The Good Life

Wellbeing and the new science of altruism, selfishness and immorality

Graham Music

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848722279
• eBook ISBN: 9781317909736
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Are we born selfish or primed to help others?

Does stress make people more antisocial?

Can we ever be genuinely altruistic?

This book explores some of the dilemmas at the heart of being human. Integrating cutting edge studies with in-depth clinical experience, Graham Music synthesizes a wealth of fascinating research into an explanation of altruism, cooperation and generosity and shows how we are primed to turn off the 'better angels of our nature' in the face of stress, anxiety and fear.

Using fascinating psychological research but rooted in a clinicians understanding of the impact of stress on our moral and pro-social capacities, The Good Life covers topics as diverse as:

• The role of parenting and family life in shaping how antisocial or pro-social we become
• How stress, abuse and insecure attachment profoundly undermine empathic and altruistic capacities
• The relative influence of our genes or environments on becoming big-hearted or coldly psychopathic
• How our immediate contexts and recent social changes might tilt us towards either selfish or cooperative behaviour

This book makes a unique contribution to a subject that is increasingly on people's minds. It does not shirk complexity, nor suggest easy explanations, but offers a hard look at the evidence in the hope that we can gain some understanding of how a 'Good Life' might develop. Often personally challenging, intellectually exhilarating and written with an easily accessible style, The Good Life makes sense of how our moral selves take shape, and shines a light on the roots of goodness and nastiness.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This book is about fundamental issues that concern us all. What predisposes us to act kindly? Have we evolved to be selfish or cooperative? How do our moral senses form? What undermines this? How do parenting and family life shape how moral we are? What is the role of our biology or genes? What is the influence of the particular culture that we are born into? Is contemporary Western society, with its individualistic values, leading us to become less moral but more impulsive and selfish?

Questions about whether humans are fundamentally good or bad, selfish or altruistic, go back, of course, as far as known human thought, and have been debated by philosophers for as long as philosophy has been debated. Plato and Aristotle had a lot to say on these matters. The likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1754) argued that people were basically born good and were ruined by society. Others such as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1651) took the opposite view, that society rescued the possibility of a moral life from the throes of our baser instincts. Aristotle particularly described the Good Life, or eudaemonia, in terms of a life lived ethically and which also feels good, what these days we often refer to as emotional wellbeing or human ‘flourishing’ (Seligman 2012). This link between feeling good and doing good is borne out by much contemporary research and is a central thread throughout this book.

I wanted to write this book for a whole range of reasons. Like most people, I am both intrigued and at times unnerved by how I act towards other people. Sometimes I can be kind and generous, but neither to everyone, nor by any means consistently. At times I can be rude and cut-off, even to the people I care about most. How I act depends a lot on my mood: it is best not to ask me for a favour the day before a deadline, or when my football team goes a goal behind with five minutes to go! My actions also depend a lot on my context. I am less likely to smile at the next person I set eyes on, or offer to help someone who looks lost, after I have just been accosted rudely. My background and early experiences, and my culture and social class, have also filled me with a host of expectations, beliefs and biological predispositions to act in certain ways. I explore how new scientific research has drilled down to explain many of the drivers of such behaviours.

Another important motivation comes from my professional life as a psychotherapist working mainly with people who have experienced difficult lives, many of whom have been abused in some way. Some can act aggressively and vindictively, often without compassion or remorse. I have seen at close hand how neglect and abuse can shake a child’s faith in the goodness of the world. I see day in day out how children who have been treated appallingly can be unpleasant to others, can steal, lie and be aggressive, but also that some retain and act from more humane areas of their personalities. I have also seen the profound effects of compassionate psychological understanding on children, how they become softer after a good adoption for example, blossoming and becoming likeable, kinder and more generous. I often witness how empathy and caring can flourish through psychotherapy, and also through mindfulness practices, both of which have benefited me hugely. I have seen what the research is now unequivocal about, that stress has a powerfully negative effect on how nice we are. Any observer of nurseries, family life or work dynamics will see how, after something upsetting happens, people can transform from relaxed, playful and cooperative to tense, angry and aggressive.

This is something psychotherapists have long known about. Donald Winnicott over half a century ago (1958) wrote about what he called ‘The Antisocial Tendency’ and how this develops in children and adults after neglect or deprivation. John Bowlby’s original findings at the Tavistock Clinic about attachment similarly showed how early emotional deprivation was common in the lives of young people in trouble with the law, then called ‘juvenile delinquents’ (1969). Of course such antisocial behaviour can become entrenched as character traits if countervailing influences are not in place early enough. Contemporary research sheds a powerful light on these issues.

My third area of personal motivation is a more social and political one, concerning how life in the industrial West seems to have been changing in recent decades, and the cost of this, for society as a whole, for the quality of people’s lives, and also for the future of our environment. I am thinking about what prominent sociologists (Sennett 2012; Bauman and Donskis 2013) have described about life becoming faster and harsher, with less continuity and security, with community and mutual support seemingly waning, and the individual increasingly deemed more important than the group. Allied to this we have seen an increasing emphasis on material consumption, on status, fame and its symbols. Many have also made a link between business methods, financial practices geared to profit irrespective of human costs, and a lack of concern for the planet’s ecosystems (Hare 1999a; Olson 2013). Although we await conclusive research about its effects, it is also likely that living in our new digital age, with constantly ‘on’ communications, is also having an impact on our brains and our nervous systems (Turkle 2012).

Such issues have sparked a range of debates about morality and the Good Society that I can only touch upon. I do not idealise previous societies, and one only has to think of the worlds of the Aztecs, Genghis Khan, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot, or any supposed former pastoral idyll to realise the dangers of romanticising the past. I do, though, draw on evidence of some of the ways society has been shifting in recent decades, and also examine research about our evolutionary past, which provides an interesting counterpoint to today. However, this is not done with a view that one kind of society is any more natural than any other, nor with a naïve assumption that findings from one culture can just be transplanted into another without much being ‘lost in translation’.

There is a powerful discourse that suggests that human beings are primarily selfish and competitive and not naturally fair or cooperative. Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene:

If you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

(Dawkins 2006)

Much contemporary research suggests that this view of human nature is limited, and underestimates the extent to which we are born primed for altruism, cooperation and generosity. It would of course be naïve to suggest that selfishness, aggression and ruthless competitiveness are not part of our human psychological inheritance, albeit taking different forms in different societies. However, we also have an urgent need to understand what tips the balance of character traits in either a more selfish direction or a more selfless and cooperative one. This includes how we parent our children, and how we organise communities, institutions and society as a whole.

Discourses about whether humans are naturally selfish or cooperative are embedded in particular cultural and ideological belief systems and social constellations and can be the site for disputes about how we define what being human is. Some anthropological accounts have suggested that in many cultures the very dichotomy between egotism and selflessness would make little sense, particularly those in which people are much more embedded in systems of mutual obligation.

Paul Anderson, for example, argues convincingly (2008) that the idea of an opposition between selfishness and selflessness is a legacy of market-oriented societies in which individuality is uniquely valued. He and others suggest that this distinction simply does not work for most pre-industrial and sociocentric societies where, for example, personhood is defined partly in terms of group obligations, and where rituals such as gift-exchange are pervasive. This links with Jacques Derrida’s argument (1992) that acts such as gift-giving inevitably create a sense of obligation in the receiver. In contemporary societies the commodity market has emerged as a sphere of self-interest the like of which was never seen in previous societies, enabling the very concepts of selfishness and altruism to take on culturally unique meanings.

Cooperation, of course, is in our DNA as much as selfishness, and as Martin Nowak (Nowak and Highfield 2011) points out, genes cannot be selfish, and anyway life on this planet has only thrived because of cooperation, whether between cells that make up an organism or between members of species, tribal groups or herds. Nowak has gone so far as to suggest that cooperation is the third principle of evolution, alongside mutation and selection. Of course some of the most successful forms of life have been extremely cooperative, such as ants and their 140,000 species. Cooperation also comes with risks, most notably from defectors, cheats and free-riders, who work the system for their own advantage, whether these are rogue cells or people who steal or exploit others.

Long before Dawkins, people argued that humans are ‘naturally’ aggressive, competitive and selfish and that to live in any kind of harmony a form of social contract is needed to quell individualistic urges. For thinkers such as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, anarchy would prevail without such a contract, or a sovereign leader to impose the rule of law.

Sigmund Freud’s influential views on human nature, for all their radicalism and innovation, are equally suggestive of a less than flattering version of our nature and dispositions. He argued that we are born with powerful urges and drives, particularly for sex and aggression, and that we are driven by an innate Pleasure Principle which if given free rein, would pose an insurmountable threat to civilisation. His solution was the internalisation of authority, via the parent, initially in the form of the Oedipus complex; in short our fear of external authority mitigates against our anarchic drive for pleasure. Yet for Freud the repression of desire comes at huge personal cost, in particular sexual repression and neurosis of many kinds.

Thinkers such as Freud helpfully keep us aware of our selfish and destructive potential, but also take insufficient account of human altruism or generosity. Supposedly good motives are often deemed untrustworthy, because self-interest is seen as inevitably lurking in the wings. This is enshrined in the famous statement by Michael Ghiselin (1974): ‘scratch an altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed’. This belief was dubbed by Frans de Waal as ‘veneer theory’ (De Waal 2008), the idea that morality and care for others are but a superficial gloss and not to be trusted.

Some new research insightfully suggests that certain forms of altruism can be deemed pathological and help neither the helper nor the recipient (Oakley et al. 2012). This includes how some highly anxious people try to buy affection with gifts, while others force their help on unwilling recipients. It is argued that we should be primarily self-interested, and it is only from the strivings of untrammelled individuals that important developments occur. The novelist and supporter of libertarian market economic models, Ayn Rand, stated, ‘If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject’ (Rand 1984).

Such thinking fits neatly alongside some evolutionary ideas of which Thomas Huxley (1984) was maybe the first major exponent. He believed that morality can be cultivated and consciously chosen by humans but is not natural. His evolutionary theory was quite different to that of Darwin (1860), who in fact made more space for sympathetic emotions. Much evolutionary thinking has argued that we tend to look after ‘number one’, and also by extension, those who share our genes. Altruism in this way of thinking is at best ‘reciprocal’ (Trivers 2002). In reciprocal altruism I will help you but only because you might later help me in return, and most importantly, if it will increase the chance of my genes being passed on to another generation.

As we will see, much new research is suggesting that this is by no means the whole story. We do have selfish, base and competitive instincts, but also selfless, moral, altruistic and prosocial personality traits. These are not just a superficial gloss. I am not arguing for a naïve theory about human beings being ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’, but the contrary views underestimate our potential for better behaviour, whatever we mean by that. I think we can reframe the idea of an innate battle within the human soul between good and bad, selfishness and selflessness, by looking hard at what factors tilt any person, or indeed any organisation or society, in one or other direction. This means understanding what brings these potentials out, both at an individual and a social level.

Much exciting research casts new light on these subjects. This comes from a variety of academic fields, many of whose representatives would barely have communicated with each other until recently. These include brain science, evolutionary, social and developmental psychology, attachment theory, as well as psychoanalysis and systems theories and a host of social sciences.

Much evidence also comes from neuroscience, a field still very much in its infancy, and one for which too many grand claims are often prematurely made. It is important to be circumspect in discussing the claims of both neurobiological research, and much psychology experimentation. Brain scans only show us so much, such as the extent of blood flow in certain brain regions, and often use worryingly small samples (Button et al. 2013), claiming more certainty than is often justified. Psychology research is often done with atypical samples such as university students, and many findings are not convincingly replicated. Both often naïvely assume they are researching universal qualities rather than states of mind which might be specific to our culture, or indeed to a specific moment. None the less, while scepticism is needed, techniques for investigating how our brains function, as well as innovative psychology research protocols, have enabled us to develop genuinely helpful understandings, which I draw upon.

I start our research journey in the next chapter by showing how being kind and caring are a natural part of what most humans spontaneously do, and that being generous and altruistic fires reward circuits in our brains. We see at what a very young age infants and toddlers will actively offer help, distinguish between good and bad behaviour and empathically reach out to others.

Next we see how our early attachment relationships have a huge effect on how moral, altruistic and caring we become, and how abusive or neglectful experiences inhibit moral and empathic urges. This leads us, in Chapter 4, to examine how helping others depends on being able to empathise and understand other minds, which in turn depends on sensitive early parenting, without which generosity, caring and trust rarely develop. Here I unpick some of the different motivations behind actions that come under the heading of altruism.

I next look at important research about the stress system. We see how the most deprived and abused in our society too commonly struggle to find a place within it. New research shows how those receiving an onslaught of bad experiences can become psychobiologically programmed to live with huge levels of fear, tension and anxiety, while others can become cold and fearless in a cut-off way. Both kinds of states of mind inhibit the ability to care for others.

From here I look at impulsiveness and low levels of emotional regulation, and the effect of this on how people relate to others. This includes looking at what can give rise to the form of impulsive behaviour seen in people who display ‘hot-headed’ reactive aggression and cannot seem to control themselves. I also look in Chapter 7 at colder, more callous forms of aggression, such as in psychopaths. Some suggest (e.g. Stout 2007; Hare and Babiak 2007) that these are on the increase in contemporary life, alongside a serious decline in empathy (Konrath, O’Brien and Hsing 2011) and an increase in narcissism (Twenge and Campbell 2009). If so these are serious issues.

Psychopaths are an extreme example of people who do not empathise, and who rely on reason and logic more than feeling. This pull between reason and emotion is described in Chapter 8 and is also a central thread throughout this book. Psychology for a long time had stressed the role of cognition and reason in morality (e.g. Kohlberg 1976; Turiel 2002; Piaget 1965), but in recent years the role of care (Gilligan 1977) and emotion (Haidt 2012) has been returned to the heart of moral understanding. There is a big difference between actions driven by emotional states such as compassion and empathy, and those motivated by abstract moral principles.

Neuroscience has entered this debate. We have learnt that those with different activity in brain areas central to emotional processing often have very different moral responses to most of us (Damasio 1999). Studies of stroke victims, brain scans of criminals, and much other research help unpick such matters. We also see that, while emotion is central to morality, a morality without reason and thought, and just based on gut reactions, is a diminished one, and can lead to all kinds of discrimination and prejudice.

We look in Chapter 9 at how neurobiology and hormonal systems are programmed not only by genes but also by experiences, and how this affects how generous, trusting and prosocial we are. Thus experiences of family life, and also cultural expectancies, are written into both our belief systems and our very body states. Next I look at the work of evolutionary anthropologists (e.g. Boehm 2012; Wilson 2012) who seek the origins of many of our more cooperative and moral behaviours in our hunter-gatherer pasts. There is recent evidence that altruistic traits and the ability to form close bonds within groups were extremely important for surviving in the environments in which much human evolution occurred.

In Chapter 11 I look at research using experimental game theory to illustrate how we are born wired for altruism. We see how acts of kindness and generosity are common even in one-off anonymous encounters (Delton et al. 2011). This is a challenge to the theories of human nature propounded by economists; if standard economic theory was right it would always make more sense to feather one’s own nest.

Close, coherent and loyal groups seem to have the edge over less cohesive ones in which in-fighting is rife, and it is to group life I turn in Chapter 12. Our tendency to cooperate and fit in is extraordinary. We feel happier, and indeed have longer and healthier lives, when we are members of close communities and groups. Yet we should be wary of idealising groups and belonging. To be ‘like us’ means that there are others who are ‘not like us’, and we have a huge propensity to be prejudiced against people whom we classify as different and ‘other’.

In Chapter 13 I look at some of the ways in which social cohesion and cultural norms are enforced, through processes such as teasing, gossip and overt punishment. I ask what motivates us to act well, looking at drivers such as the importance of our reputations. Finally I spend a bit of time ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Primed for goodness
• 3 Attachments and helping others
• 4 How empathy and altruism grow
• 5 Why stress can make us nasty
• 6 Impulsiveness, self-regulation and aggression
• 7 Cold aggression, callousness and psychopaths
• 8 A battle between emotion and reason?
• 9 Hormones of cooperation and competition
• 10 Evolved both to cooperate and compete
• 11 Moral games
• 12 Group-minded and narrow-minded
• 13 Reputations, shaming, gossip and punishment
• 14 Consumerism, society and our divided brain
• 15 Conclusions
• References
• Index