Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

In this strange speed dating moral universe, I would ask people to tell me of their last embarrassing experience. I would then focus my eyes and carefully watch embarrassment ripple across their faces. Why put stock in an emotion so closely associated with the seemingly superficial aspects of social life—politeness, manners, and social conventions regarding the exchanges between strangers? Because the elements of the embarrassment are fleeting statements the individual makes about his or her respect for the judgment of others. Embarrassment reveals how much the individual cares about the rules that bind us to one another. Gaze aversion, head turns to the side and down, the coy smile, and the occasional face touch are perhaps the most potent nonverbal clues we have to an individual’s commitment to the moral order. These nonverbal cues, in the words of sociologist Erving Goffman, are “acts of devotion…in which an actor celebrates and confirms his relation to a recipient.”

One way to test this hypothesis—that embarrassment displays are evanescent signs of moral commitment—would be to study moral heroes, and look to see whether they show extraordinary embarrassment and modesty. That is, is the modesty, deference, and respect they have cultivated seen in their everyday visage? One cannot help but be struck by the deep modesty evident in the smiles of people such as Gandhi or the Dalai Lama, which show elements of embarrassment that I documented—gaze aversion, lip presses, and smile controls.

I chose to study the other end of the continuum—people prone to violence. My thesis was simple: To the extent that embarrassment displays reflect respect for others and a commitment to the moral order, the relative absence of embarrassment should be accompanied by the tendency to act in antisocial ways, the most extreme being violence. In a first study to test this hypothesis, I concentrated on young boys prone to violence, known in clinical science as externalizers (they externalize their inner turmoil by acting out aggressively). These are boys who fight, bully, steal, burn things, and vandalize on a routine basis. I observed ten-year-olds while they were taking a two-minute interactive IQ test, attempting to answer questions whose answers you’d find in an encyclopedia (“What is a barometer?” “Who was Charles Darwin?”). The test is designed to produce some failure in all children. All the boys in this study responded emotionally to these academic misfires, glaring in anger, showing the tightened brow of anxiety, or, most typically, showing the now familiar signs of embarrassment. Consistent with my moral commitment hypothesis, the well-adjusted boys showed the most embarrassment, and in fact this was their dominant response to the test. They in effect were displaying concern over their performance, and perhaps a deeper respect for the institution of education. The externalizing boys, in contrast, showed little or no embarrassment. Instead, these boys erupted with occasional facial displays of anger (one boy gave the finger to the camera when the experimenter momentarily had to leave the testing room). The fleeting, subtle embarrassment display is a strong index of our commitment to the social-moral order and the greater good.

Neuroscientist James Blair has followed up on this work on embarrassment and violence by studying “acquired sociopathy,” that is, antisocial tendencies brought on by brain trauma. One such patient, J. S., was an electrical engineer. One day in his mid-fifties he collapsed and lost consciousness. During his recovery in a hospital, he was known for his outrageous outbursts. He threw furniture at other patients. He pushed a wheelchair-bound patient around at roller-coaster speed and with hairpin shifts in direction despite her shrieks of terror. He groped female nurses on a routine basis and, on another occasion, bodysurfed on a gurney through the hallways of the hospital.

In Blair’s research, J. S. demonstrated a normal ability to learn, to recognize faces, and to identify whether faces were male or female. He showed normal physiological reactions to a clap and the utterance of his name. He could provide normal explanations of protagonists’ behavior briefly described in vignettes, suggesting that he did not suffer from some general deficit in understanding others’ mental states.

What J. S. proved to be deficient in was embarrassment. In one task, he was asked to attribute emotions to hypothetical characters in various situations. Some were ones of happiness—a person wins an award. Others were of sadness—the protagonist loses a job. Still others were about embarrassment—a protagonist slips in a café and falls prostrate in the middle of some tables. J. S. was near-perfect in his ability to attribute feelings of happiness and sadness to the fictional characters; he could reason about the emotions of gains and losses. He was utterly incompetent in his attributions of embarrassment.