The Exchanges

Q Why do you feel like they're the key to happiness? Like, what's the connection?

A Well, you know, it's, it's interesting. I think that one connection is, um, is it, you know, we've long known, um, that it, that, you know, you know, we have these sayings in our cultures and they're sayings like this in almost all of the great contemplative, spiritual, ethical traditions that, you know, to give is, is, is meaningful as to receive, you know, you find yourself in serving others. And indeed, a lot of studies are showing that Bringing out the good in others, giving to others, promoting others, just gives you this burst of happiness, and we're, Shane, it's really incredible. Um, there's a region of the brain that you might loosely call the reward circuitry, and it involves a couple of regions that produce dopamine, uh, like the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens down in the middle of your brain. They project to your prefrontal cortex in the frontal part of your cortex, and And, and that's your reward circuit associated with eating good food and getting a massage and so forth. And what new studies are finding is that that circuit is activated when you feel love, when you, um, feel compassion and help somebody out, when you give resources to another person, when you cooperate with another person, it all activates this reward circuit. And what that tells us is the brain has been wired to make it feel good to do good. Right. And, and it, we don't know why…

AI assessment note: “that circuit is activated when you feel love, when you, um, feel compassion”

Q biography on the most powerful man in the 20th century, which was Robert Moses. And he said a few times, he said that following, which I want to quote here, which is I often hear that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is Lord Acton's kind of rule. But what I have found to be invariably true is that power reveals. Would you agree with that sentiment?

A Yeah. You know, Shane, man, you are a good reader of things. I really appreciate it. So, uh, and, and I'll, I'll give you a little bit of science on this and the struggle. Um, you know, The science, so I, I push the argument that power leads to these really selfish, problematic behaviors, and I believe that to be true. Um, so a lot of our work More recent work with Paul Piff in particular , Michael Krause, uh, two cherished collaborators is about privilege. And if I come from the one percent, how do I behave? And it, and it looks like you are more abusive, right? If you have a lot of wealth, you know, and so our studies show fitting this power abuse hypothesis that if I'm from the well-to-do and, you know, or feeling I'm from the upper class, um, I'm less likely to attend to people carefully when they're speaking. I, um, in an experiment, I'm more likely to lie and say I got a really good score on a test to win a prize, even though I have more money, you know, don't need the monetary prize. I drive in a problematic way, which I talked about. Uh, I'm more likely to take candy in a bowl Then the candy is says it's meant for the kids in this Institute in which the study took place. So power seems to corrupt in that case, but I think Karo's hypothesis is really more apt, which is that it's the context of privilege and being from an upper class background that allows you to just gra…

AI assessment note: “I think Karo's hypothesis is really more apt... in that sense, Carol's right. It reveals”

Q Um, which losing power, I would imagine would obviously cause decreased happiness, but just in general, what is, what does it mean to have empathy and what does that look like?

A Wow. Such a nuanced question. So, so empathy, you know, we often confuse empathy with, with compassion or sympathy, sympathy and compassion are when you feel you're concerned about someone suffering and you want to lift up their welfare, or you just want to enhance the wellbeing of another person. Empathy is really, you know, people talk in the scientific literature about cognitive empathy, which is where I know what you are thinking about and feeling and And then emotional empathy is I feel what you feel, right? I, you laugh, and I start laughing, or you're feeling joyful and tearing up, and I feel the same thing. So there's cognitive and emotional empathy. And, you know, the, this was really the first, one of the first big clues to why power Produces so many problematic effects in society. The abuse of power, which is labs started to show that, you know, if I get power and I'm randomly assigned to have power over other people, I judge their emotions less accurately. I can read emotions less effectively from photos of facial expressions. One of my favorite lines of work is in the neuroscience realm. The work of Keely Muscatel, who's now at the University of North Carolina, You know, she is interested in regions of the frontal lobes that are engaged when we listen to other people talk, you know, and if a friend is talking to you, parts of your frontal lobes are activated so tha…

AI assessment note: “cognitive empathy, which is where I know what you are thinking about and feeling”

Q In a, in an increasingly, um, just to go back to something we said earlier, in an increasingly self-centered, uh, world, do you think you can be too kind?

A Yeah. Yeah. There's no doubt. You know, I mean, I think that, It's, um, you know, one of the things that I teach in human emotion is, um, and it's interesting is Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher had this principle of moderation, which is we need all the passions in the right place and to the right degree and in the right context, you know. And anger can get you into trouble. If you're a young boy and you, you are constantly expressing your anger, data show, studies show you're going to have trouble, right? You're going to get suspended and so forth. Uh, and Aristotle's idea is really mapping onto kind of a new line of work on, we need all the emotions to moderate degrees and alert to the context in the right way. And ironically, Some of the positive emotions, um, like compassion or joy, if you have too much of them, you will pay a price. So, you know, we've done work in my lab on, uh, people who show a lot of hyper connectivity and compassion to others. And, uh, you know, they tend to fit a profile of being vulnerable to mania, right? Where, um, You walk around in your daily life, and you feel connected to the homeless person, and you give away a lot of money, you know, and then you, you go to work, and there's a woman who's, you know, feeling sad, and you feel too connected to her, and you become merged in an inappropriate relationship, and then you, you go out, you know…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. Yeah. There's no doubt.”

Q Since you're a psychologist, I have to ask, what is your take on the reproducibility crisis kind of in the social sciences and some of the non-social sciences these days? How do you approach this problem of non-replicable research and sort of being careful not to draw Conclusions that are false.

A Yeah, you know, well, I mean, the first thing to, you know, to remember, and when you've been around, uh, science, you know, I was in grad school, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, is sciences go through crises, right? Um, and when I was a young grad student, um, the big crisis was whether, You know, all of the great studies of social psychology, the Milgram obedience to authority studies, the Solomon Ash conformity studies. These are the most famous studies almost in psychology. Um, were they true, right? Or were people just pretending? And that was a crisis and we debated it and, and then we used our reason to assess the validity of the findings and they've stood the test of time. Um, today the, you know, the reproduction crisis, um, I have a couple of reactions to it. Uh, one is that, you know, a lot of our journals Uh, very painstakingly require re-replication. So, uh, you know, you do a study several times with slight variations to really have a sense of the reliability of the finding. Um, a lot of our statistical techniques now recognize the need to re-replicate when we do what are called meta-analyses, where we look at what is an effect size or how strong is a statistical relationship across labs and studies. Um, So I think we do care about replication. Um, I, I will note, you know, it's interesting to me that the replication crisis has targeted certain kinds of studies, so we…

AI assessment note: “today the, you know, the reproduction crisis, um, I have a couple of reactions to it.”

Q lean on that thesis. If we have such a well-developed sense of positive morality and doing good things feels good to us, as you explain in your book, then why do individual humans and groups consistently do such heinous things to each other? Perhaps the worst atrocities in history are Um, have been committed, you know, only a few generations ago, after tens of thousands of years of human evolution.

A Yeah, you know, I, I sympathize with that critique, Jane, and, and I think that, um, the Science that I report on in Born to be Good about love and compassion and, you know, laughter and play and joy and gratitude, um, those are new sciences, and they, the older science on anger and fight or flight and aggression, you know, and stress had been well worked out, and so I prioritized the good and, and should have You know, I think that the more realistic perspective that I take in my scientific inquiry, or when I write about human emotion more generally, is humans are a very complicated bundle of an array of social strategies that manifest in emotions, and we have a lot of pro-social tendencies, and we have a lot of Uh, uh, unnerving antisocial tendencies from, you know, uh, violence and genocide and, and, you know, evolutionary psychologists have made a case that rape is a evolved strategy and it's a human universal and regrettably we see it everywhere. And so that's, that's the struggle of human existence and the struggle of society is to, in history is, wow, we have all this complicated, All these complicated tendencies to, to be kind and to be, um, harsh and, and that, and then you have to think about what are the, the contextual factors that, that allow for the expression of, of the good things and not the bad. And, and that becomes, you know, different intellectual tasks. So…

AI assessment note: “humans are a very complicated bundle of an array of social strategies”

Q What are the differences between the man and the woman in terms of a physical connection? The woman has a baby growing inside her for nine months. The man doesn't. How does that affect our emotional connectivity?

A Yeah. I think, you know, the, we are seeing increasingly, you know, we're an unusual primate in that, you know, like chimpanzees, males don't even know who really know who their offspring are given their reproductive patterns. And I write about this in born to be good. You know, the, the female goes into estrus mates with every male around and, and then there's sperm competition and a baby comes out and the male doesn't know. So they aren't really engaged in too much parenting. And in humans, for a lot of interesting reasons, fathers are in the game and they know who their offspring are and they provide care. But I, but I do think, Shane, you are pointing to something that we often overlook as scientists, but which is fundamental is the physical connection between mother and child. Um, you know, just the, the having a child grow in the womb. Um, and then through breastfeeding, which, you know, the human average across history is four years of skin to skin contact and the provision of nourishment and the oxytocin that's released and the prolactin that is this oceanic feeling of connection that's foundational. So I, I, you know, you, uh, we shy away from those raw facts at times of our evolution. And these interesting sex differences, um, but they are there and I think have interesting things to say about why women are more collaborative and live longer and, um, and handle stress…

AI assessment note: “the oxytocin that's released and the prolactin that is this oceanic feeling of connection”

Q What do successful people who not only attain power, but seem to use that in a way for the benefit of the group, how do they differ from people that don't? Do they put in their own checks and balances? What are their, do they have some sort of mechanism by which they, um, make sure that they don't sway too far? Like, how does that, how does that look?

A It's interesting when people talk about great leaders and there have been studies, historical studies, for example, that I write about in the Paraparadox of who were the great presidents, you know, who had a lasting legacy. Lincoln had a lasting legacy. Nixon's legacy did not have, did not really endure for his ethical violations. Um, and when we talk about great leaders, we, we often think about, um, kind of their attributes, right? Their qualities. And that's a common tendency in Western thought to think about characteristics of the individuals being the source of greatness. But we do talk about things like, um, you know, one of the defining characteristics of Lincoln was empathy, his ability to listen to other people. Um, Jim Collins in this, you know, probably the most widely read book on leadership, you know, Millions and millions of copies sold has this final level of leadership, which is about service serving other good to great, right? Yeah. Um, people often talk about the great leaders. Aristotle had a whole theory of great leadership is really being rooted in virtue, like courage and humility. So we talk about these attributes and And I do think that that's a very important part of the story, but, but I think your question and observation is really the more important, and I think as leaders we can commit to these attributes, but your observation is what kind of social…

AI assessment note: “he appointed people in his cabinets to be devil's advocate. You have to have critics”

Q I want to come back to Darwin for a second, because you discuss him a lot. You discussed The Dissent of Man quite a bit in Born to be Good. It seems like that book has, it's relatively unknown, like it's fallen out of favor over time, or it seems like it's fallen out of favor. Why do you think that is?

A Well, you know, the, um, The, it fell out of favor, um, you know, the Descent of Man, Darwin wrote, it was his first book about humans, and Origin of Species is about other species, and he has nothing to say about human beings, uh, and then he started to face a bunch of Critiques. And it's important to remember, you know, at the time that Darwin published his theory of evolution, 50% of scientists were creationists. They really felt that God had designed nature, uh, and laid it down and unfixed fat in sort of a fashion. And so Darwin encountered these critiques in the public conversation and he had to write about humans. And he did so to, he made his case for evolution, um, Inhumans by charting the emotions, and he wrote the expression of emotion in man and animals in 1872. And, and he also wrote the descent of man, which originally was going to be part of one book with the expression book, but he broke it into two. And Darwin's, um, you know, the, the reason that it fell out of favor is, uh, one is, um, And, and this is a subject of debate in Darwinian circles is, you know, was he a bit, was there a little bit of racism in the book when he talked about other cultures? And like many in that Victorian period, which was a pretty racist period, he, um, did, there are some shades of Thinking in essential essentialist terms about racial categories, which we know is misguided today. …

AI assessment note: “the reason that it fell out of favor is, uh, one is... was there a little bit of racism”

Q The connection between happiness and emotion seems strong. And you're writing, you talk about Jen, which is a concept I haven't heard of before. Can you explain that?

A Yeah, you know, the, the connection, you know, happiness, our sense that life is going pretty well, is strongly driven by three things in the vast scientific literature now, you know, and one is the positive emotions we've been talking about, like mirth and laughter and love and sympathy. Another is how you handle stress and negative emotion. And the third is social connection. And You know, Shane, when I was, when I, I've been teaching human happiness at Berkeley and then online at edX for a long time, and there, there's just this amazing array of findings from labs all over the world showing that, you know, like Elizabeth done, when I, when I share money with another person, I get happier than if I spend it on myself. Uh, investigators at the University of Oregon, uh, led by Harbaugh and colleagues showing that if I give money to charity, it activates the reward circuits of the brain, much as if I receive that gift. Other studies showing that when I'm, when I'm volunteering, which activates the vagus nerve and oxytocin, presumably in certain regions of the brain, I live longer and, and I'm happier. And so I was trying to, you know, the English language For interesting historical reasons, doesn't have a great set of words that describe that phenomenon of, like, serving others to that, in an ironic way, that build up the social fabric. You know, we, like, scientists use the wor…

AI assessment note: “is called jen, or ren, and it's about bringing out the good in others”

Q I like that a lot. It seems like our, our definition of good can change though. And how does that affect the brain's wiring? I mean, what was, what's good today or what we consider culturally good? Uh, like not every culture would, would have the same sort of. Yeah.

A Well, that's, that's where, that's where culture is so dynamic, you know, and it is So, uh, and that's why conversations like this one and the work that you're doing and, and, you know, why we write books, which is we contest and try to define the good in ways that are ideally in my philosophical perspective, good for society in the world and the sustainability of our species. And, you know, one of the things that the happiness literature has brought into focus is that You know, the past 30 years, 40 years in the U.S., and then we're seeing this in Canada, less so Canada, actually, but increasingly in some of the fast, you know, the quickly industrializing societies is we've moved away from an other orientation, right, to, hey, I'll share resources, or I'll cooperate with you, or I'll trust you. We've moved towards a more self-focused, um, Materialistic, ego-focused, greed-based focused set of values where people really boldly, with great fanfare, define the good as self-expression, right? As maximizing your self-interest. One of my favorite champions of this is Ayn Rand, who Probably the most influential philosopher of the 20th century. You know, everybody's Atlas Shrugged, and so forth. And I'm going to quote her from 1964, where she said, for any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject. And, you know, I think, I think, you know, as …

AI assessment note: “we've moved away from an other orientation... moved towards a more self-focused”

Q Not us. And I agree with this wholeheartedly, of course, but how do we solve this problem in ourselves? I mean, how do we catch our own Version of that extremism.

A Wow, you're, you're not asking lighthearted questions. Um, yeah, you know, we, we started to do this work, you know, and I think it's more timely than ever today, and you know, when we, we studied people on opposite ends of the, or on different categories, in different categories of ideological debates, like abortion, and the death penalty, and Uh, and the like, and, you know, and other kinds of conflicts, and, and we noticed this really interesting tendency, and it really is twofold, which is people tend to assume that they get the facts right, and, and, you know, we call this naive realism, and other people call it phenomenal absolutism, Um, but it's the idea that when I look at reality, it's, it's, and, and we know how I look at reality is shaped by my emotion and my hunger and my social class and all these contextual factors. Um, but we tend to assume we, we kind of got the facts right, you know, that if I, um, am in a debate and, and we're debating mass incarceration and I've read a bunch of stuff and been to a prison, I will assume like, yeah, I see the truth. And then the second thing that happens in this study, this research we did is, um, when we encounter people who differ from us, like, oh, that guy thinks we should punish criminals more strongly or, um, That person has a different view of transgender identity. Um, we assume that they are politically and ideologicall…

AI assessment note: “we noticed this really interesting tendency, and it really is twofold”