Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

As I have applied the Darwinian lens to the emotions the past fifteen years, another swath of human nature was revealed to me, positive emotions that bring the good in others to completion. I kept encountering fleeting two-or three-second emotions that belonged in the numerator of the jen ratio. As I painstakingly coded hundreds of hours of people talking about the deaths of their spouses, I witnessed laughs that acted like brief journeys to a more peaceful state. In the surge of affection between romantic partners, I saw brief head tilts, smiles, and open-handed gestures. I saw teasers, once playfully vicious, soothe their targets with quarter-second touches to the shoulders and fleeting eye-to-eye affirmation. I observed sexual interest sweep over flirtatious young suitors’ faces in lip puckers and lip bites. After being startled, people recovered their poise briefly, but then collapsed, disheveled, into a state of embarrassment, looking askance, blushing, touching their faces, and smiling awkwardly. When I presented images of these abashed participants to others, these viewers would sigh vocalizations that provided clues to the origins of compassion.

The canonical studies of human emotion, studies of the universality of facial expression, of how emotion is registered in the nervous system, how emotion shapes judgment and decision making, had never looked into these states. The groundbreaking studies of emotion had only examined one state covered by the term “happiness.” But research is often misled by “ordinary” language, the language we speak rather than the language of scientific theory. Happiness is a diffuse term. It masks important distinctions between emotions such as gratitude, awe, contentment, pride, love, compassion and desire—the focus of this book—as well as expressive behaviors such as teasing, touch, and laughter. This narrow concentration on “happiness” has stunted our scientific understanding of the emotions that move people toward higher jen ratios. By solely asking “Am I happy?” we miss out on the many nuances of the meaningful life.

My hope is to shift what goes into the numerator of your jen ratio, to bring into sharper focus the millisecond manifestations of human goodness. I hope that you will see human behavior in a new light, the subtle cues of embarrassment, playful vocalizations, the visceral feelings of compassion, the sense of gratitude in another’s touch to your shoulder, that have been shaped by the seven million years of hominid evolution and that bring the good in others to completion. In our pursuit of happiness we have lost sight of these essential emotions. Our everyday conversations about happiness are filled with references to sensory pleasure—delicious Australian wines, comfortable hotel beds, body tone produced by our exercise regimens. What is missing is the language and practice of emotions like compassion, gratitude, amusement, and wonder. My hope is to tilt your jen ratio to what the poet Percy Shelley describes as the great secret of morals: “the identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.” The key to this quest resides in the study of emotions long ignored by affective science. It will require that we return to Darwin’s country home, Down House, in Kent, England, and that we travel with Paul Ekman to the highlands of New Guinea.

2Darwin’s Joys

 

IN 1967, PAUL EKMAN was lucky to land his Cessna on a small clearing in a jungle of New Guinea (the plane had lost a wheel on takeoff). He arrived with a packet of photos, film equipment, and a hypothesis in hand. He was there thanks to U.S. government malfeasance in South America. A government agency had been funding counterinsurgency research in left-leaning South American countries under the guise of public opinion research. When a congressional committee found out, the funds were quickly shunted to a promising but relatively unknown young researcher—Ekman—for a cross-cultural study of emotion recognition.

Ekman traveled to New Guinea to ascertain whether people from a culture remote from Western influence, a people living in pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer conditions, would interpret photos of facial expressions of six emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—as you or I would. Ekman doubted he would obtain such findings. He was steeped in the cultural relativist assumptions of the era. He had little notion that this work, however it turned out, would catalyze the study of emotion. Nor did he suspect that this work would unravel time-honored notions about the place of emotion in human nature. He was making the trip in the discovery-oriented spirit of Charles Darwin.

DARWIN’S JOYS