Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Read online

  BORN TO BE GOOD

  Dacher Keltner

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York • London

  Copyright © 2009 by Dacher Keltner

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book,

  write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07335-5

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

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  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

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  TO THOSE WHO HAVE GIVEN ME SO MUCH JEN:

  THE FAMILY WHO RAISED ME—JEANIE KELTNER, MY MOTHER;

  RICHARD KELTNER, MY FATHER; AND ROLF KELTNER, MY BROTHER—

  AND THE FAMILY WHO SUSTAINS ME—

  MOLLIE MCNEIL, MY WIFE; AND NATALIE AND SERAFINA KELTNER-

  MCNEIL, MY DAUGHTERS.

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  1

  Jen Science

  2

  Darwin’s Joys

  3

  Rational Irrationality

  4

  Survival of the Kindest

  5

  Embarrassment

  6

  Smile

  7

  Laughter

  8

  Tease

  9

  Touch

  10

  Love

  11

  Compassion

  12

  Awe

  Notes

  Text Acknowledgments

  PREFACE

  SOME SCIENTIFIC INSIGHTS arise in powerful, fleeting experiences—a startling observation, a dream, a gut feeling, a sudden realization. My own thinking about human emotion has taken a longer course, reflecting the intersection of the long arc of life and the scientific data I have gathered.

  I have been led to the idea that emotion is the source of the meaningful life. My mother, an English professor and student of Romanticism, and my father, an artist guided by Lao Tzu and Zen, cultivated in me the conviction that our best attempts at the good life are found in bursts of passion captured in plot turns in the prose on a page or oil layered on a canvas. This idea proved to have the deepest scientific promise in the hands of Charles Darwin, who believed that brief emotional expressions offer clues to the deep origins of our design, and Paul Ekman, who figured out how to bring quantifiable order to the thousands of movements of the face.

  Born to Be Good is the product of my family and scientific upbringings, and attempts answers to three age-old questions. The first is: How can we be happy? Legions of recent empirical studies on happiness have led to best-selling books. We have learned about the difficulties of knowing what makes us happy (Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness), the importance of optimism (Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness), and that, for most of us, relationships are the surest route to happiness, and seeking happiness through financial gain is an illusion (Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis).

  Born to Be Good offers a new answer to the question of how we can be happy. In honor of my mother and father, you might call it the Zen Romanticism thesis. The idea is that we have evolved a set of emotions that enable us to lead the meaningful life, emotions such as gratitude, mirth, awe, and compassion (the Romanticism thesis). The key to happiness is to let these emotions arise, to see them fully in oneself and in others, and to train the eye and mind in that practice (the Zen thesis).

  Born to Be Good engages a second old question: What are the deep origins of our capacity for kindness? We are witnessing a renewed debate about our origins. Advances in DNA measurement, in archeology, and in the study of our primate relatives are yielding striking new insights into the history of humanity, where we came from, how we dispersed, how we evolved. Embedded in these discoveries is an answer to the question of where our capacity for goodness comes from. Born to Be Good reveals how survival of the kindest may be just as fitting a description of our origins as survival of the fittest.

  Finally, Born to Be Good asks: How can we be good? We are in a period of probing moral reflection. U.S. children rank twentieth of twenty-one industrialized countries in terms of social well-being. The moral stature of the United States has fallen dramatically in the past eight years. Deep concerns about genocide, inequality, and global warming raise doubts about whether a hopeful future for the human race is justified on any grounds. There is a hunger for new views of the nature and practice of human goodness. Just look at the crowds that attend every talk by the Dalai Lama.

  Born to Be Good reveals a straightforward answer to the question of how to be good: rely on emotions like amusement, gratitude, and compassion to bring the good to others to completion. To give life to this idea, Born to Be Good offers a conversation between Darwinian views of the origins of human goodness (you’ll be surprised to learn that Darwin believed that sympathy is our strongest passion) and gems from the great traditions of East Asian and Western thought.

  The road map of Born to be Good follows the development of my own thinking about answers to these questions. It begins with a discussion, in chapter 1, of the Confucian concept of jen, which refers to kindness, humanity, and reverence. I introduce the concept of the jen ratio, a simple but powerful way of looking upon the relative balance of good and uplifting versus bad and cynical in life. The jen ratio honors my interests in Eastern philosophy and in parsimonious measurement. It is a way to think about the clues to happy marriages, well-adapted children, healthy communities and cultures.

  The next three chapters take the reader on a tour of the latest discoveries in evolutionary approaches to emotion. We start in chapter 2 by considering Darwin’s nuanced analyses of the many positive emotions. Contrary to what many may assume, Darwin believed that these emotions were the basis of our moral instinct and capacity for good. Darwin and Confucius would have been very content collaborators.

  From Darwin we travel to New Guinea, and Paul Ekman’s paradigm-shifting studies of the universality of facial expression. As a result of the empirical science that followed this work, we have arrived at three new ideas about emotion that are summarized in chapter 3: Emotions are signs of our commitment to others; emotions are encoded into our bodies and brains; emotions are our moral gut, the source of our most important moral intuitions.

  In chapter 4 we look back in time to glean what has been learned about the evolution of human goodness. This ever-changing evolutionary science provides a context for understanding the origins of the positive emotions, where the smile comes from, why we are wired to trust and to care. The chapter brings together insights from the study of our close primate relatives, from archeology, and from hunter-gatherer cultures. The reader may be surprised to learn that:

  We are a caretaking species. The profound vulnerability of our offspring rearranged our social organization as well as our nervous system.

  We are a face-to-face species. We are remarkable in our capacity to empathize, to mimic, to mirror.

  Our power hierarchies differ from those of other species; power goes to the most emotionally intelligent.

  We reconcile our conflicts rather than fleeing or killing; we have evolved powerful capacities to forgive.

  We live in complex patterns of fragile monogamy, preferring monogamy but often showing patterns of serial monogamy.

  Each of the remaining eight chapters is devoted to the science of different emoti
ons that give rise to high jen ratios. This science is rooted in Darwin’s deepest insight about human emotion: that the visible expressions of emotion that we observe today are clues to the ancient behaviors that led some mammals to fare well in the tasks of survival, reproduction, and care of offspring. This science would not exist without the methodology Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen gave to the field: the ability to measure millisecond movements of muscles in the face. Every chapter tries to honor the insights about emotion found in art, literature, and philosophy.

  In chapter 5, I begin where I began, with a serendipitous discovery of the embarrassment display. I show how embarrassment acts as an appeasement display, prompting others to forgive and forget. The smile is revealed, in chapter 6, to have evolved as a signal of equality and trust, and as a sign of the life well lived. Chapter 7 examines how laughter evolved as a unique signal of play and levity, detailing the varieties of laughter and how laughter promotes healthy responses to trauma. In chapter 8, I examine the much-maligned act of teasing. I show, building on the study of fools and jesters as well as the philosophy of language, how teasing is actually a remarkable act of pretense and drama, and enables people to negotiate conflicts and hierarchies. In chapter 9, I survey the startling new science of touch: it makes people trust, it increases body weight in premature babies and reduces depression in adults in nursing homes, it builds strong immune systems. In our lab we have documented that people can communicate compassion, love, and gratitude to a stranger with one-second touches to the forearm. In chapter 10 I reveal lasting insights about humans’ reproductive relations, profiling the new discoveries on oxytocin, a neuropeptide that promotes devotion, and how it is released during nonverbal displays of love. Compassion is the focus of chapter 11. Darwin thought it was the foundation of our moral sense and cooperative communities. I focus on new discoveries about a branch of the nervous system, the vagus nerve, which is centrally involved in compassion. I conclude, in chapter 12, by examining awe. I begin by talking about John Muir’s experiences of awe in the Sierras that led to the environmentalist movement and trace back to revolutionary thinkers in the West who transformed our experience of awe, from a religious experience to something that can be felt in nature, toward others in art, and in spiritual experience. I then rely on studies of goosebumps, dinosaurs, and beauty to tell a story about the evolution of this fascinating emotion, and how it enables us to fold into cooperative social collectives.

  In carrying out the science and writing that led to Born to Be Good, I have become more acutely aware of our capacity for jen. I see it in the smiles of friends, our many modest ways, melodious laughter, moving touches, and the readiness with which we care, appreciate, and revere. Seeing these capacities in our species has brought a bit of the good in me to completion. I hope the same will prove to be true for you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I HAVE SO MANY to acknowledge and appreciate.

  I would like to thank my mentors Phoebe Ellsworth, Robert Levenson, and Paul Ekman for initiating me into the scientific study of emotion, when the field was just getting off the ground. I have learned so much from my collaborator colleagues: George Bonanno, Lisa Capps, Serena Chen, Avshalom Caspi, James Gross, Deborah Gruenfeld, Jonathan Haidt, Oliver John, Ken Locke, Robert Knight, Ann Kring, David Matsumoto, Terrie Moffitt, Michael Morris, Terrie Moffitt, and Gerben van Kleef. In writing two textbooks, I have been made wiser in perspective and prose by Tom Gilovich, Jennifer Jenkins, Richard Nisbett, and Keith Oatley. In friendly conversations, many of the ideas here have been enlivened and brought into focus by Chris Boas, Nathan Brostrom, Gustave Carlson, Christine Carter, Claire Ferrari, Michael Lewis, Jason Marsh, Peter Platt, and especially Tom Gilovich, Leif Hass, Mollie McNeil, and Frank Sulloway, who dwelled in the ideas here in ways that let me view their promises and pitfalls through different eyes.

  I thank those who have funded my research: The National Institute of Mental Health, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Foundation, the Metanexus Institute, the Mind and Life Institute, and the Positive Psychology Network. I am deeply grateful to Tom and Ruth Ann Hornaday, founders of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, a place to cultivate the next generation of scientists interested in how we are born to be good, and Lani and Herb Alpert, for their support in building our magazine, Greater Good.

  This book would not exist were it not for the astonishing empirical science of my students: Cameron Anderson, Jennifer Beer, Brenda Buswell, Belinda Campos, Adam Cohen, David Ebenbach, Jennifer Goetz, Gian Gonzaga, June Gruber, Erin Heerey, Matthew Hertenstein, Elizabeth Horberg, Emily Impett, Michael Kraus, Carrie Langner, Jennifer Lerner, Alexander LuoKogan, Lorraine Martinez, Chris Oveis, Paul Piff, Sarina Rodrigues, Laura Saslow, Lani Shiota, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, John Tauer, Ilmo van der Löwe, Kris Vasquez, and Randall Young.

  I was guided at the outset in far-reaching ways by my agent, Linda Lowenthal. And my dear editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, early on found the soul of this book, wouldn’t let me waver, and brought the good in this book to completion.

  Duchenne smiles and grateful touches to you all.

  BORN TO BE GOOD

  1

  Jen Science

  ANTONY VAN LEEUWENHOEK changed how we look at the natural world. Born in Delft, the Netherlands, in 1632, he came from a family of brewers and basket-makers. Van Leeuwenhoek was peacefully settled into his life as a fabric maker, minor city official, and wine assayer until he started grinding up lenses to build simple microscopes to get a better look at the drapes in his shop. His curiosity led him to place the algae of nearby lakes under his three-to four-inch single-lens microscopes, as well as the cells of fish, his sperm, and the plaque of two old men who had never cleaned their teeth. He was the first to study bacteria, blood cells, and spermatozoa. He opened humanity’s eyes to the microbiological world, changing our understanding of who we are.

  This book offers a Darwinian lens onto a new science of positive emotion. We’ll call this new science jen science, in honor of the Confucian concept of jen. Jen is the central idea in the teachings of Confucius, and refers to a complex mixture of kindness, humanity, and respect that transpires between people. Alienated by the violence, the materialism, and the hierarchical religion of his sixth-and fifth-century BC China, Confucius taught a new way of finding the meaningful life through the cultivation of jen. A person of jen, Confucius observes, “wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others.” A person of jen “brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion.” Jen is felt in that deeply satisfying moment when you bring out the goodness in others.

  Jen science is based on its own microscopic observations of things not closely examined before. Most centrally, it is founded on the study of emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment, and amusement, emotions that transpire between people, bringing the good in each other to completion. Jen science has examined new human languages under its microscope—movements of muscles in the face that signal devotion, patterns of touch that signal appreciation, playful tones of the voice that transform conflicts. It brings into focus new substances that we are made of, neurotransmitters as well as regions of our nervous system that promote trust, caring, devotion, forgiveness, and play. It reveals a new way of thinking about the evolution of human goodness, which requires revision of longstanding assumptions that we are solely wired to maximize desire, to compete, and to be vigilant to what is bad.

  Seeing the world through this Darwinian lens of jen science could very well shift your jen ratio. The jen ratio is a lens onto the balance of good and bad in your life. In the denominator of the jen ratio place recent actions in which someone has brought the bad in others to completion—the aggressive driver who flips you off as he roars past, the disdainful diner in a pricey restaurant who sneers at less well-heeled passersby. Above this, in the numerator of the ratio, tally up the actions that bring the good in others to co
mpletion—a kind hand on your back in a crowded subway car, the young child who compliments the elderly woman on her bathing suit as she nervously dips her toe in a swimming pool, the woman who laughs as a stranger accidentally steps on her foot. As the value of your jen ratio rises, so too does the humanity of your world.

  Let’s give the jen ratio a little life. An after-school moment at my daughters’ playground yields the following. In the numerator: two boys laugh, giving each other noogies on the head, girls do handstands and cartwheels, giggling at their butt-thumping mistakes, in the soft expanse of a grassy field, kids dog pile on a young boy deliriously clasping the football to his chest. In the denominator: a boy teases a smaller boy about his shoes; two girls whisper about another girl who tries to enter into their game of unicorn. This minute of playground life yields a jen ratio of 3/2, or 1.5. A pretty good scene. In an interminable, eight-minute line to buy stamps I see 24 varieties of exasperation, from sighs to glares to threatening groans, and one guy laughs three times. 3/24 = .125.

  One can apply the jen ratio to any realm: our interior life, more satisfying and more trying periods of a marriage, the tenor of a family reunion, the goodwill of a neighborhood, the rhetoric of presidents, the spirit of historical eras. Think of the jen ratio as a lens through which you might take stock of your attempt at living a meaningful life.