Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

I was saved by touch. Toward the end of the nightly ritual my younger daughter, Serafina, who entered the world with outstretched hand before the crown of her head, preferred that I sit next to her bed, which I did reliably, and eventually with anticipation. The reason: She would gently stroke the back of my hair near the neck as she fell asleep. She was targeting a region near the top of my spinal cord, where the vagus nerve, loaded with oxytocin receptors, originates and, I am convinced, is stimulated by such patterns of touch. We were engaging in a trade with ancient evolutionary origins. I offered my protective presence as she finally closed her eyes and drifted into the dreamy quiet of the dark. She offered me the most pleasurable of touches to the back of my neck, a kind of touch that was as potent a trigger of my pro-social nervous system—the orbitofrontal cortex, oxytocin (the little I have), the vagus nerve—as I have ever experienced.

The right touch—not some uncle squeezing your cheeks purple or a bully giving you a twist to the arm—creates trust and long-term cooperative exchange. Through its rewarding features, touch can be a glue of trading relations between kith and kin. One of the first to document this systematically was Frans de Waal, who has studied the role of touch in the patterns of food exchange in chimpanzees. Sure enough, chimpanzees use touch as a reward, and as a means of asking for favors. De Waal observed over 5,000 instances of food sharing in captive chimpanzees, carefully noting the patterns of who shared with whom in the troop. Chimpanzees, like our hominid predecessors, have a strong urge to share and to avoid hoarding. De Waal found that chimps were much more likely to share with those who shared previously with them and with chimps who had groomed them earlier in the day. They systematically traded calories for touch.

The same is true of humans: touching triggers trust and generosity. In one study, participants were asked to sign a petition in support of a particular issue of local importance. Those participants who were touched signed 81 percent of the time. Those who were not touched during the request volunteered to sign at a rate of 55 percent. In a recent study, Robert Kurzban put a participant into the prisoner’s dilemma game, which gives participants the opportunity to compete or cooperate with a fellow player. As they were about to play the game, the experimenter lightly touched the participants on the back, creating an atmosphere of trust and generosity. This seemingly inconsequential act was enough to shift the frame of the game from one of competition to one of cooperation. Those participants who were touched were much more likely to cooperate.

It is not a coincidence that greeting rituals around the world systematically involve touch. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt has catalogued greeting rituals with surreptitious photography in remote cultures in Africa, Asia, Europe, New Guinea, and elsewhere. First contacts elicit, in ritualistic fashion, many of the tools that promote cooperation—submissive bows, smiles, open-handed gestures of cooperation. But they most systematically involve touch and skin-to-skin contact in various forms: handshakes, chest to chest embraces, and, in subtler forms than those used by rat dams and pups, varieties of kisses. Touching and trusting go hand in hand.

TOUCH AND THE SPREAD OF GOODNESS

 

If there is a consensus in the scientific study of morality and human goodness, it is that emotions like sympathy, love, and gratitude are the engines of everyday jen. For Charles Darwin, sympathy was a cardinal moral emotion.

Buoyed by this claim, ten years ago I began a search to document the nonverbal displays of sympathy and gratitude. Both emotions involve a powerful concern for enhancing the welfare of others, and a willingness to subordinate the demands of self-interest in the service of another. For cooperation to spread in groups, the contagious goodness hypothesis would suggest, sympathy and gratitude should possess reliable and evocative signals, allowing group members to readily discern the cooperative intent of others and, when feeling altruistically inclined, evoke cooperative tendencies in others.