Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Simple measures can yield powerful diagnoses. Apgar scores, blood pressure indexes, emotional intelligence quotients all take minutes to derive but reveal the course a life can take. What measure would you propose to diagnose the social well-being of our times? Murder rates? The GDP? The distribution of wealth to those on the top compared to those at the bottom? The percentage of citizens who believe in the resurrection? The speed with which people laugh at Homer Simpson? If I were given one metric to take the temperature of the social well-being of the individual, the marriage, a school, community, or culture, the jen ratio would be my choice.

For the individual, new studies are finding that a high jen ratio, a devotion to bringing the good in others to completion, is the path to the meaningful life. Engaging in five acts of kindness a week—donating blood, buying a friend a sundae, giving money to someone in need—elevates personal well-being in lasting ways. Spending twenty dollars on someone else (or giving it to charity) leads to greater boosts in happiness than spending that money on oneself (even though most people think that spending money on themselves would be the surer route to happiness). When pitted against one another in competitive economic games, cooperators and those who forgive selfish partners fare better than competitors in terms of economic outcome. New neuroscience suggests we are wired for jen: When we give to others, or act cooperatively, reward centers of the brain (such as the nucleus accumbens, a region dense with dopamine receptors) hum with activity. Giving may enhance self-interest more than receiving.

What works for individuals works in marriage: Bringing the good of a romantic partner to completion (and not the bad) yields many positive returns. One of the most toxic developments in marriage is the emergence of a low jen ratio. In over twenty studies of how romantic partners explain one another’s actions, the couples heading toward divorce routinely attribute the good things in their intimate life to the selfish motivations of their partner (“he brought me flowers just to butter me up for his golf weekend”). Regrettably, they just as readily pin the responsibility of their hassles, struggles, and crises on their partners (“if she’d clean the back seats of our car every now and then we wouldn’t have things growing under there”). Happier couples are guided by a high jen ratio: They generously give credit to their partner and see hidden virtues accompanying their partner’s foibles and faults.

And what’s true of individuals and marriages is true of nations: Nations whose citizens bring the good in others to completion thrive. High jen ratios are proving to be a hallmark of healthy societies. In 1996, Paul Zak and colleagues asked random samples of participants in various countries to answer the following question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you cannot be too careful in dealing with people?”. After statistically controlling for appropriate variables, such as economic development, Zak and colleagues found that for every 15 percent increase in the trust of a nation’s citizens, their economic fortunes rise by $430. Trust facilitates economic exchange with fewer transaction costs, including fewer failed negotiations, adversarial settlements, and needless lawsuits. With increased trust among a citizenry, discrimination and economic inequality fall. High jen ratios promote a society’s economic and ethical progress.

 

One cannot help but be struck by the cultural variation in the levels of trust presented in this figure. As a generalization, Zak found that Scandinavian and East Asian cultures are more trusting than South American and Eastern European cultures. Poorer nations (India) are often more trusting than wealthier nations (the United States).

 

JEN YEN

 

In the recent explosion of studies on social well-being, signs of a loss of jen in the United States are incontrovertible. The percentage of Americans who trust their fellow citizens has dropped 15 percentage points in the past fifteen years. Many indicators of our culture’s poor health—increasing feelings of anomie, greater loneliness, the trend toward less happy marriages—are on the rise. U.S. adults now have one-third fewer close friends in their circle of intimates than twenty years ago. Young babies have more physical contact with their Hummer-like baby strollers than from the touch of their parents’ hands. In a recent UNICEF study of twenty-one industrialized nations, U.S. children ranked twentieth in terms of overall well-being.