Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  In an essay on the sublime and the beautiful, Immanuel Kant zeros in on the possibility that compassion renders people weak and passive in the face of injustice. Digressing somewhat, Kant observed:

  For it is not possible that our heart should swell from fondness for every man’s interest and should swim in sadness at every stranger’s need; else the virtuous man, incessantly dissolving like Heraclitus in compassionate tears, nevertheless with all this goodheartedness would become nothing but a tender-hearted idler.

  Compassion turns people into passive, timid, melancholic sorts, “tender-hearted idlers” like the philosopher Heraclitus, known for his thesis that human nature is always in flux. We can thank Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg for taking on this deeply entrenched claim, and gathering empirical data that show that compassion is the holy grail of altruism researchers—a pure, other-oriented state that motivates altruistic behavior like that which Paul Rusesabagina so courageously displayed during the genocide in Rwanda.

  To set the stage for his empirical studies, Batson argues that any noble or altruistic act can have multiple motives. Seemingly altruistic actions—donations to charity, staying late to help a colleague, climbing a tree to rescue a child’s kitten, helping an elderly woman cross an icy street—are often driven by selfish motives. One such selfish motivation is to reduce the distress we ourselves feel at the sight of another person suffering (it is still quite remarkable that we suffer at the sight of another suffering). A second is the allure of social praise—we help those in need to win those gold stars in the classroom, the Boy Scout badges, public service awards, approving head nods of parents, and to burnish our reputations in the eyes of our peers.

  Batson also maintains, in theorizing that would have warmed Darwin’s heart or more precisely his vagus nerve, that there is an other-oriented state that can be the wellspring of altruistic behavior: compassion. The question is how to document that this selfless state of compassion produces altruism. Batson’s solution to this challenge is to put people in experiments where they are confronted with someone in need, and their experience of compassion and selfish motives—for example, to slip out of helping with little notice—clash. If one observes altruistic action in this clash of selfish motives and compassion, we can infer that compassion won the day and motivated the altruistic action. It’s a bit like testing a new lover by allowing him or her possibilities of intimate affection from others. If in this clash of competing affections he or she returns, faithful, doughy-eyed and devoted, one has learned about commitment.

  In a first study, Batson had participants watch another participant (actually a confederate) complete several trials of a memory task. After each mistake, this individual received—of course—a wince-producing, shoulder-jolting shock. In one condition, the easy-escape condition, the participant was only required to watch the confederate receive two of the ten shocks. At that moment, the participant was free to leave. Here the participant should be guided by the selfish inclination to reduce personal distress in witnessing the other person suffer; all the participant had to do was leave. In the difficult-to-escape condition, the participant had to watch the other person take all ten shocks.

  After the first two trials, the individual receiving the shocks began to look a little pale. He mumbled for a glass of water. He mentioned feelings of discomfort and recounted a traumatic shock experience from childhood. While the experimenter figured out how to respond to this complex turn of events, the participant reported on how distressed and compassionate he or she was feeling at that moment. Then the experimenter hit upon an idea: Would the participant take some of the shocks on behalf of the other individual, clearly dreading the prospects of more shocks? The critical test for our present interests was in the condition in which participants were feeling compassion but were allowed to leave. Which branch of their nervous system prevailed—the selfish or the compassionate? The compassionate. These participants, feeling the swell of compassion in their chest but hearing the voice of pure self-interest—they could just pick up and leave—volunteered to take several more shocks on behalf of the other participant.

  One worry you might have is that participants who took more shocks did so simply to impress the experimenter. Fair enough, a reasonable critique. Does compassion drive altruistic action even in purely anonymous settings? Does the absence of the opportunity to gain social rewards—the esteem of others—dampen our nobler inclinations? This age-old question motivated Batson’s next study. In this study, female participants conversed with another participant (a confederate) through an exchange of notes while seated in separate cubicles. Some participants were told to be as objective as possible when reading the notes, to concentrate on the facts at hand. Other participants were asked to imagine as vividly as possible how the communicator—the other person—felt; they were led to feel compassion.

  The first note the participant read was from a student named Janet Arnold, who confessed to feeling out of place at her new home at the University of Kansas. She hailed from the rolling hills of nearby Ohio and was having a bit of difficulty adjusting to the exotic locale of Lawrence, Kansas. In the second exchange, Janet expressed a strong need for a friend. She asked the participant, point-blank, if she’d like to hang out together. Upon reading this second note, the participant was told that Janet had finished and left the study and was then asked to indicate how much time she would be willing to spend with Janet. Her response would be read by Janet and the experimenter or it would remain anonymous. The individual who volunteered to spend the most time with Janet? The person who was feeling compassion and in the anonymous condition.

  Stronger evidence still would link selfless, altruistic action to activation in the vagus nerve. Nancy Eisenberg has gathered just this kind of data. In one illustrative study, young children (second-graders and fifth-graders) and college students watched a videotape of a young mother and her children who had recently been injured in a violent accident. Her children were forced to miss school while they recuperated from their injuries in the hospital. After watching the videotape, the children were given the opportunity to take homework to the recovering children during their recess (thus sacrificing precious playground time). Those children who reported feeling compassion and who showed heart rate deceleration—a sign of vagus nerve activity—as well as oblique, concerned eyebrows while watching the video were much more likely to help out the kids in the hospital. In contrast, those children who winced, who reported distress, and who showed heart rate acceleration—that is, those children who reacted with their own personal distress—were less likely to help. These findings make a clarifying point: It is an active concern for others, and not a simple mirroring of others’ suffering, that is the fount of compassion, and that leads to altruistic ends.

  These scientific studies countervail the influential claims of the Kants, Nietzsches, and Rands about the nature of human goodness. Compassion is not a blind emotion that catapults people pell-mell toward the next warm body that walks by. Instead, compassion is exquisitely attuned to harm and vulnerability in others. Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions. The kindness, sacrifice, and jen that make up healthy communities are rooted in a bundle of nerves that has been producing caretaking behavior for over 100 million years of mammalian evolution. And the lives of individuals with highly active vagus nerves add yet another chapter to the story of how we are wired to be good.

  VAGAL SUPERSTARS

  Our tendencies to experience specific emotions, fleeting and evanescent as they are, define who we are. Emotions shape our deepest beliefs and core values, our relationships, the careers we choose, our methods for handling conflict, the art we like, the foods that please us, the very trajectory of our lives and those of our spouses, children, and friends. Descartes did not quite get it right in stating, “I think, therefore
I am” he would have been more on the mark if he had said, “I feel, therefore I am.”

  Consider what has been learned about shyness—a temperamental style characteristic of William James, Virginia Woolf, and so many others who have uncovered the mysteries of emotion. Early in life shy individuals show evidence of a hyperactive fear system, or HPA axis, which shapes their patterns of relationships and life choices. We know this thanks to the longitudinal studies of Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan. Kagan has identified very shy infants at four months of age according to their fearful, distressed reactions to novel toys. Fast-forward seven years to Kagan’s observations of these children in social groups: Shy children identified at age four months are most likely to be those two or three children in grammar-school classes who hover at the edges of the playground, observing and analyzing rather than engaging in the pyrotechnic face-to-face dynamics of that age (my bet is that a disproportionate number of writers fit this profile). Shy children have stronger stress reactions (elevated heart rate, pupil dilation, cortisol response) when hearing fiction being read or when engaging in complex cognitive tasks. And these same individuals, at age twenty-one, when in an fMRI scanner and presented with slides of faces they had not seen, show stronger activation in the amygdala. When Avshalom Caspi studied the adult lives of shy individuals, he found, fitting with the analysis here, that shy individuals took almost 2 additional years, compared to more outgoing types, to enter into marriage, and they also took longer to settle upon a stable job. That fearful 4 month old, startled and distressed at the presence of a new toy, fight or flight physiology throbbing in the veins and throughout the body, is likely to lead a life of restraint, inhibition, and hesitation in the face of intimacy.

  If the vagus nerve is a caretaking organ, then one would expect individuals with elevated vagus nerve activity to enjoy rich networks of social connection, to show highly responsive caretaking behavior, and for compassion to be at the center of their emotional lives. New studies are finding this to be the case. In one study, Chris Oveis and I brought Berkeley undergraduates to our lab in October and had their vagus nerve activity measured (deriving a measure known as vagal tone) while they sat quietly and comfortably in a resting state. Our interest was in tracking the lives of people with elevated vagus nerve activity in a resting state—vagal superstars. When they returned to the lab seven months later, we found that our vagal superstars, compared to those individuals with low baseline vagal tone, reported elevated levels of the trait extraversion, which is defined by high levels of social energy, friendships, and social contacts, and agreeableness, which is defined by great warmth, kindness, and a love of others. People with elevated baseline vagal tone also reported more optimism, general positive mood, and better physical health seven months later. And when presented with images of harm and beauty, they reported greater compassion and awe—their minds were more active in the aesthetic realm.

  Perhaps most dramatically, we found that the vagal superstars showed an increased propensity for transformative experiences of the sacred. Approximately three months after we had assessed baseline vagus nerve activity, we e-mailed our participants, asking them the following question: “While going through college, people sometimes have experiences that have an important impact on their sense of meaning and purpose, or how they see themselves or the world. Since coming in for your initial lab visit for this project, can you please describe any experiences of this kind you have had?” Sixty-five percent of participants reported such a transformative experience during the three-month period between the initial lab visit and the e-mail query. There were accounts of nature, of going to a political rally, of hearing an inspiring person speak about global warming or free markets, of relatives and friends passing away and the contemplation of death, of being engaged in spiritual practice. This age is a fertile time of expansion and transformation. Here are a couple of examples:

  “I went to winter camp with my church. We stayed in the mountains for four days…. There was a guest speaker there who gave a very powerful message on the last night. It made me feel like God had a plan for me.”

  “After my father’s passing, I pondered what is the purpose of life. It changed me in that I’m closer to my family and I’m more responsible than before.”

  When we coded these transformation narratives, the central theme that emerged was a shift toward increased connection with others, an inclination to sacrifice, to be altruistic. And, yes, our high vagal tone individuals were more likely to report this kind of transformative experience.

  Elevated vagus nerve activity, then, orients the individual to a life of greater warmth and social connection. Nancy Eisenberg has found that seven-and eight-year-olds with a higher resting vagal tone are more helpful in class, more sympathetic to those in need, more pro-social toward their friends, and experience more positive emotions. College students with higher resting vagal tone are better able to cope with the stresses of college—exam periods, career choices, the vicissitudes of romantic life. Following the loss of a married partner, people with high resting vagal tone recovered more quickly from the depressive symptoms that often accompany bereavement. And on the other end of the continuum, people experiencing severe depression, and its accompanying impoverishment of social connection, have been shown to have low resting vagal tone.

  If William James had been a psychophysiologist with a high-tech lab, and had been able to study the vagus nerve, I suspect he would have brought Walt Whitman in—an inspiration to James and a source of his writings on the optimistic and embracing spirit. James observed that Whitman was known by all to be uniformly kind, generous, and upbeat. Had James recruited Whitman as a participant, and hooked him up to electrodes near the heart and to the respiration band around his girth to derive an assessment of Whitman’s baseline vagal tone, I bet he would have found his vagal tone to be stratospherically high, and to soar at each thought of the beauty of our species or the wonders of leaves of grass.

  THE SPREAD OF SELFLESS GENES

  The great shift in early hominid social organization had to do with the arrival of hypervulnerable, big-brained offspring. The success of getting genes to the next generation hinged in unprecedented ways on getting dependent offspring to the age of viability and reproduction—a hair-raisingly long thirteen or fourteen years. Our vulnerable offspring shifted the reproductive dynamics of females and males toward a pattern of serial monogamy. Our vulnerable offspring’s need for care got fathers into the act—hominid fathers provide more care for offspring than almost all other primates. The vulnerability of our offspring, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes in Mother Nature, exceeded the capacities of any single parent, and thus necessitated cooperative systems of child rearing built upon trades and exchanges between kith and kin. It was take care or die for our early primate predecessors.

  The profound vulnerability of our big-brained offspring wired into us an instinct to care. It created in us a biologically based capacity for sympathy. It produced a vagus nerve, loaded up with oxytocin receptors, the provenance of feelings of devotion, sacrifice, and trust. It yielded a rich set of signals—empathic sighs, oblique eyebrows, and soothing touch, which trigger vagus nerve response and oxytocin and opioid release in the recipient, giving rise to oceanic feelings of connection. It produced specific cells underneath the surface of the skin that fire in response to the slow, soothing touch of compassion. The selection pressure to take care produced the indescribably beautiful qualities of the offspring themselves, designed, as many have argued, to reset the parents’ nervous systems toward more caretaking settings. When parents look at pictures of their new babies, the orbitofrontal cortex lights up, as does a region called the periaqueductal gray, a bundle of neurons known to coordinate the patterned actions of grooming in primates. So great is the evocative power of the baby that baby-faced cues in adults—big forehead, big eyes, small chin—trigger trust and liking in other adults, and short-circuit the tendency to punish (if you’re on trial, you’re well served by increasing
the size of your forehead and eyes).

  But evolution did not stop there. So critical was caretaking to the survival of our species that it was selected for in other ways, guaranteeing that the capacity to be kind would be woven into the genetic fabric of this new hominid. A first is through sexual selection, the processes, initially described by Darwin, according to which certain individuals prevail in competitions with their own sex to gain access to mates, thereby gaining reproductive opportunities and increasing the likelihood of passing on their genes to the next generation. What sorts of people prevail in the meat markets, singles bars, speed dating and online dating services, and more run-of-the-mill matchmaking of modern life? Full-lipped women or men with six-pack abs? Actually, Geoffrey Miller has argued, the victory goes to the kind.

  Kindness is the most important quality women and men seek in romantic partners.

  Consider the data presented in the figure above, from the largest study of mate preferences ever undertaken, involving 10,000 participants in 37 nations. David Buss asked people at the age of reproduction (20 to 25) to indicate how important different attributes were in potential romantic partners (0 = unimportant, 3 = indispensable). What generated the most heat (and some light) from these findings were the gender differences in mate preferences that remain to this day some of the most highly contested findings in the social sciences: Men prioritize beauty more than women, looking for hourglass-shaped women at the peak of their reproductive potential (see the two bars to the right); women, facing the extreme costs of raising offspring, show a greater preference for silver-haired, ambitious mates with big pocketbooks (see the two middle bars).