The Compassionate Instinct

Greater Good magazine is published by the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, an interdisciplinary research center devoted to the scientific understanding of happy and compassionate individuals, strong social bonds, and altruistic behavior. While serving the traditional tasks of a university research center—fostering groundbreaking scientific discoveries—the GGSC is unique in its commitment to helping people apply scientific research to their lives.

In the pages that follow, we present some of the best and most pathbreaking essays to have appeared in Greater Good magazine. These essays are the fruits of radical new developments in science: new evolutionary studies of peacemaking among our primate relatives; neuroscientific experiments that have identified the neural bases of emotions like love and compassion; discoveries of how hormones like oxytocin promote trust and generosity; and psychological studies of how and why people can be moved to practice kindness, even when it seems to cut against their own self-interest.

Taken together, this research challenges some long-held notions about human nature, revealing that the good in us is just as intrinsic to our species as the bad. Empathy, gratitude, compassion, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation, once thought to be aberrations from the tooth-and-claw natural order of things, are now being revealed as core features of primate evolution.

What’s more, as the essays in this volume reveal, this research offers new pathways to healthier bodies, marriages, workplaces, families, and cultures. For example, neuroscience suggests that when we give to others, our brain shows heightened activity in the nucleus accumbens, a region known to have many dopamine receptors and process rewards; in other words, kindness really is its own reward. Moreover, kindness is contagious: research finds that when we offer modest expressions of gratitude—the simple “thank you,” smile, or warm gaze—we prompt other people to reciprocate the kindness toward us and toward others.

This research suggests that compassionate behavior not only exemplifies a good, moral way to live, but carries great emotional and physical health benefits for compassionate people, their families, and their communities. More and more, it seems that rather than being irrational and superfluous, behaviors like compassion and kindness are actually conducive to human survival—and essential to human flourishing.

Our expectations for ourselves play a strong role in shaping our behavior. For too long a view of humans has prevailed that presupposes that we are wired to compete, to act aggressively, to pursue unbridled self-interest. These are no doubt facets of human nature, but they represent only half of the story. The essays in this volume reveal another story, one that places goodness at the center of human nature. Our contributors don’t deny the existence of the violence and selfishness we see in the world around us. But they do offer scientific evidence that another world is possible.

THE COMPASSIONATE INSTINCT

Dacher Keltner

HUMANS ARE SELFISH. It’s so easy to say. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good.

These kinds of claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotion. For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. Plato compared the human soul to a chariot: the intellect is the driver and the emotions are the horses. Life is a continual struggle to keep the emotions under control.

Even compassion, the concern we feel for another being’s welfare, has been treated with downright derision. Kant saw it as a weak and misguided sentiment: “Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings,” he said of compassion. Many question whether true compassion exists at all—or whether it is inherently motivated by self-interest.

Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest. These studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive—a view that has its origins in Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Compassion and benevolence, this research suggests, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF COMPASSION