Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

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.”