The Compassionate Instinct

All of my life, people have been involved to assist me in getting dressed, showered, to work/school, etc. It was my hope that one day, I would be able to do something really significant for someone else, like others have always done for me. I met a man who was married and very unhappy. He and his wife had a little boy born to them and then die at 7 months of age. For ten years they remained married, trying to have another baby. They were never able to have a child again. They divorced and he became my friend and lover. He told me of his life’s dream of having another child. I got pregnant from him and had a miscarriage. I got pregnant again and had an ectopic pregnancy. (No loss of my tube, thank God!) A shot took care of the problem. I got pregnant a third time; our beautiful son was born on 12/20/98. I have never felt as grateful for anything in my life. I was actually able to give something back to someone. Me, who was supposed to die before I was 2 years old.

It is gratitude that enables us to receive and it is gratitude that motivates us to return the goodness that we have been given. In short, it is gratitude that enables us to be fully human.

WIRED TO BE INSPIRED

Jonathan Haidt

HERE’S A PUZZLE: Why do we care when a stranger does a good deed for another stranger? Most theories in the social sciences say that people’s actions and feelings are motivated by self-interest. So why are we sometimes moved to tears by the good deeds or heroic actions of others?

I believe we cannot have a full understanding of human morality until we can explain why and how human beings are so powerfully affected by the sight of a stranger helping another stranger. For the past several years, I have studied this feeling, which I call “elevation.” I have defined elevation as a warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.

Elevation is widely known across cultures and historical eras. You probably recognize it yourself. But for some reason, no psychologist has studied it empirically. Instead, psychologists have focused most of their energies on the negative moral emotions, especially guilt and anger. Psychologists have thought about morality primarily as a system of rules that prevents people from hurting each other and taking their possessions.

But I believe that morality is much richer and more balanced. Most people don’t want to rape, steal, and kill. What they really want is to live in a moral community where people treat each other well and in which they can satisfy their needs for love, productive work, and a sense of belonging to groups of which they are proud. We get a visceral sense that we do not live in such a moral world when we see people behave in petty, cruel, or selfish ways. But when we see a stranger perform a simple act of kindness for another stranger, it gives us a thrilling sense that maybe we do live in such a world. The fact that we can be so responsive to the good deeds of others—even when we do not benefit directly—is a very important facet of human nature. Yes, people can be terribly cruel, and we must continue our study of racism, violence, and other social ills. But there is a brighter side to human nature, too, and psychology ought to look more closely at it.

BEYOND DISGUST

I started examining elevation only after years of studying its opposite: disgust. It makes good evolutionary sense that human beings should have an emotion that makes us feel repulsion toward rotten food, excrement, dead bodies, and other physical objects that are full of dangerous bacteria and parasites. It also makes sense that disgust should make us hypersensitive to contagion—that is, we feel disgust toward anything that touched something that we find disgusting.

But when my colleagues and I actually asked people in several countries to list the things they thought were disgusting, we repeatedly found that most people mentioned social offenses, such as hypocrisy, racism, cruelty, and betrayal. How on earth did a food-based and very corporeal emotion become a social and moral emotion? The short version of our attempt at an answer is that while disgust may motivate people to distance themselves from physical threats, it is well suited for dealing with social threats as well. When we find social actions disgusting, they indicate to us that the person who committed them is in some way morally defective.

In this light, we seem to place human actions on a vertical dimension that runs from our conception of absolute good (God) above, to absolute evil (the Devil) below. This vertical dimension is found in many cultures—for example, in Hindu and Buddhist ideas that people are reincarnated at higher or lower levels, depending on their moral behavior in this life.