

  In calling sympathy the strongest of instincts, Darwin was touching a nerve in the veins of canonical Western thought. Little did he know, Darwin was also touching another nerve, literally a bundle of nerves, known as the vagus nerve, which resides in the chest and, when activated, produces a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat. The vagus nerve originates in the top of the spinal cord and then winds its way through the body (vagus is Latin for wandering), connecting up to facial muscle tissue, muscles that are involved in vocalization, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and liver, and the digestive organs. In a series of controversial papers, physiological psychologist Steve Porges has made the case that the vagus nerve is the nerve of compassion, the body’s caretaking organ.

  How so? First of all, Porges notes that the vagus nerve innervates the muscle groups of communicative systems involved in caretaking—the facial musculature and the vocal apparatus. In our research, for example, we have found that people systematically sigh—little quarter-second, breathy expressions of concern and understanding—when listening to another person describe an experience of suffering. The sigh is a primordial exhalation, calming the sigher’s fight/flight physiology, and a trigger of comfort and trust, our study found, in the speaker. When we sigh in soothing fashion, or reassure others in distress with our concerned gaze or oblique eyebrows, the vagus nerve is doing its work, stimulating the muscles of the throat, mouth, face, and tongue to emit soothing displays of concern and reassurance.

  Second, the vagus nerve is the primary brake on our heart rate. Without activation of the vagus nerve, your heart would fire on average at about 115 beats per minute, instead of the more typical 72 beats per minute. The vagus nerve helps slow the heart rate down. When we are angry or fearful, our heart races, literally jumping five to ten beats per minute, distributing blood to various muscle groups, preparing the body for fight or flight. The vagus nerve does the opposite, reducing our heart rate to a more peaceful pace, enhancing the likelihood of gentle contact in close proximity with others.

  Third, the vagus nerve is directly connected to rich networks of oxytocin receptors, those neuropeptides intimately involved in the experience of trust and love. As the vagus nerve fires, stimulating affiliative vocalizations and calmer cardiovascular physiology, presumably it triggers the release of oxytocin, sending signals of warmth, trust, and devotion throughout the brain and body and, ultimately, to other people.

  Finally, the vagus nerve is unique to mammals. Reptilian autonomic nervous systems share the oldest portion of the vagus nerve with us, what is known as the dorsal vagal complex, responsible for immobilization behavior: for example, the shock response when physically traumatized; more speculatively, shame-related behavior when socially humiliated. Reptiles’ autonomic nervous systems also include the sympathetic region of the autonomic nervous system involved in fight/flight behavior. But as caretaking began to define a new class of species—mammals—a region of the nervous system, the vagus nerve, emerged evolutionarily to help support this new category of behavior.

  Historians of science have rated Charles Darwin as off-the-charts in terms of kindness and warmth relative to other groundbreaking scientists (he was the only passenger on the Beagle about whom not a negative word was said, and was friend to captain and ship hands alike). As Darwin wrote in his Down House, amid the noisy, loving spectacle of his ten children, he most certainly felt those sensations of expansive warmth in the chest associated with the vagus nerve. The humming of the vagus nerve may have led Darwin to his often neglected thesis that sympathy and the maternal instincts are
the centerpiece of human social evolution, that they bring the good in others to completion and are a foundation of high jen ratios. Some hundred and thirty years later a new science has yielded similar insights.

  NERVES OF COMPASSION

  Steve Porges’s wild-eyed claims about the vagus nerve would have inspired William James. James was the progenitor of the notion that our emotions originate in patterned responses in the autonomic nervous system, which lies below the brain stem and coordinates basic tasks like the distribution of blood, digestion, sexual response, and breathing. What could be more compelling proof that our emotions are embodied in peripheral physiological response, “reverberations of the viscera,” in James’s Victorian language, than the notion that that loftiest of human emotions—compassion—has its own bundle of nerves located deep within the chest?

  Walter Cannon, a student of William James’s, was not so convinced by his advisor’s provocative armchair musings. The responses of the autonomic nervous system, Cannon countered, do not carry enough specific meaning to account for the many distinctions people make in their emotional experience. Patterned changes in heart rate, breathing, goose bumps, pupil dilation, cotton mouth, and sweaty palms could never give rise to nuances in experiences of gratitude, reverence, compassion, pity, love, devotion, desire, and pride.

  On top of that, Cannon continued, the autonomic responses of emotion are simply too slow to account for the rapidity with which we experience emotion or move from one emotion to another. The autonomic nervous system typically produces measurable responses within fifteen to thirty seconds after the emotion-eliciting event. Clearly our emotional experience arises more rapidly. The blush, for example, peaks at about fifteen seconds after the embarrassing event; our experience of embarrassment, in contrast, arises immediately upon the recognition of the mistake we have made. In Cannon’s eyes, the autonomic nervous system is too slow-moving a system to account for the meteoric emergence and nimble shifting of our emotional experiences.

  Finally, and perhaps most persuasively, we are relatively insensitive to the changes in the autonomic nervous system—heart rate increases, sweaty palms, vasoconstriction in the veins of your arms or legs, blushing, or activity in your intestines. Cannon noted, for example, that people actually feel little when their intestines are cut or burned. Slightly less dramatic empirical studies have found that when people are asked to guess whether their heart rate has increased or decreased, they most typically fare little better than chance. Even if the autonomic nervous system generated emotion-specific responses, it is not clear that we would perceive these bodily changes with our conscious minds. It is even less clear to assume that these dimly perceived bodily sensations would weave their way into our emotional experience. It would be foolhardy, by implication, to seek to locate all the nuances of compassion—the sense of undeserved harm, the feeling of concern and common humanity, the urge to help—in something so diffusely distributed in the peripheral nervous system as the vagus nerve.

  Undaunted, my student Chris Oveis has risked his career on the very hypothesis that the vagus nerve is a bundle of caretaking nerves. He did so by starting in an obvious place—suffering. Humans are wired to respond to harm from the first moments of life. One-day-old infants cry in response to another infant’s cries of distress but not their own. Many two-year-old children, upon seeing another cry, will engage in the purest forms of comfort, offering their toys and gestures of visible concern to the person suffering. Pictures of sad faces presented so fast participants don’t even know what they’ve seen trigger activation in the amygdala.

  So we asked first whether the exposure to harm would trigger activation in the vagus nerve, and whether an emotion that revolves around the inclination to distance oneself from weak others—pride—would not. In the compassion condition, participants viewed images of malnourished children, suffering during wartime, and infants in distress, images that fit the Aristotelian notion of the purest elicitors of compassion: another’s suffering that is extreme and undeserved. Participants in the pride condition viewed slides that would arouse the pride of our UC Berkeley undergraduates—images of landmarks on the campus, pictures of Cal sporting events, and, perhaps the most inspiring of all, a picture of the Cal mascot, Oski the bear.

  As participants viewed 2.5 minutes of slides, we measured activity of the vagus nerve with electrodes attached to the chest and a band placed around the abdomen to measure breathing. These measures yield an index called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), which has been developed in the past fifteen years to capture activation in the vagus nerve. RSA works as follows. When we inhale, the vagus nerve is inhibited, and heart rate speeds up. When we exhale, the vagus nerve is activated, and heart rate slows down (which is why so many breathing practices prioritize exhaling and are soothing to the soul—and a source, perhaps, of compassion). The vagus nerve controls how breathing influences fluctuations in heart rate. We measure the strength of the vagus nerve response, therefore, by capturing how heart rate variability is linked to cyclical changes in respiration.

  The first finding of importance from Chris’s study was that brief exposure to images of harm triggered activation of the vagus nerve more so than the images that made participants proud. Perhaps more convincingly, participants’ experiences of compassion and pride were, as James would have hypothesized, quite sensitive to fluctuations in the activity of the vagus nerve. Participants’ reports of their feelings of compassion increased as their vagus nerve activity increased; participants’ self-reports of pride decreased as their vagus nerve activity increased. With increasing vagus nerve response, participants’ orientation shifted toward one of care rather than attention to what is strong about the self.

  Then our participants, feeling surges of either compassion or pride, indicated how similar they themselves were to twenty other groups. They rated their common humanity with Democrats, Republicans, saints, small children, convicted felons, terrorists, the homeless, the elderly, farmers, and, God forbid, Stanford students. Why this odd task? To ascertain whether compassion shifts people’s sense of similarity to others—a potent enabler of altruistic action. Philosopher Peter Singer has argued that this sense of similarity, or circle of care, is a core ethical principle that emerged as part of the evolution of the ethical mind. In Singer’s words, evolution has

  bequeath(ed) humans with a sense of empathy—an ability to treat other people’s interests as comparable to one’s own. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family. People outside that circle were treated as subhuman and can be exploited with impunity. But over history the circle has expanded…from village to the clan to the tribe to the nation to other races to other sexes…and other species.

  This expanding circle of care gives rise to a belief in equality, to the extension of individual rights to others. It is the target of many meditation exercises, which discipline the mind to come to treat all sentient beings with loving kindness. It is advocated by spiritual leaders, from the Buddha to Jesus. It is at the heart of jen. And it is a deep intuition that is intertwined with activity of the vagus nerve in the depths of the human chest. Our participants made to feel compassion by viewing images of harm reported a broader circle of care—they reported a greater sense of similarity to the 20 groups—than people feeling pride. This feeling of similarity to others increased as individuals’ vagus nerve fired more intensely. And when we looked more closely at whom people feeling compassion and pride felt most similar to, we found that pride made people feel more similar to the strong, resource-rich groups in the set of twenty they rated—Berkeley and Stanford undergraduates, lawyers, and the like (the dark bar to the far right). Compassion, on the other hand, made people feel more similar to the vulnerable groups—the homeless, the ill, the elderly (the gray bar to the far left). Compassion is anything but blind or biased by subjective concerns; it is exquisitely attuned to those in need.

  Compassion makes people feel similar to weak groups; prid
e makes people feel similar to strong groups.

  ALTRUISM’S HOLY GRAIL

  There are theoretical cottage industries devoted to attributing seemingly altruistic action to selfish motivations. Take Paul Rusesabagina’s remarkable heroism during the genocide of Rwanda, so powerfully depicted in Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families and the film Hotel Rwanda. Rusesabagina risked his own life, and that of his wife and children, to save hundreds of Tutsis (he is a Hutu) from the genocidal Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, sheltering them at the hotel Milles Collines, which he managed. Within the social sciences, these courageous actions are readily attributed to selfish genes, to the desire to save kin, or to self-interest, pure and simple. Freudian-leaning theorists have also weighed in—altruistic action is a defense mechanism by which we ward off deeper, unflattering, anxiety-producing revelations about the self (“If I give to charity then I’ll think less about how much I hate my father!”). The more parsimonious account—that Paul Rusesabagina, and we on our best days, act altruistically because we are wired to care for others—plays second fiddle to selfish accounts of altruism in this age-old debate about the origins of goodness.