After the first two trials, the individual receiving the shocks began to look a little pale. He mumbled for a glass of water. He mentioned feelings of discomfort and recounted a traumatic shock experience from childhood. While the experimenter figured out how to respond to this complex turn of events, the participant reported on how distressed and compassionate he or she was feeling at that moment. Then the experimenter hit upon an idea: Would the participant take some of the shocks on behalf of the other individual, clearly dreading the prospects of more shocks? The critical test for our present interests was in the condition in which participants were feeling compassion but were allowed to leave. Which branch of their nervous system prevailed—the selfish or the compassionate? The compassionate. These participants, feeling the swell of compassion in their chest but hearing the voice of pure self-interest—they could just pick up and leave—volunteered to take several more shocks on behalf of the other participant.
One worry you might have is that participants who took more shocks did so simply to impress the experimenter. Fair enough, a reasonable critique. Does compassion drive altruistic action even in purely anonymous settings? Does the absence of the opportunity to gain social rewards—the esteem of others—dampen our nobler inclinations? This age-old question motivated Batson’s next study. In this study, female participants conversed with another participant (a confederate) through an exchange of notes while seated in separate cubicles. Some participants were told to be as objective as possible when reading the notes, to concentrate on the facts at hand. Other participants were asked to imagine as vividly as possible how the communicator—the other person—felt; they were led to feel compassion.
The first note the participant read was from a student named Janet Arnold, who confessed to feeling out of place at her new home at the University of Kansas. She hailed from the rolling hills of nearby Ohio and was having a bit of difficulty adjusting to the exotic locale of Lawrence, Kansas. In the second exchange, Janet expressed a strong need for a friend. She asked the participant, point-blank, if she’d like to hang out together. Upon reading this second note, the participant was told that Janet had finished and left the study and was then asked to indicate how much time she would be willing to spend with Janet. Her response would be read by Janet and the experimenter or it would remain anonymous. The individual who volunteered to spend the most time with Janet? The person who was feeling compassion and in the anonymous condition.
Stronger evidence still would link selfless, altruistic action to activation in the vagus nerve. Nancy Eisenberg has gathered just this kind of data. In one illustrative study, young children (second-graders and fifth-graders) and college students watched a videotape of a young mother and her children who had recently been injured in a violent accident. Her children were forced to miss school while they recuperated from their injuries in the hospital. After watching the videotape, the children were given the opportunity to take homework to the recovering children during their recess (thus sacrificing precious playground time). Those children who reported feeling compassion and who showed heart rate deceleration—a sign of vagus nerve activity—as well as oblique, concerned eyebrows while watching the video were much more likely to help out the kids in the hospital. In contrast, those children who winced, who reported distress, and who showed heart rate acceleration—that is, those children who reacted with their own personal distress—were less likely to help. These findings make a clarifying point: It is an active concern for others, and not a simple mirroring of others’ suffering, that is the fount of compassion, and that leads to altruistic ends.
These scientific studies countervail the influential claims of the Kants, Nietzsches, and Rands about the nature of human goodness. Compassion is not a blind emotion that catapults people pell-mell toward the next warm body that walks by. Instead, compassion is exquisitely attuned to harm and vulnerability in others. Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions. The kindness, sacrifice, and jen that make up healthy communities are rooted in a bundle of nerves that has been producing caretaking behavior for over 100 million years of mammalian evolution. And the lives of individuals with highly active vagus nerves add yet another chapter to the story of how we are wired to be good.
VAGAL SUPERSTARS
Our tendencies to experience specific emotions, fleeting and evanescent as they are, define who we are. Emotions shape our deepest beliefs and core values, our relationships, the careers we choose, our methods for handling conflict, the art we like, the foods that please us, the very trajectory of our lives and those of our spouses, children, and friends. Descartes did not quite get it right in stating, “I think, therefore I am” he would have been more on the mark if he had said, “I feel, therefore I am.”
Consider what has been learned about shyness—a temperamental style characteristic of William James, Virginia Woolf, and so many others who have uncovered the mysteries of emotion. Early in life shy individuals show evidence of a hyperactive fear system, or HPA axis, which shapes their patterns of relationships and life choices. We know this thanks to the longitudinal studies of Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan. Kagan has identified very shy infants at four months of age according to their fearful, distressed reactions to novel toys. Fast-forward seven years to Kagan’s observations of these children in social groups: Shy children identified at age four months are most likely to be those two or three children in grammar-school classes who hover at the edges of the playground, observing and analyzing rather than engaging in the pyrotechnic face-to-face dynamics of that age (my bet is that a disproportionate number of writers fit this profile). Shy children have stronger stress reactions (elevated heart rate, pupil dilation, cortisol response) when hearing fiction being read or when engaging in complex cognitive tasks. And these same individuals, at age twenty-one, when in an fMRI scanner and presented with slides of faces they had not seen, show stronger activation in the amygdala. When Avshalom Caspi studied the adult lives of shy individuals, he found, fitting with the analysis here, that shy individuals took almost 2 additional years, compared to more outgoing types, to enter into marriage, and they also took longer to settle upon a stable job. That fearful 4 month old, startled and distressed at the presence of a new toy, fight or flight physiology throbbing in the veins and throughout the body, is likely to lead a life of restraint, inhibition, and hesitation in the face of intimacy.
If the vagus nerve is a caretaking organ, then one would expect individuals with elevated vagus nerve activity to enjoy rich networks of social connection, to show highly responsive caretaking behavior, and for compassion to be at the center of their emotional lives. New studies are finding this to be the case. In one study, Chris Oveis and I brought Berkeley undergraduates to our lab in October and had their vagus nerve activity measured (deriving a measure known as vagal tone) while they sat quietly and comfortably in a resting state. Our interest was in tracking the lives of people with elevated vagus nerve activity in a resting state—vagal superstars. When they returned to the lab seven months later, we found that our vagal superstars, compared to those individuals with low baseline vagal tone, reported elevated levels of the trait extraversion, which is defined by high levels of social energy, friendships, and social contacts, and agreeableness, which is defined by great warmth, kindness, and a love of others. People with elevated baseline vagal tone also reported more optimism, general positive mood, and better physical health seven months later. And when presented with images of harm and beauty, they reported greater compassion and awe—their minds were more active in the aesthetic realm.