Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  as Frans de Waal has observed: de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), chap. 2.

  Our hominid predecessors evolved bigger brains: Ehrlich, Human Natures, chap. 6.

  “carried in a sling”: Konner, The Tangled Wing, 306.

  Cooperative child rearing, where relatives and friends traded off duties: Hrdy, Mother Nature, 90–95.

  consistent evidence of cooperative hunting for meat: Stephen Mithen, Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 238.

  fall to their deaths: ibid., 238.

  morphological changes that gave rise to our remarkable capacity to communicate: Marc D. Hauser, The Evolution of Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

  Unlike our primate relatives, the human face has relatively little obscuring hair: Nina Jablonski, Skin: A Natural History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 43.

  allowing for a much richer vocabulary of expressive behavior originating in the face: D. Matsumoto et al., “Facial Expressions of Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotion.

  The evolving capacity to communicate is even more pronounced in the human voice: Ehrlich, Human Natures, 152.

  to represent and spread information across time and space with language: Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richardson, eds., Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 204–40.

  our basic emotional tendencies can quickly spread to others, through mimicry, imitation, and communication: For a superb review of the evolution of the capacity to imitate and empathize, see S. D. Preston and F.B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002): 1–72.

  In research with my colleague Cameron Anderson: C. Anderson, O.P. John, D. Keltner, and A. Kring, “Social Status in Naturalistic Face-to-Face Groups: Effects of Personality and Physical Attractiveness in Men and Women,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 118–29.

  Female adults attain comparable levels of status with just as much alacrity and effect: Ibid. We found few differences in how women and men ascribe status to other women and men in their groups. High-status women and men show similar tendencies to keep their elevated positions of power over time. The one difference we did document is that group members achieved consensus, or agreement, in their judgments of the status of men a bit faster than in their judgments of women. It is also important to bear in mind that these are status judgments in informal groups. It is very likely that within institutions with historical sex-based differences in status (for example, the U.S. Senate), one is likely to find differences in judgment.

  Yet the hierarchical social organization of higher primates and early humans differs dramatically from that of other species: One of the first scientists to make this point was Christopher Boehm. Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See also Dacher Keltner, “The Power Paradox,” Greater Good 8 (2008): 14–17.

  Frans de Waal has found: Chimpanzee Politics (New York: Harper and Row, 1982) and Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  Instead, it is the socially intelligent individuals who advance the interests of other group members (in the service of their own self-interest) who rise in social hierarchies: Several new lines of research lend support to this counterintuitive claim. In a recent review, we summarize how socially energetic, outgoing individuals gain power in social groups, and how aggressive, manipulative, Machiavellian types often lose power. Andersen et al., “Social Status in Naturalistic Face-to-Face Groups: Effects of Personality and Physical Attractiveness in Men and Women,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001): 1108–29. Stephane Coté has recently documented that socially intelligent individuals—that is, those individuals who are able to understand their own emotions and those of other group members—acquire leadership in organizations. S. Coté and C. T. H. Miners, “Emotional Intelligence, Cognitive Intelligence, and Job Performance,” Administrative Science Quarterly 51 (2006): 1–28. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this thesis is recent work by Cameron Anderson and colleagues, who have found that individuals in social groups who have modest assessments of their own power actually keep positions of power, whereas individuals who have inflated assessments of power lose power over time. C. Anderson et al., “Knowing your Place: Self-Perceptions of Status in Face-to-Face Groups,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, no. 6 (2006): 1094–1110. We have long been guided by Machiavellian analyses of power, which suggest that effective leadership requires deception, strategic manipulation, pitting group members against one another, and being feared. The new empirical science of power is proving this to be an erroneous set of assumptions. See Keltner, “The Power Paradox.”

  who can tell a good joke or tease in ways: In our research on teasing we have found that individuals who are highly esteemed by other group members are quite adept at teasing in ways that are playful, D. Keltner et al., “Teasing in Hierarchical and Intimate Relations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75, no. 5 (1998): 1231–47.

  bullies, who resort to aggression, throwing their weight around, and raw forms of intimidation and dominance, in point of fact, are outcasts and low in the social hierarchy: D. Olweus, “Stability of Aggressive Reaction Patterns in Males: A Review,” Psychological Bulletin 86 (1979): 852–75.

  adorn and beautify themselves in an arms race of beauty to attract resource-rich mates: Darwin, Descent, chaps. 19–20. For an erudite and illuminating extension of Darwin’s ideas, see Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Anchor, 2000). For a playful treatment of the evolutionary biology of sex, see O. Judson, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation (New York: Owl, 2002).

  This logic of competing interests extends to parent-offspring relations: Hrdy, Mother Nature, chap. 18.

  This parent-offspring conflict even extends to mother-fetus relations: D. Haig, “Evolutionary Conflicts in Pregnancy and Calcium Metabolism—A Review,” Placenta 25. Supplement A. Trophoblast Research 18 (2004): S10–S15.

  In an observational study of American families: Judy Dunn and her colleagues have done revealing research on the dynamics of family conflict, and how those conflicts lay a foundation for talks about emotion and morality, and the development of empathy and conflict resolution strategies. J. Dunn and C. Herrera, “Conflict Resolution with Friends, Siblings and Mothers: A Developmental Perspective,” Aggressive Behavior 23 (1997): 343–57; Dunn and P. Munn, “Becoming a Family Member: Family Conflict and the Development of Social Understanding in the Second Year,” Child Development 56 (1985): 480–92.

  This kind of sibling conflict: Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (New York: Pantheon, 1996).

  who documented how our primate relatives reconcile after aggressive encounters: Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Frans B. M. de Waal, “The Integration of Dominance and Social Bonding in Primates,” Quarterly Review of Biology 61 (1986): 459–79; de Waal and A. van Roosmalen, “Reconciliation and Consolation among Chimpanzees,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 5 (1979): 55–66.

  the prevailing wisdom: Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, trans. M. Latzke, (London: Methuen, 1967).

  Recent studies have found that wolves: For an excellent review of the literature on ostracism, see K. Williams, “Ostracism,” Annual Review of Psychology 58 (2007): 425–52.

  our survival depends on healthy, stable bonds with others: R. F. Baumeister and M. R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 117 (1995): 497–529.

  We are relative prudes compared to these primate relatives: Matt Ridley, The Red Q
ueen (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 213–17.

  Bonobo females are sexually active for about five years: Frans B. M. de Waal, “Bonobo Sex and Society,” Scientific American 272 (March 1995): 82–88.

  This sexual organization had several important implications: Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

  sexual monogamy was the most common sexual pattern: Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

  In The Evolution of Cooperation: Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

  Built into the human organism, therefore, must be a set of mechanisms that reverse the cost-benefit analysis of giving: Sober and Wilson, Unto Others, chap. 1.

  Jonathan Haidt has called this state elevation: J. Haidt and D. Keltner, “Appreciation of Beauty and Excellent (Awe, Wonder, Elevation),” in Character Strengths and Virtues, ed. Christopher Peterson and Martin E.P. Seligman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 537–51.

  EMBARRASSMENT

  On July 2, 1860, Eadweard Muybridge boarded a stagecoach in San Francisco: Rebecca Solnit, Rivers and Shadows (New York: Penguin, 2003).

  At the time I began my research, the display of embarrassment was thought to be a sign of confusion and thwarted intention: The brilliant sociologist Erving Goffman was fascinated by embarrassment and described it as reflecting a state of confusion. He did, however, suggest that it was a critical signal of an individual’s commitment to the social order—an observation that would guide much of the work on embarrassment. Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 97–112.

  In a frenzied eighteen months at the University of Pennsylvania: Eadweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (New York: Dover, 1955).

  That is the orienting function of the startle: S. S. Tomkins, “Affect Theory,” in Approaches to Emotion, 163–95.

  the magnitude of the 250-millisecond startle response is a telling indicator of a person’s temperament, and in particular of the extent to which the person is anxious: There is now an extensive literature that relies on the magnitude of the startle response, most typically measured in terms of the intensity of the eyeblink, as an index of fear and negative emotion. Just as importantly, a person’s positive emotional disposition or current positive emotion tends to attenuate the startle response. P. J. Lang, “The Emotion Probe,” American Psychologist 50 (1995): 372–85; Lang, M. N. Bradley and B. N. Cuthbert, “Emotion, Attention, and the Startle Reflex,” Psychological Review 97 (1990): 377–95, and “Emotion, Motivation, and Anxiety: Brain Mechanisms and Psychophysiology,” Biological Psychiatry 44 (1998): 1248–63.

  neurotic individuals make for more difficult marriages: Neuroticism is defined by elevated levels of tension, anxiety, worry, and self-doubt. As important as negative emotions are in certain contexts, their chronic occurrence has proven to be difficult for marriages. N. Bolger and E. A. Schilling, “Personality and the Problems of Everyday Life: The Role of Neuroticism in Exposure and Reactivity to Daily Stressors,” Journal of Personality 59 (1991): 355–86.

  My first step was to embarrass people, a task that has given license to a more mischievous side of researchers’ imaginations: For reviews of studies of embarrassment, see R. S. Miller, “The Nature and Severity of Self-Reported Embarrassing Circumstances,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18 (1992): 190–98; D. Keltner and B. N. Buswell, “Embarrassment: Its Distinct Form and Appeasement Functions,” Psychological Bulletin 122 (1997): 250–70.

  after eighteen months of age, they show embarrassment: M. Lewis, M. V. Sullivan, C. Stanger, and M. Weiss, “Self-Development and Self-Conscious Emotions,” Child Development 60 (1989): 146–56.

  perhaps the most mortifying experiment: D. Shearn et al., “Facial Coloration and Temperature Responses in Blushing,” Psychophysiology 27 (1990): 687–93.

  and one in line with Darwin-inspired analyses of emotional displays as involuntary, truthful signs: Ekman, “Facial Expression and Emotion” A. J. Fridlund, Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994). D. Keltner and A. Kring, “Emotion, Social Function, and Psychopathology,” General Psychological Review 2 (1998): 320–42.

  Consider the kiss: J. Foer, “The Kiss of Life,” The New York Times, February 14, 2006.

  documented by: Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology.

  Frans de Waal has devoted thousands of hours to the study of what different primates: de Waal and van Roosmalen, “Reconciliation and Consolation.”

  When I reviewed forty studies of appeasement and reconciliation processes across species: Keltner and Buswell, “Embarrassment: Its Distinct Form.”

  the loss of body control (the prosaic fart or stumble): For one study that has characterized the different causes of embarrassment, see R. S. Miller, “The Nature and Severity of Self-Reported Embarrassing Circumstances,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18 (1992): 190–98.

  I concentrated on young boys prone to violence: D. Keltner, T. Moffitt, and M. Stouthhamer-Loeber, “Facial Expressions of Emotion and Psychopathology in Adolescent Boys,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 104 (1995): 644–52.

  Neuroscientist James Blair has followed up on this work on embarrassment and violence by studying “acquired sociopathy”: R. J. R. Blair and L. Cipolotti, “Impaired Social Response Reversal: A Case of ‘Acquired Sociopathy,’” Brain 123 (2000): 1122–41.

  Like J. S., Muybridge had damaged his orbitofrontal cortex, which might be thought of as a command center for the moral sentiments: Edmund T. Rolls, The Brain and Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped part of the midbrain: Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

  It receives information from the cingulate cortex: For a review, see R. J. Davidson, D. Pizzagalli, J. B. Nitschke, and N. H. Kalin, “Parsing the Subcomponents of Emotion and Disorders: Perspective from Affective Neuroscience,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, 8–24.

  Soft, velvety touch to the arm: E. T. Rolls, “The Orbitofrontal Cortex and Reward,” Cerebral Cortex 10 (2000): 284–94.

  “He is fitful”: J. M. Harlow, “Recovery from the Passage of an Iron Bar through the Head,” History of Psychiatry 4 (1993): 274–81.

  In research with Jennifer Beer: J. Beer et al., “The Regulatory Function of Self-Conscious Emotion: Insights from Patients with Orbitofrontal Damage,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003): 594–604.

  They resembled psychopaths: R. J. R. Blair, R. L. Jones, F. Clark, and M. Smith, “The Psychopathic Individual: A Lack of Responsiveness to Distress Cues?” Psychophysiology 34, no. 2 (1997): 192–98.

  “When man is born”: Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (New York: Penguin, 1963), Book II. LXXVI.

  SMILE

  Greek artisans: Agnus Trumble, A Brief History of the Smile (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 11–18.

  What does the smile mean?: M. Frank, P. Ekman, and W. V. Friesen, “Behavioral Markers and Recognizability of the Smile of Enjoyment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 83–93; A. J. Fridlund, “Sociality of Solitary Smiling: Potentiation by an Implicit Audience,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 (1991): 229–40.

  If the right kind of smile is synonymous with happiness: D. Keltner et al., “Facial Expression of Emotion,” Handbook of Affective Science, ed. Richard Davidson, Klaus Scherer, and Hill H. Goldsmith, (London: Oxford University Press, 2003), 415–32.

  Charles Darwin’s analysis of the smile: Darwin, Expression, chap. 8.

  In her careful observations of primates: S. Preuschoft and J. A. R.A. M. Van Hooff, “The Social Function of ‘Smile’ and ‘Laughter:’ Variations across Primate Species and Societies,” in Where Nature Meets Culture: Nonverbal Communication in Social Interaction, ed. U. Segerstråle and P. Molnár, (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997), 171–89.
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  I first encountered the deferential smile: D. Keltner et al., “Teasing in Hierarchical and Intimate Relations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 75 (1998): 1231–47.

  Research shows that when workers smile in the service industry: For a review of the role of emotion in the workplace, see M. W. Morris and D. Keltner, “How Emotions Work: An Analysis of the Social Functions of Emotional Expression in Negotiations,” Review of Organizational Behavior 22 (2000): 1–50.

  workers experience a problematic disconnect: Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

  This disconnect has parallels to recent studies by my colleague Ann Kring of schizophrenics: A. M. Kring, S. L. Kerr, A. D. Smith, and J. M. Neale, “Flat Affect in Schizophrenia Does Not Reflect Diminished Subjective Experience of Emotion,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 102 (1993): 507–17; Kring and Neale, “Do Schizophrenics Show a Disjunctive Relationship among Expressive, Experiential, and Psychophysiological Components of Emotion?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105 (1996): 249–57.

  the empirical literature on the smile yields similarly paradoxical findings: Keltner et al., “Facial Expression of Emotion,” in Handbook of Affective Sciences, 415–32.

  The answer is provided by Paul Ekman, and it involves looking away from the lip corners: Frank, Ekman, and Friesen, “Behavioral Markers and Recognizability of the Smile of Enjoyment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64 (1993): 83–93.

  Duchenne smiles differ morphologically: ibid., 83.

  D smiles tend to be associated with activity in the left anterior portion of the frontal lobes: Neuroscientist Richard Davidson has made the persuasive case that positive emotions tend to activate regions of the brain on the left side of the frontal lobes, because these regions enable the individual to approach rewards. Ekman, Davidson, and Friesen, “The Duchenne Smile: Emotional Expression and Brain Physiology II,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1996): 342–53.