Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life
by Dacher Keltner
Dacher Keltner’s description of a kiss isn’t exactly romantic: “the simple lip pucker and lip funnel…and, in more lascivious moments, the tongue protrusion.”
But his purpose in Born to Be Good is a heart-warming one. Keltner, a Berkeley professor of psychology and director for the Greater Good Science Center, traces the evolution not of mankind’s nastier modes of survival, but rather of those gestures that make us a particularly sociable species: kisses and smiles, laughter and touch, love and embarrassment, awe and compassion. Through studying these emotions and acts he aims to find the roots of our capacity for jen, the Confucian concept that refers to “kindness, humanity, and reverence.”
Keltner begins by making note of Charles Darwin’s lesser-known follow-up to On the Origin of Species – a study of emotional expression in humans and animals that hinted at a universality of emotional expression. Darwin observed the minute gestures that combine to make a feeling visible, like the coughing and blushing of embarrassment, or the hurried breath and flushed face of what he euphemistically termed “romantic love.” Each emotion and its expression is made possible by other advances in human evolution, like the loss of facial and body hair due to heat, the range of our voices, the years-long helplessness of our offspring. And each is a vestige of fuller actions that were evolutionary favorable. (In other words, disgust is a sort of advanced, less messy shorthand for vomiting.) Working a century after Darwin, Paul Ekman, with whom Keltner pursued postgraduate work, studied the movement of minute facial muscles to find that emotions are wired into our nervous system.
Keltner’s study of these emotions – a dissection of how they work, why they happen, and what they mean – is thorough enough to make anyone who reads it wary of having to talk to the man face to face. Keltner knows, for instance, that the difference between a real smile and a forced smile lies in an obscure eye muscle called the orbicularis oculi (the movement of which Botox injections hamper, he notes). And after years of observing faces in love, Kelter also knows the difference between romance and lust well enough to know when to give his daughters’ suitors “a firm hand on the neck and a polite escorting out of our house.”
Keltner also arms the reader with his own easier-to-use tools for reading people, even as he sweetly says, after telling a self-deprecating story about being the butt of his seventh-grade crush’s bawdy prank, “it may be in our best interests to be fooled by those we love.” He suggests startling your beloved by dropping a heavy book suddenly behind him. “If he shrieks, with arms flailing,” Keltner writes, “you have just witnessed a few telling seconds of his behavior that speaks volumes to how he will handle the daily stresses and tribulations of life.” The “relative absence of embarrassment,” he finds, can predict antisocial behavior. People who smile more – even for, say, a staged yearbook photograph – will be happier in later life, and friends whose laughter falls into the same rhythms have a closer bond. Those who can laugh while discussing the recent death of a spouse will find coping easier in the long run, and those who feel compassion (as Keltner mapped while screening videos of children with ailing health) are more likely to help others.
By showing the breadth of these feelings and their origins, Keltner argues that positive emotions aren’t a simple matter of an excess of oxytocin (though it doesn’t hurt), or some singular happiness receptor designed for the pursuit of self-interested pleasure. These emotions are instead deeply hard-wired and designed ultimately to create and spread goodwill. Laughter is contagious – easy enough to tell from experience – and so is cooperation. Teasing and embarrassment reinforce social norms and defuse tension. Love and compassion make us feel for other people, even for strangers. And our awe – singularly expressed through goose bumps and warm swelling in the chest – places us in context: the individual self seems small, and the collective, cooperative whole looms.
Excerpt: “The laugh might rightfully lay claim to the status of tool-making, agriculture, the opposable thumb, self-representation, imitation, the domestication of animals, upright gait, and symbolic language – an evolutionary signature of a great shift in our social organization, accompanied by shifts in our nervous system. What separates mammals from reptiles are the raw materials of laughter – play, and the ability to communicate with the voice (when’s the last time you heard the family gecko howl for a nibble of your salmon or purr for a scratch behind the ears?).”
Further Reading: Emotions Revealed
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