What works for individuals works in marriage: Bringing the good of a romantic partner to completion (and not the bad) yields many positive returns. One of the most toxic developments in marriage is the emergence of a low jen ratio. In over twenty studies of how romantic partners explain one another’s actions, the couples heading toward divorce routinely attribute the good things in their intimate life to the selfish motivations of their partner (“he brought me flowers just to butter me up for his golf weekend”). Regrettably, they just as readily pin the responsibility of their hassles, struggles, and crises on their partners (“if she’d clean the back seats of our car every now and then we wouldn’t have things growing under there”). Happier couples are guided by a high jen ratio: They generously give credit to their partner and see hidden virtues accompanying their partner’s foibles and faults.
And what’s true of individuals and marriages is true of nations: Nations whose citizens bring the good in others to completion thrive. High jen ratios are proving to be a hallmark of healthy societies. In 1996, Paul Zak and colleagues asked random samples of participants in various countries to answer the following question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you cannot be too careful in dealing with people?”. After statistically controlling for appropriate variables, such as economic development, Zak and colleagues found that for every 15 percent increase in the trust of a nation’s citizens, their economic fortunes rise by $430. Trust facilitates economic exchange with fewer transaction costs, including fewer failed negotiations, adversarial settlements, and needless lawsuits. With increased trust among a citizenry, discrimination and economic inequality fall. High jen ratios promote a society’s economic and ethical progress.
One cannot help but be struck by the cultural variation in the levels of trust presented in this figure. As a generalization, Zak found that Scandinavian and East Asian cultures are more trusting than South American and Eastern European cultures. Poorer nations (India) are often more trusting than wealthier nations (the United States).
JEN YEN
In the recent explosion of studies on social well-being, signs of a loss of jen in the United States are incontrovertible. The percentage of Americans who trust their fellow citizens has dropped 15 percentage points in the past fifteen years. Many indicators of our culture’s poor health—increasing feelings of anomie, greater loneliness, the trend toward less happy marriages—are on the rise. U.S. adults now have one-third fewer close friends in their circle of intimates than twenty years ago. Young babies have more physical contact with their Hummer-like baby strollers than from the touch of their parents’ hands. In a recent UNICEF study of twenty-one industrialized nations, U.S. children ranked twentieth in terms of overall well-being.
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.
These claims, that humans are wired to pursue self-interest, to compete, and to be vigilant to the bad rather than the good, are no doubt familiar to you. In fact, they lie at the heart of the intellectual traditions that have shaped Western thought. These core assumptions guide the thinking of founding figures in fields such as psychoanalysis, economics, political theory, and evolutionary theory: