The road map of Born to be Good follows the development of my own thinking about answers to these questions. It begins with a discussion, in chapter 1, of the Confucian concept of jen, which refers to kindness, humanity, and reverence. I introduce the concept of the jen ratio, a simple but powerful way of looking upon the relative balance of good and uplifting versus bad and cynical in life. The jen ratio honors my interests in Eastern philosophy and in parsimonious measurement. It is a way to think about the clues to happy marriages, well-adapted children, healthy communities and cultures.
The next three chapters take the reader on a tour of the latest discoveries in evolutionary approaches to emotion. We start in chapter 2 by considering Darwin’s nuanced analyses of the many positive emotions. Contrary to what many may assume, Darwin believed that these emotions were the basis of our moral instinct and capacity for good. Darwin and Confucius would have been very content collaborators.
From Darwin we travel to New Guinea, and Paul Ekman’s paradigm-shifting studies of the universality of facial expression. As a result of the empirical science that followed this work, we have arrived at three new ideas about emotion that are summarized in chapter 3: Emotions are signs of our commitment to others; emotions are encoded into our bodies and brains; emotions are our moral gut, the source of our most important moral intuitions.
In chapter 4 we look back in time to glean what has been learned about the evolution of human goodness. This ever-changing evolutionary science provides a context for understanding the origins of the positive emotions, where the smile comes from, why we are wired to trust and to care. The chapter brings together insights from the study of our close primate relatives, from archeology, and from hunter-gatherer cultures. The reader may be surprised to learn that:
We are a caretaking species. The profound vulnerability of our offspring rearranged our social organization as well as our nervous system.
We are a face-to-face species. We are remarkable in our capacity to empathize, to mimic, to mirror.
Our power hierarchies differ from those of other species; power goes to the most emotionally intelligent.
We reconcile our conflicts rather than fleeing or killing; we have evolved powerful capacities to forgive.
We live in complex patterns of fragile monogamy, preferring monogamy but often showing patterns of serial monogamy.
Each of the remaining eight chapters is devoted to the science of different emotions that give rise to high jen ratios. This science is rooted in Darwin’s deepest insight about human emotion: that the visible expressions of emotion that we observe today are clues to the ancient behaviors that led some mammals to fare well in the tasks of survival, reproduction, and care of offspring. This science would not exist without the methodology Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen gave to the field: the ability to measure millisecond movements of muscles in the face. Every chapter tries to honor the insights about emotion found in art, literature, and philosophy.
In chapter 5, I begin where I began, with a serendipitous discovery of the embarrassment display. I show how embarrassment acts as an appeasement display, prompting others to forgive and forget. The smile is revealed, in chapter 6, to have evolved as a signal of equality and trust, and as a sign of the life well lived. Chapter 7 examines how laughter evolved as a unique signal of play and levity, detailing the varieties of laughter and how laughter promotes healthy responses to trauma. In chapter 8, I examine the much-maligned act of teasing. I show, building on the study of fools and jesters as well as the philosophy of language, how teasing is actually a remarkable act of pretense and drama, and enables people to negotiate conflicts and hierarchies. In chapter 9, I survey the startling new science of touch: it makes people trust, it increases body weight in premature babies and reduces depression in adults in nursing homes, it builds strong immune systems. In our lab we have documented that people can communicate compassion, love, and gratitude to a stranger with one-second touches to the forearm. In chapter 10 I reveal lasting insights about humans’ reproductive relations, profiling the new discoveries on oxytocin, a neuropeptide that promotes devotion, and how it is released during nonverbal displays of love. Compassion is the focus of chapter 11. Darwin thought it was the foundation of our moral sense and cooperative communities. I focus on new discoveries about a branch of the nervous system, the vagus nerve, which is centrally involved in compassion. I conclude, in chapter 12, by examining awe. I begin by talking about John Muir’s experiences of awe in the Sierras that led to the environmentalist movement and trace back to revolutionary thinkers in the West who transformed our experience of awe, from a religious experience to something that can be felt in nature, toward others in art, and in spiritual experience. I then rely on studies of goosebumps, dinosaurs, and beauty to tell a story about the evolution of this fascinating emotion, and how it enables us to fold into cooperative social collectives.
In carrying out the science and writing that led to Born to Be Good, I have become more acutely aware of our capacity for jen. I see it in the smiles of friends, our many modest ways, melodious laughter, moving touches, and the readiness with which we care, appreciate, and revere. Seeing these capacities in our species has brought a bit of the good in me to completion. I hope the same will prove to be true for you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I HAVE SO MANY to acknowledge and appreciate.
I would like to thank my mentors Phoebe Ellsworth, Robert Levenson, and Paul Ekman for initiating me into the scientific study of emotion, when the field was just getting off the ground. I have learned so much from my collaborator colleagues: George Bonanno, Lisa Capps, Serena Chen, Avshalom Caspi, James Gross, Deborah Gruenfeld, Jonathan Haidt, Oliver John, Ken Locke, Robert Knight, Ann Kring, David Matsumoto, Terrie Moffitt, Michael Morris, Terrie Moffitt, and Gerben van Kleef. In writing two textbooks, I have been made wiser in perspective and prose by Tom Gilovich, Jennifer Jenkins, Richard Nisbett, and Keith Oatley. In friendly conversations, many of the ideas here have been enlivened and brought into focus by Chris Boas, Nathan Brostrom, Gustave Carlson, Christine Carter, Claire Ferrari, Michael Lewis, Jason Marsh, Peter Platt, and especially Tom Gilovich, Leif Hass, Mollie McNeil, and Frank Sulloway, who dwelled in the ideas here in ways that let me view their promises and pitfalls through different eyes.
I thank those who have funded my research: The National Institute of Mental Health, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Foundation, the Metanexus Institute, the Mind and Life Institute, and the Positive Psychology Network. I am deeply grateful to Tom and Ruth Ann Hornaday, founders of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, a place to cultivate the next generation of scientists interested in how we are born to be good, and Lani and Herb Alpert, for their support in building our magazine, Greater Good.