Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Then our participants, feeling surges of either compassion or pride, indicated how similar they themselves were to twenty other groups. They rated their common humanity with Democrats, Republicans, saints, small children, convicted felons, terrorists, the homeless, the elderly, farmers, and, God forbid, Stanford students. Why this odd task? To ascertain whether compassion shifts people’s sense of similarity to others—a potent enabler of altruistic action. Philosopher Peter Singer has argued that this sense of similarity, or circle of care, is a core ethical principle that emerged as part of the evolution of the ethical mind. In Singer’s words, evolution has

bequeath(ed) humans with a sense of empathy—an ability to treat other people’s interests as comparable to one’s own. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family. People outside that circle were treated as subhuman and can be exploited with impunity. But over history the circle has expanded…from village to the clan to the tribe to the nation to other races to other sexes…and other species.

 

This expanding circle of care gives rise to a belief in equality, to the extension of individual rights to others. It is the target of many meditation exercises, which discipline the mind to come to treat all sentient beings with loving kindness. It is advocated by spiritual leaders, from the Buddha to Jesus. It is at the heart of jen. And it is a deep intuition that is intertwined with activity of the vagus nerve in the depths of the human chest. Our participants made to feel compassion by viewing images of harm reported a broader circle of care—they reported a greater sense of similarity to the 20 groups—than people feeling pride. This feeling of similarity to others increased as individuals’ vagus nerve fired more intensely. And when we looked more closely at whom people feeling compassion and pride felt most similar to, we found that pride made people feel more similar to the strong, resource-rich groups in the set of twenty they rated—Berkeley and Stanford undergraduates, lawyers, and the like (the dark bar to the far right). Compassion, on the other hand, made people feel more similar to the vulnerable groups—the homeless, the ill, the elderly (the gray bar to the far left). Compassion is anything but blind or biased by subjective concerns; it is exquisitely attuned to those in need.

 

Compassion makes people feel similar to weak groups; pride makes people feel similar to strong groups.

 

ALTRUISM’S HOLY GRAIL

 

There are theoretical cottage industries devoted to attributing seemingly altruistic action to selfish motivations. Take Paul Rusesabagina’s remarkable heroism during the genocide of Rwanda, so powerfully depicted in Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families and the film Hotel Rwanda. Rusesabagina risked his own life, and that of his wife and children, to save hundreds of Tutsis (he is a Hutu) from the genocidal Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, sheltering them at the hotel Milles Collines, which he managed. Within the social sciences, these courageous actions are readily attributed to selfish genes, to the desire to save kin, or to self-interest, pure and simple. Freudian-leaning theorists have also weighed in—altruistic action is a defense mechanism by which we ward off deeper, unflattering, anxiety-producing revelations about the self (“If I give to charity then I’ll think less about how much I hate my father!”). The more parsimonious account—that Paul Rusesabagina, and we on our best days, act altruistically because we are wired to care for others—plays second fiddle to selfish accounts of altruism in this age-old debate about the origins of goodness.

In an essay on the sublime and the beautiful, Immanuel Kant zeros in on the possibility that compassion renders people weak and passive in the face of injustice. Digressing somewhat, Kant observed:

For it is not possible that our heart should swell from fondness for every man’s interest and should swim in sadness at every stranger’s need; else the virtuous man, incessantly dissolving like Heraclitus in compassionate tears, nevertheless with all this goodheartedness would become nothing but a tender-hearted idler.

 

Compassion turns people into passive, timid, melancholic sorts, “tender-hearted idlers” like the philosopher Heraclitus, known for his thesis that human nature is always in flux. We can thank Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg for taking on this deeply entrenched claim, and gathering empirical data that show that compassion is the holy grail of altruism researchers—a pure, other-oriented state that motivates altruistic behavior like that which Paul Rusesabagina so courageously displayed during the genocide in Rwanda.