Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The decline in our social well-being has been blamed on the abandonment of the classics of Western civilization in higher education, moral relativism, and the loss of religious faith. Others have floated different causes of the wearing down of the social fabric: the disappearance of modesty, precocious sexuality, the proliferation of mediated communication, and fast food.

 

The measure of childhood well-being was based on the sum of six measures: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviors and risks, and children’s own subjective well-being. Lower scores indicate higher overall rankings reflective of greater childhood well-being in the country.

 

I see these disheartening social trends as the culmination of a broader ideology about human nature, one with a jen ratio trending toward 0. This ideology has influential advocates from Sigmund Freud to evolutionary theorists. The strongest proponents of this view are found in the halls of economics departments. Their characterization of human nature, known widely as rational choice theory, extends to evolutionary thought, psychological science, and the field of emotion—my own disciplines. It has blinded us to the science and practice of jen.

At the center of this theory is Homo economicus, the latest stage of human evolution, a hominid first portrayed by philosophers, Adam Smith the most well-known, who were awestruck by the great expansion of wealth, technology, and progress during the Industrial Revolution. First and foremost, Homo economicus is selfish. Every action of Homo economicus is designed to maximize self-interest, in the form of experienced pleasure, advances in material wealth, or, in evolutionist thought, the propagation of genes.

When “pleasure centers” were first discovered in 1954 in a region of the limbic brain known as the septum, rats, neither hungry nor thirsty, would press bars for hours on end just to have that region stimulated. Economists assume that you and I have much in common with those rats, that we are wired for the perpetual pursuit of personal gratification. And now a new field, neuroeconomics, is beginning to back this up: Of the sixty miles of neural wiring of the human brain, the regions involved in representing the basic rewards, such as sweet tastes or pleasant scents, also light up like Christmas lights in fMRI scans at the prospect of winning money.

If humans are wired to maximize the fulfillment of desire, a second claim readily follows: Competition is a natural and normative state of affairs. Competition subjects our unbounded self-interest to the rational order of the marketplace in which supply and demand constrain the fulfillment of our desires. Cooperation and kindness are, by implication, cultural conventions or deceptive acts masking deeper self-interest. As a case in point, consider the debate about generous acts toward strangers. These acts cost you in terms of time, energy, and missed opportunities and, most irrationally, benefit genetically unrelated individuals. Such acts fall outside the reach of stalwart evolutionary concepts of inclusive fitness (the generous act benefits those individuals who share our genes) and reciprocal altruism (the generous act is eventually reciprocated and thus enhances the individual’s welfare). The conclusion: These generous acts are evolutionary “misfires” or “strategic errors” they are misapplications of more self-interested systems such as the love of kin or friends who reciprocate.

Evolving in societies of selfish, competitive gratification machines gave rise to a third design feature of Homo economicus: a mind wired to prioritize the bad—the toxic food, hidden snake, cuckolding friend, backstabbing peer—over the good. That the bad is stronger than the good is evident in several findings. Our memory for bad things is more robust than for good things (it’s a wonder any of us ever go back to a high-school reunion). Economic losses loom larger than their equivalent gains: Losing twenty dollars stings more than finding twenty dollars pleases. Slides of negative stimuli (pictures of mutilated faces or a dead cat) trigger stronger activation in brain regions associated with evaluative judgments than slides of positive stimuli (pictures of a pizza slice or a bowl of chocolate). Negative things, Paul Rozin observers, contaminate the positive more readily than vice versa. A cockroach walks near a plate of truffles and they’re ruined. Place a truffle near a pile of cockroaches and…they’re still disgusting.