Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

signs of a loss of jen in the United States are incontrovertible: For the most comprehensive assessment of the well-being of our culture, see David G. Myers, The American Paradox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

U.S. adults now have one-third fewer close friends: M. McPherson, L. Smith-Lovin, and M. E. Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 353–75.

In a recent UNICEF study of twenty-one industrialized nations: The overall score is based on a sum of six categories: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks, and children’s own subjective well-being. “UNICEF Ranks Well-Being of British, U.S. Children Last in Industrialized World,” USA Today, February 14, 2007.

I see these disheartening social trends as the culmination of a broader ideology about human nature: Barry Schwartz was one of the first scholars to deconstruct the deeper assumptions of self-interest underlying the social and biological sciences. Barry Schwartz, Battle for Human Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). For another excellent challenge of the assumption that humans are self-interested, one more focused on the debate over altruism, see Alfie Kohn, The Brighter Side of Human Nature (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

When “pleasure centers” were first discovered in 1954: J. Olds and P. Milner, “Positive Reinforcement Produced by Electrical Stimulation of Septal Area and Other Regions of Rat Brain,” Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 47 (1954): 419–27.

And now a new field, neuroeconomics: Neuroeconomics is the scientific study of whether basic principles of behavioral economics—loss aversion, favoring current gains over future ones, risk taking and risk seeking—are represented in different regions of the brain. The study of reward circuits in the brain is one of the hot areas in neuroeconomics. See B. Knutson and J. C. Cooper, “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Reward Prediction,” Current Opinions in Neurology 18, no. 4 (2005): 411–17.

consider the debate about generous acts toward strangers: For a lucid examination of altruism, consult the work of Daniel Batson. Batson argues that kind actions that enhance the welfare of others, even at costs to the self, are motivated by selfish reasons, like the desire to reduce personal distress and to receive social praise, as well as pure altruistic motives that stem from a concern for the welfare of others. D. C. Batson and L. L. Shaw, “Evidence for Altruism: Toward a Pluralism of Prosocial Motives,” Psychological Inquiry 2 (1991): 107–22. Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson also provide a thoughtful examination of this debate. Sober and Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). And for an earlier treatment of the philosophical mistakes made in assuming that altruism is necessarily self-interested, see Kohn, The Brighter Side of Human Nature.

That the bad is stronger than the good is evident in several findings: R. F. Baumeister, E. Bratslavsky, C. Finkenauer, and K. D. Vohs, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Review of General Psychology 5 (2001): 323–70. S. E. Taylor, “Asymmetrical Effects of Positive and Negative Events: The Mobilization-Minimization Hypothesis,” Psychological Bulletin 110 (1991): 67–85. P. Rozin and E. B. Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 5 (2001): 296–320.

Economic losses loom larger than their equivalent gains: A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science 21 (1981): 453–58.

Slides of negative stimuli: T. A. Ito, J. T. Larsen, N. K. Smith, and J. T. Cacioppo, “Negative Information Weighs More Heavily on the Brain: The Negativity Bias in Evaluative Categorizations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 887–900.

Freud: On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Michael Huise (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Rand: “In the Words of Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand, with Alvin Toffler,” Playboy, March 1964, 40.

Machiavelli: The Prince, trans. G. Bull (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Williams: Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 255.