Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Cooperative child rearing, where relatives and friends traded off duties: Hrdy, Mother Nature, 90–95.

consistent evidence of cooperative hunting for meat: Stephen Mithen, Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 238.

fall to their deaths: ibid., 238.

morphological changes that gave rise to our remarkable capacity to communicate: Marc D. Hauser, The Evolution of Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

Unlike our primate relatives, the human face has relatively little obscuring hair: Nina Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 43.

allowing for a much richer vocabulary of expressive behavior originating in the face: D. Matsumoto et al., “Facial Expressions of Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotion.

The evolving capacity to communicate is even more pronounced in the human voice: Ehrlich, Human Natures, 152.

to represent and spread information across time and space with language: Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richardson, eds., Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 204–40.

our basic emotional tendencies can quickly spread to others, through mimicry, imitation, and communication: For a superb review of the evolution of the capacity to imitate and empathize, see S. D. Preston and F.B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002): 1–72.

In research with my colleague Cameron Anderson: C. Anderson, O.P. John, D. Keltner, and A. Kring, “Social Status in Naturalistic Face-to-Face Groups: Effects of Personality and Physical Attractiveness in Men and Women,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 118–29.

Female adults attain comparable levels of status with just as much alacrity and effect: Ibid. We found few differences in how women and men ascribe status to other women and men in their groups. High-status women and men show similar tendencies to keep their elevated positions of power over time. The one difference we did document is that group members achieved consensus, or agreement, in their judgments of the status of men a bit faster than in their judgments of women. It is also important to bear in mind that these are status judgments in informal groups. It is very likely that within institutions with historical sex-based differences in status (for example, the U.S. Senate), one is likely to find differences in judgment.

Yet the hierarchical social organization of higher primates and early humans differs dramatically from that of other species: One of the first scientists to make this point was Christopher Boehm. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also Dacher Keltner, “The Power Paradox,” Greater Good 8 (2008): 14–17.

Frans de Waal has found: Chimpanzee Politics (New York: Harper and Row, 1982) and Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).