Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

I’ve asked dozens of children in summer camps, hundreds of undergraduates in lecture courses, dozens of executives in seminars, most of my indulgent friends, and even, I must confess, my two daughters, to try to produce these muscle actions. After many misfires, contorted faces, shakes of disbelief, and the occasional blush, individuals inevitably fail. What these muscles are, Ekman deduced, are the reliable indicators of emotion. These fleeting movements of muscles in the face are the trustworthy signs of specific emotions, such as anger, fear, desire and love, and, by implication, our social commitments.

Consider sympathy, an emotion central to the stability of the social contract, as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Charles Darwin long ago surmised. Social theorists have homed in on sympathy for some time because it backgrounds the individual’s self-interest, and leads to actions that enhance the welfare of others, even at expense to the self. The question is: How do we discern sincere sympathy, or true commitment to others’ welfare, from the false promises of demagogues, sociopaths, and hucksters? Robert Frank reasoned, in a synthesis of Schelling’s insights and Ekman’s methodological labors, that the clues to another’s sympathy and commitment to cooperation are found in two simple facial muscle movements (AU1 + AU4, in FACS terminology). Feelings of sympathy, and the commitment to cooperative exchange, are registered in an involuntary facial display that is more trustworthy than its cheap, and readily feigned, copies.

To get a sense of this, compare your reactions to the photos of the two facial displays below. The expression on the left is hard to produce voluntarily. It involves the pulling in and upward of the inner eyebrows, and has been shown in several empirical studies to accompany sympathetic feelings and activation of a region of the nervous system that is associated with caretaking behavior. The facial expression on the right, although quite similar morphologically to the sympathetic display on the left, does not involve activation of these involuntary, reliable facial muscles. It is not a reliable signal of an individual’s interest in your welfare (in fact, the eyebrow raise is a signal with many meanings, including interest, skepticism, weakness, and dramatic emphasis when speaking).

Darwin had claimed that our emotional expressions are distilled tokens of more complex social actions—striking out, soothing, eating, embrace, yelling to escape, vomiting, self-protection. Ekman had taken this analysis one step further, showing that of the thousands of possible configurations of facial muscles, a select few are reliable clues to the individual’s emotions. This subset of facial expressions, by implication, signals an individual’s social commitments, be it likely attack, the inclination to soothe, to be sexually faithful in romantic bonds, or to show concern over social norms and morals.

Emotions feel irrational from the individual’s point of view. Emotions can subvert our best attempts at self-control, composure, autonomy, and a narrow self-interested rationality. I’m not at my best at considering the recommendations of a financial advisor, solving crossword puzzles, or sorting out the costs and benefits of my actions when feeling strong emotion.

Long-term relationships, however, require us to put aside utilitarian, cost-benefit analyses of self-interest. Emotions enable us to enact the costly commitments to another’s welfare, to respect, to maintaining fair and just relations. Emotions are statements to others that we care, and without these statements long-term relations wither and die. Emotions, Martha Nussbaum argues in Upheavals of Thought, are the idiom in which we negotiate our engagements with others. We would live in a lonely, disengaged world were it not for the emotions.

THE SUBLIME BODY

 

Like many members of his illustrious family, William James was a hypochondriac. It may have been his somatic oversensitivities that led James to publish his radical thesis about emotion in 1884. His thesis turned long-standing intuitions about emotion on their head, and in fact, the role of the head in emotion on its head. Most writers had proposed that our experience of emotion follows from the perception of emotionally evocative events. These experiences, in turn, generate bodily responses rooted in our nervous system. Your experience of embarrassment, for example, follows from your recognition that you’ve been conducting an important business meeting with toilet paper stuck to your briefcase, and it is this recognition and experience that generate the physiological response—the rush of blood to your cheeks, neck, and forehead that results in the blush.