Humans are selfish. It’s so easy to say. Likewise for so many assertions that
readily follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation for suckers.
Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the
good.
These kinds of claims originate in how we have thought for millennia about
emotion, and in particular, compassion, the concern we feel for another being’s welfare.
Since Plato, we have portrayed the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and
sin. What would the seven deadly sins be without destructive passions? Or the ten
commandments for that matter?
Even the most seemingly beneficial of emotions, compassion, has been treated
with downright derision, as a weak and misguided sentiment (see Nussbaum, 2001).
Many question whether true compassion exists; underneath the guise of compassion is
exploitative self-interest. There are others, like Nietzsche, who portrayed compassion as
an unreliable sentiment: it mollifies those who have the resources to give to others, and
belittles the recipients of compassion. Compassion is the enemy of equality.
The contemporary science of the evolution of emotion calls these views roundly
into question. This tradition, with origins in Darwin's Expression of Emotion in Man and
Animals from 1872 and extensions to studies of different cultures and the brain, has led
to the view that emotions are rational, functional, and adaptive. And recent studies of
compassion persuasively argue for a different view of human nature than that which
identifies self-interest as the sole motive of human behavior. Compassion and
benevolence, it is beginning to appear, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our
biology and brain, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.
The End of Self-Interest
Humans are selfish: there may be no more widespread assumption in Western
European culture. In my seminars I ask my undergraduates to complete the following
clause, “Human nature is…” with as many ideas as they can. Typically about 70% of
their responses refer to some form of selfishness, competition, or aggression.
These students will find ample and lofty support for these intuitions. At the core of
Freud’s human nature was the Id, governed by the self-serving pleasure principle and the
desire for sex. Learning theory made famous by BF Skinner starts from the assumption
that the organism moves towards self-serving rewards and away from punishments.
Within evolutionary psychology all human traits ultimately benefit selfish genes. In
economics, it is axiomatic that humans are rational pursuers of self-interest.
This view of human nature has many origins: Calvinism and the doctrine of original
sin, the industrial revolution, the exponential rise in materialism, and the over-reliance
upon market force explanations. It has been wildly overextended in human affairs:
friends are “assets” and “good investments,” we “spend” quality time with children,
dinner parties yield “good returns” and “good dividends,” we “profit” from visits to
family.
Recent studies in psychology suggest that the pursuit of self-interest may not be the
clearest path to the greater good or personal happiness, as so widely assumed. When
researchers study what makes us happy, they find that it is not personal wealth, the
strength of the stock market, inflation, or interest rates that cause the ebb and flow in our
personal well-being. What makes us happy, what matters in the end, is the quality of our
romantic and family bonds, our connection to our friends, and doing things for others.
Other empirical findings lead to a similar conclusion about the limits, and perils, of
self-interest. When relationship partners focus on their self-interest, and whether they are
getting what they deserve, their relationships suffer. The connection we feel to our
family and friends strengthens our immune system and makes us more resistant to disease
and less likely to experience depression, anxiety, and antisocial tendencies. And in one
study when participants were asked to maximize their personal happiness while enjoying
a piece of music, they enjoyed that experience less than individuals who did not prioritize
their own pleasure.
The view that we at our very core are selfish is just as subject to theoretical critique.
Evolutionist, selfish gene explanations presuppose that our traits ultimately benefit our
own genes and those of our biological relatives. This kind of explanation concerns the
ultimate causes of our behavior, that is, the distal evolutionary processes that have
designed who we are. Our behavior, however, is also guided by proximal causes such as
our emotions, values, and beliefs, and these, we shall soon see, can be primarily oriented
towards enhancing the welfare of others.
Portrayals of humans as rational pursuers of self-interest have been devastated by the
Nobel prize winning work of Daniel Kahneman. This work elegantly shows time and
time again that we are not necessarily rational, nor do we always act in self-interested,
utilitarian fashion. People will sacrifice personal gain in the name of fairness. Or
consider the traveler who tips in restaurants, although certain not to be seen again.
What then, lies beyond, or alongside, the selfish side to human nature? A
biologically based capacity for goodness that emerged in human evolution in the form of
compassion and other benevolent emotions, like love, gratitude, and awe.
The Evolution of Compassion
From an evolutionist perspective, nicely articulated by Elliot Sober and Robert
Frank, three conditions must be met for compassion to evolve, for the emergence of
human action that enhances the welfare of others at the expense of self-interest. A first
is what I’ll call the principle of cost-benefit reversal. One constraint upon giving is the
cost of helping. When these costs exceed the benefits of giving, we hold back. For
compassion to emerge, there must be some mechanism that overwhelms self-interest, one
that puts our own desire, pleasures, and pains on the back burner so to speak, and that
prioritizes the needs of others. This process must transform others’ gains into one’s own
and endow the act of helping with intrinsic pleasure.
The evolution of compassion is further enabled by the principle of contagious
cooperation. Cooperative people are exploited in competitive contexts; nice guys do
finish last in certain situations. Kind individuals do better if they were able to evoke
goodness in others, and pursue cooperative strategies in more cooperative contexts. To
the extent that compassion evokes beneficent responses in others, it should flourish.
In a related vein, compassion is more likely to emerge when people can reliably
identify good-natured people – the principle of reliable identification. Good-natured
people fare better (and are more likely to pass on their genes) when they can find other
good-natured individuals. This hinges on the ability to identify goodness in others, and,
by implication, that compassion (and other virtues) will have reliable physical signs
detectable by the ordinary eye.
If compassion is the product of evolution and intimately involved in the
cooperative tendencies that make up such a striking part of the human experience, then
several propositions readily follow. We would expect compassion to be associated with
distinct physiological responses in the brain and body. We would expect compassion to
be readily communicated. Such a signal of compassion would presumably sooth others
in distress, and more generally, serve as a sign of cooperative intent, allowing individuals
to enter into interactions with trustworthy, committed individuals. And perhaps most
importantly, we would expect the experience of compassion to motivate self-less,
altruistic behavior. The evidence lends credence to all three of these claims.
The Biological Basis of Compassion
First consider the recent study of the biological basis of compassion. We should
be wired up, so to speak, to respond and help others in need. Recent evidence makes this
point convincingly. Pictures of our own babies trigger unique regional activation in the
brain that differs from the pictures of other infants than our own. The perceptual regions
of the brain are finely attuned to the first objects of our compassion – our offspring.
And in other studies, graphic scenarios depicting harm to others activate in similar
regions of the brain, suggesting that more general portrayals of harm activate regions of
the brain that trigger emotion and action.
In other research, participants were given the chance to help another while their
brain activation was recorded. Helping others triggers activity in the anterior cingulate, a
portion of the brain that is activated when people receive rewards and experience
pleasure. This is a rather remarkable finding: helping others triggers the pleasure one
would associate with the gratification of personal desire.
The brain, then, seems wired up to respond to others’ harm. What about other
parts of the body? One important candidate is the loose association of glands, organs,
and cardiovascular and respiratory systems known as the autonomic nervous system.
(ANS). The ANS plays a primary role in providing the appropriate blood flow and
respiration patterns to support different kinds of action (e.g., fight or flight). What is the
ANS profile of compassion? As it turns out, when young children and adults feel
compassion for others, their heart rate goes down from baseline levels, which promotes
approach and soothing rather than flight. These studies, taken together, strongly suggest
that there is a biological basis of compassion. There is a circuit in the brain triggered by
objects of compassion -- infants, harm -- that is old, fast, and associated with feelings of
pleasure.
Signs of Compassion
According to the aforementioned analysis, one would likewise expect compassion
to have an evolved nonverbal signal. Such a signal would serve many functions. Most
importantly, a distinct signal of compassion would soothe others in distress, and allow
others to identify and enter into long-term relationships with good-natured individuals.
These displays would help us build bonds between strangers and friends, they should be
expressed in a medium that makes generosity and kindness rewarding.
Some studies show that there is a particular facial expression of compassion
characterized by oblique eyebrows and concerned gaze, which predicts helping behavior.
Another candidate is touch. Recent discoveries regarding touch are remarkable. Nonhuman
primates spend hours a day grooming, even when there are no lice in their
physical environment. They use grooming to resolve conflicts and form alliances.
Human skin has special receptors that transform patterns of tactile stimulation into
indelible sensations as lasting as childhood scents – a mom's caress of a sleepy child's
hair, a friend’s pat on the back. Touch can trigger the release of oxytocin in the touchee.
The handling of rat pups raised in impoverished environments stimulates neural growth
and enhanced immune function, and can reverse the effects of deprivation.
To document for the first time whether compassion can be communicated via
touch, I put two strangers into a room in which they were separated by a barrier. They
could not see one another, but they could reach through a hole in the barrier and touch the
other. One person touched the other on the forearm several times, each time trying to
convey one of 12 emotions, including love, gratitude and compassion. After each touch,
the touchee had to guess the emotion that the toucher was attempting to communicate.
Imagine yourself in this experiment: your arm rests on the other side of a partition, you
receive a touch upon your forearm, you receive no other cues, either visual or auditor
from the person, and your task is to discern which of 12 emotions the person is
communicating. Rather remarkably, this study provided the first scientific evidence that
we can communicate compassion and gratitude with nonverbal behavior: people could
reliably identify these emotions, and love as well, from touches to their forearm.
Compassion as a Source of Altruism
Now let’s turn to perhaps the most important question: does compassion promote
altruistic behavior? In an important line of research, Daniel Batson has made the
persuasive case for this claim. According to Batson, very often when we encounter a
person in need or distress we imagine what their experience is like. This is one of the
great developmental milestones – to take the perspective of another, and in fact one of the
most human of capacities, and one of the most important parts of moral judgment and the
social contract. When we take the other’s perspective, we feel an empathic state of
concern for that person, and we are motivated to have that person’s needs addressed, to
enhance that person’s welfare, even at our own expense.
In a compelling series of studies, Batson has exposed participants to another
person suffering. He then has some participants imagine that person’s pain but he gives
those participants the opportunity to act in self-serving fashion, for example by leaving
the experiment. If one observers altruistic helping behavior in those circumstances, that
is when one can take the more self-serving route, one has confidence that compassion has
produced fairly selfless helping behavior. Several studies suggest this is so.
A first study allowed participants to escape the aversive arousal of watching
someone suffer. Specifically, participants watched another person receive shocks in the
context of a memory task, and were asked to take shocks on behalf of the participant,
who had experienced a shock trauma as a child. Those participants who felt compassion
for the other individual volunteered to take several shocks for that person, even when
they were free to leave the experiment.
In another experiment, Batson and colleagues asked whether people feeling
compassion would help another person in distress, even when their acts were completely
anonymous. In this study female participants exchanged written notes with another
person, who quickly expressed feeling lonely and an interest in spending time with the
participant. Those participants feeling compassion volunteered to spend significant time
with the other person, even when no one would know of this act. And in other studies,
people have been shown to experience uplifted moods when they hear of other
individuals who altruistically come to the aid of others suffering.
Taken together, our three strands of evidence suggest the following. Compassion
has a biological basis in the brain and body. It can be communicated in the face and with
touch. And when experienced, compassion overwhelms selfish concerns, and motivates
altruistic behavior.
Cultivating Compassion. For many, compassion is the highest state of human
nature, it is an ideal to move towards, and to guide our many interactions. What can be
said about cultivating compassion? First, recent neuroscience paints an optimistic picture
regarding the prospects of cultivating compassionate individuals, relationships, and
communities. Recent studies suggest that the positive emotions are less heritable, that is
less determined by our genetic endowment, than the negative emotions. Other studies
indicate that the brain structures involved in the positive emotions like compassion are
more plastic and subject to changes brought about by environmental input. We might
think about compassion as a biologically based skill or virtue that can be cultivated in the
appropriate context. What might that context look like? For children, we are learning
some answers.
In longitudinal research, researchers have looked at the same children over time,
and asked what kinds of family factors influence pro-social behavior and empathy and
compassion. Several factors make children more compassionate and likely to offer help
to their peers or strangers in distress (Eisenberg, 2002).
Children securely attached to their parents, compared to insecurely attached
children, tend to be sympathetic with their peers as early as 3.5 years of age (Saters,
Wippman, & Sroufe, 1979). In contrast, abusive parents who resort to physical violence
have less empathetic children (Main & George, 1985).
Developmental psychologists have also been interested in parenting style, and
disciplinary practices as predictors of empathy and pro-social behavior. The comparison
tends to focus on one of two styles. Parents who rely on induction engage their children
in reasoning when they have done harm, prompting their child to think about the
consequences of their actions and how they have harmed others. Parents who rely on
power assertion simply declare what is right and wrong, and resort more often to physical
punishment or strong emotional responses of anger. Parents who resort to induction and
reasoning promote children who are more pro-social and likely to help their peers (e.g.,
Eisenberg & Fabes, 1998; Hoffman, 1983).
Other factors still promote more empathy and helping. Giving children chores
makes them more pro-social. Children who have grandparents around, and have strong
connections with grandparents tend to be more pro-social. Children who have
compassionate and pro-social parents tend to be more altruistic. For example, in the
Oliner's studies of Germans who helped rescue Jews during the Nazi holocaust, one of
the strongest predictors of this inspiring helping behavior was the individual's
recollection that they grew up in a family environment that prioritized compassion and
altruism.
A summary awaits.
