The Compassionate Instinct

My spirit was lifted even higher than it already was. I was joyous, happy, smiling, energized. I went home and gushed about it to my suite-mates, who clutched at their hearts. And, although I have never seen this guy as more than just a friend, I felt a hint of romantic feeling for him at this moment.

Love and a desire for affiliation appear to be a common human response to witnessing saints and saintly deeds or even to hearing about them secondhand. If disgust is a negative emotion that strengthens ego boundaries and defenses against a morally reprehensible other, then elevation is its opposite—a desire to associate with those who are morally admirable.

A second study confirmed this general portrait of elevation. This study induced elevation in a laboratory by showing one group of participants video clips from a documentary about Mother Teresa. Control groups saw other videos, including an emotionally neutral but interesting documentary and a comedy sequence from the television show America’s Funniest Home Videos. Compared to participants who watched the control videos, participants who watched the elevating video clip reported feeling more loving and inspired; they more strongly wanted to help and affiliate with others, and they were more likely to actually volunteer to work at a humanitarian charity organization afterward.

In both studies, we found that participants in the elevation conditions reported different patterns of physical feelings and motivations when compared to participants in the control conditions. Elevated participants were more likely to report physical feelings in their chests—especially warm, pleasant, or “tingling” feelings—and they were more likely to report wanting to help others, become better people themselves, and affiliate with others. In both studies, reported feelings of happiness energized people to engage in private or self-interested pursuits, while feelings of elevation seemed to open people up and turn their attention outward, toward other people.

Based on this research, I believe that elevation carries many benefits, including individual benefits like the energy and playfulness of the woman in the earlier example. However, elevation is particularly interesting because of its social benefits—its power to spread, which could improve entire communities.

If frequent bad deeds trigger social disgust, cynicism, and hostility toward one’s peers, then frequent good deeds may have a type of social undoing effect, raising the level of compassion, love, and harmony in an entire society. Efforts to promote and publicize altruism may therefore have widespread and cost-effective results. I am now looking into the possibility that elevation can be used in moral education programs, inspiring young people in ways that more traditional teaching techniques cannot.

GETTING ELEVATED

It is a surprising and very beautiful fact about our species that each of us can be moved to tears by the sight of a stranger helping another stranger. It is an even more beautiful fact that these feelings sometimes inspire us to change our own behavior, values, and goals. Narratives of the lives of Jesus, Buddha, Mother Teresa, and other inspiring figures are full of stories of people who, upon meeting the saintly figure, dropped their former materialistic pursuits and devoted themselves to advancing the mission of the one who elevated them.

Indeed, a hallmark of elevation is that, like disgust, it is contagious. When an elevation story is told well, it elevates those who hear it. Powerful moments of elevation, whether experienced first-or secondhand, sometimes seem to push a mental “reset” button, wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration. This thought is for the moment an unsubstantiated speculation, but a clear description of such a case was recently sent to me by a man named David Whitford.

Several years ago, David’s Unitarian church asked each of its members to write his or her own “spiritual autobiography,” an account of how he or she became a more spiritual person. While reflecting on his spiritual experiences, David grew puzzled over why he is so often moved to tears during the course of church services. He concluded that there are two kinds of tears. The first he called “tears of compassion,” such as those he shed during a sermon on Mother’s Day about children who were growing up abandoned or neglected. He wrote that these cases felt to him like “being pricked in the soul,” after which “love pours out” for those who are suffering.

But the second kind of tears was very different. He called them “tears of celebration,” but he could just as well have called them “tears of elevation.” I will end this article with his words, which give a more eloquent description of elevation than anything I could write: