Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The implication is clear: Cooperation, kindness, and virtue are embodied in observable acts—facial muscle movements, brief vocalizations, ways of moving the hands or positioning the body, patterns of gaze activity—that are signals detectable to the ordinary eye. These outward signals of virtue, it further stands to reason, have involuntary elements that are not likely to be faked, and are likely to be put to use as people form intuitions about whom to trust and love and sacrifice for. This central premise—that for cooperation and goodness to emerge there must be outward signs of trustworthiness and cooperation—shapes the very design of the nonverbal signs of compassion, gratitude, and love. As science has begun to map the pro-social emotions in the body, new facial displays of embarrassment, shame, compassion, awe, love, and desire have been discovered. Studies of new modalities of communication, such as touch, have revealed that we can communicate gratitude, compassion, and love with a brief touch to the forearm. We are wired to detect benevolent intent in others in the moment-to-moment flow of the microinteractions of our daily living.

Finally, the tit-for-tat evokes cooperation in others—the principle of contagious cooperation. The tendency to cooperate and give can be readily exploited by individuals who are competitive and self-serving; nice guys do finish last in certain contexts. Kind individuals fare better, however, if they are able to evoke pro-social tendencies in others, thus prompting cooperative exchange. To the extent that goodness evokes beneficent responses in others, it should flourish.

Compassion, embarrassment, and awe are contagious at many different levels. Perceiving a person’s smile, even below subliminal awareness, prompts the perceiver to feel good and to show shifts away from fight-flight physiology. Perhaps more remarkable are the feelings evoked in hearing of others’ kindness—the swelling in the chest, goosebumps, and occasional tearing. Jonathan Haidt has called this state elevation, and he argues that we’re wired to be inspired by hearing the good acts of others. Through touch, cooperation and kindness can spread across people and physical space within seconds. The emotions that promote the meaningful life are powerfully contagious, which increases their chance for propagation, and their encoding into our nervous systems and their ritualization into cultural practice.

We have now set the stage for our examination of emotions that promote high jen ratios and the meaningful life. We have reviewed the intellectual backdrop in which this work has taken place, which has assumed that emotions are disruptive, base tendencies, part of a human nature largely oriented toward the gratification of desire. We have considered the specifics of emotions that have been discovered in the past thirty years. We have learned that emotions serve as commitment devices, are embodied in our bodies, and shape moral judgment in systematic fashion. And in this past chapter we have sketched what kind of evolutionary environment might have given rise to emotions like compassion or gratitude, and what general principles these emotions abide by. We will now turn to scientific studies that illuminate this new swath of human design, and that will lend credence to Darwin’s insight about the origins of human goodness: that it is rooted in our emotion, and that these social instincts may be stronger than those “of any other instinct or motive.”

5Embarrassment

 

ON JULY 2, 1860, Eadweard Muybridge boarded a stagecoach in San Francisco bound for St. Louis, Missouri, where he was to catch a train and make his way to Europe. There he would search for rare books to fill the shelves in the bookstore that he ran with his brother. In northeastern Texas, things went horribly. The driver of the stagecoach lost control and the coach careened down a hillside. Muybridge was hurled out of the boot of the coach, smashing his face against a tree, damaging a part of his frontal lobes that enables people to draw upon their emotions in making difficult decisions.

After six vague years in England, Muybridge returned to San Francisco. In 1872, he married Flora Shallcross Stone, twenty-one years his junior. While Muybridge was away on assignment for weeks on end, taking photographs of Yosemite and the Indian wars, Flora frequented fashionable theaters and restaurants with the dashing Major Harry Larkyns. Flora soon bore a baby boy. The little boy was more the source of uneasy suspicion than joy for Muybridge. Muybridge’s concerns were quickly confirmed: He found a photo of the baby with “Little Harry” inscribed on the back. When the baby’s nurse confirmed Muybridge’s suspicions—that Harry Larkyns was the father of the baby—Muybridge was overwhelmed.