Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The early Christian church took an immediate dislike to communal dance—it generated subversive passions and could quickly sow the seeds of dissent and protest. Not surprisingly, the powers that be in the church (I suspect they had little rhythm) set in place extreme restrictions upon this human universal. But that proved to be, and will always be, a losing endeavor. The instinct to dance reemerged outside church walls in the form of carnivals, which persist to this day. Dance will emerge in any context, in church, at the game, at scholarly conferences, in strangers waiting in line for a bus, in two-year-olds bouncing to the beat of big bands at formal weddings. People need to sway their hips, shimmy their shoulders, and clap their hands together.

Our conceptual mistake, Ehrenreich observes, and it is a common one, is to assume that dance is sexual. Certainly our early, memorable experiences of dance—the intense slow-dance clutches to Stairway to Heaven of my eighth-grade youth—felt sexual. (Of course, anything in eighth grade is sexual—algebra, spelling bees, fire drills, corn dogs served at lunch.) But to generalize from these experiences to a broad statement about dance is misguided.

Instead, dance creates a love for fellow group members; it coordinates evolved patterns of touch, chant, smiling, laughing, and head shakes to spread collective joy in the sweat and delirium of collective movement. Dance is the most reliable and quickest route to a mysterious feeling that has gone by many names over the generations: sympathy, agape, ecstasy, jen; here I’ll call it trust. To dance is to trust.

If neuroeconomist Paul Zak could study the neural correlates of that particular kind of love—of fellow group members—that rises after a great bout of dancing, he would likely find oxytocin levels shooting through the roof. Zak proposes that oxytocin is the biological underpinning of trust—a thesis he has supported in his groundbreaking work with the trust game. In the trust game, one participant, known as the “investor,” makes contributions to another individual, known as the “trustee.” The value of the money given to the trustee then triples, and the trustee then gives some amount back to the investor—as much or as little as he or she desires. As in so many realms of life, cooperation amplifies the potential gains to be had by all, but it requires a leap of faith, a core conviction, a sense of trust, that the trustee will give back some of the funds generously given.

In studies Zak has conducted in Germany and Switzerland (where it is not illegal to study oxytocin experimentally) Zak has given a blast of oxytocin, or a neutral solution, to the investor via a nasal spray. Our “investor,” grooving on oxytocin, was more than twice as likely to give away maximum amounts of money to the stranger than the “investor” given a neutral solution in the control condition.

My former student Belinda Campos calls this cocktail of love toward non-kin, enhanced by oxytocin and founded in the sense of trust, the love of humanity. Her research shows that this feeling, and not other kinds of love, amplifies the conviction in the goodness of other humans. It is accompanied by the urge to give, to trust, and to sacrifice. In one study we examined college students’ transitions to their new community—their residence hall—during their first year of college. Students who reported feeling a great deal of the love of humanity prior to coming to college more quickly trusted their new hallmates, and folded more quickly into dense webs of friendships. It is the feeling that led Gandhi to say that “all men are brothers” and Jesus to say “Whoever love all brothers has obeyed the whole law” (Romans 13:8–10). It is the love of humanity that weaves together Walt Whitman’s declarations in Song of Myself.

And empirical studies are finding that the health of communities depends on trust and the love of humanity. Robert Sampson, at Harvard University, has found that in resource-deprived, dangerous neighborhoods, children fare better when they feel a sense of love of humanity from their neighbors. In these neighborhoods, adults who make warm eye contact with neighborhood children, who provide that comforting pat on the back, who speak with encouraging words and in uplifting tones, create a sense of trust and strength in the young non-kin in their midst. In other research on divorce and the fractured family, children prove to be much more resilient in the wake of their parents’ divorce when they feel a sense of connection to and devotion for other nearby adults—neighbors, teachers, coaches, pastors.

 

Oxytocin increases generosity in the trust game.