At the same time, I think, somewhere inside us is this yearning to lead a life that is productive and meaningful. But placing “goodness” at the center of our human existence seems like an unrealistic naive idealism for most of us to survive society as we till try to navigate the nastiness all around us - I guess that is what this interview boils down to. How do we make this possible or How do we cultivate this “positive expressivity” and still reconcile it with the overwhelming contamination of the negativity around us?
DK: I think the position that I advocate for, "Survival of the Kindest" sort of balances out that story. For a long time we assumed that people are greedy and competitive and in part that is true. We have to sort of serve our own self interest to survive. But what a lot of scholarship is saying, evolutionary scholarship, game theory traditions is that people share a lot, they cooperate a lot, and they will share 40% of their resources with a stranger, they will volunteer to help people they don’t know. So to your first big point, we are both, we are both very competitive and violent and at the same time we are compassionate and kind and sharing, and so.
HS: You mention a number of positive emotions in your talks and books. compassion, gratitude, altruism, empathy, kindness, forgiveness, sympathy, happiness, love, and awe. Is “goodness” an aggregate of these positive emotions? If not, which ones? Are some better than others? Is compassion a master emotion for instance, or just a personal favorite? Could you elaborate?
DK: We got one big cluster of emotions, the negative emotions, you got anger and fear and shame, then we have this other big space we call positive emotions, a subset of those are the good emotions - good to others like gratitude, compassion and aweI study Positive emotions. And goodness is really more of a moral quality, so goodness is about morality, so you probably put into it good emotions like compassion, gratitude and awe and how we think about them.
Are some better than others? Emotions are here to help us get through a specific day, right? And some emotions are better than others for a specific task. Compassion is really about reducing suffering in the world and it’s really good at getting people to help other people who are suffering. Gratitude is about sharing resources with friends. It’s better than other emotions in getting us to form cooperative relationships. Pride as an emotion is not so good at taking care of other people, but it's good at getting us to show we have power and status. So each emotion has a function or purpose. That they are good at.
Is compassion my favorite, is it a master emotion? This is a really good question, because it is a favorite of mine but when I teach Human Happiness, what I talk about is a lot of scholarship in culture and religion, for example by religious historian Karen Armstrong; all cultures care about compassion. So it's kind of a master emotion. If you read Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islamic thought, Indigenous thinking; you will find that caring for others is really fundamental. So I think you could call it a master emotion.
HS: Is compassion and kindness just a matter of perspective-taking?. Is Compassion the main motivation for Altruism and Forgiveness?. Where does empathy fit into this or is empathy another form of perspective-taking? . Are compassion, sympathy, and empathy approximate synonyms?.
Where does love fit in as an emotion?. Many cultures think of love as the all-encompassing and greatest of all emotion.
Maybe all of them are part of a spectrum (like how we say autism is a spectrum)?
(Sorry, if this sounds like a lot of stuff thrown at you)
DK: So yeah, those are really really good questions. We in the English language and other languages often use compassion and sympathy and empathy often interchangeably. You would say, well I serve food to the homeless because I feel empathy for them.
But now what science, behavioral science and neuroscience, has shown us is that they are really different. Compassion is where you care about other people’s suffering and you want to make their lives better. Empathy is where you feel what other people feel or you know what they think, so it's going into the minds of other people. Perspective taking is a kind of empathy and its where you are able to see other people’s circumstances through their eyes. Take their perspective and see how they go about it.
To your question, compassion and kindness, kindness is the behavior that follows from compassion, feeling that leads to a behavior like kindness. Perspective taking can lead to kindness behavior but it's different than compassion.
And yes, altruism or sacrifice for other people at our own expense is very powerfully determined by feelings of compassion. And so is forgiveness, when we forgive people who have harmed us, it's often produced by compassion.
So are they synonyms? No I think compassion (wanting to lift up the welfare of others), sympathy (recognizing the suffering of another and wanting to assist) and Empathy (feeling what other people are feeling) are different things.
Love. I love your questions because it took us like 20 years to figure this out, so love is. There are many kinds of love, probably a dozen kinds of love. You have love for a friend, love for a romantic partner, love for parents, you have love for your siblings, you have love for a child. Love is thought of as where you are trusting and devoted and affectionate towards others. And we gathered a lot of data showing that love is a separate emotion. It’s different from sympathy, it has a different bodily expression, it has a different neurophysiological profile and it really is about forming attachments to other people.
Is it the greatest of all emotions? (Laughs). I think that a lot of people feel that at the end of the life, what’s most important is love and they love people. So in that sense you could say it’s the greatest of all emotions, because we consider it critical to wellbeing. But I don’t think it's all-encompassing, I think it has its very specific context, I think if you cultivate a loving sentiment towards other people or attitude, it will be all encompassing
And yeah, the idea that emotions are on a spectrum or continuum is really true. A lot of our new work is showing that in a category of emotion like awe and compassion, there are varieties, some are really intense, some are less intense, some are more mixed with other emotions , I think it's really important to be thinking of emotions on a spectrum or continuum.
HS: In your TedX talk, you defined Compassion as a feeling of goodwill for others.
If our DNA is indeed also evolutionarily hard-wired with positive emotions like compassion and kindness, as you suggest, any thoughts on why society compartmentalizes these emotions to only certain times of the year?
For instance, we are told to have “goodwill for all” during Christmas Break, engage in altruism during “giving Tuesday” for thanksgiving and “love” for Valentine's day.
Such seasonal “positive expressivity” ends up feeling very forced and artificial - almost like it's geared towards some corporate interests rather than human interest.
DK: Compassion is in our DNA. It’s one of deeply evolved emotions. In my book, "Born to be Good," I write about how we have universal signals of compassion; our primate relatives show compassion. It’s just part of who we are as a species. We even have some gene studies, oxytocin related studies to back up empathy and compassion.
Why do we see it on only certain rituals.- Christmas, going to church. I have a couple of answers to that. First is that you are absolutely right, corporations and capitalism exploit and put to problematic uses all the emotions. That’s what they do, they seek to make money off emotions. Buying presents for other people as an act of compassion, which is built up in the transformed ritual of Xmas is a form of commodification of this really important emotion and that is really frustrating. But what I would suggest , and what I try with the Science of Kindness is that people are much more generous and kind on an everyday basis spontaneously that you might imagine. 31% of Americans volunteer to help other people. We are routinely sharing a lot, we routinely assist each other. There is a lot of everyday heroism out there in the world that’s been documented. So what I would say is compassion induces in us the capacity to really be kind to other people a lot on a regular basis. Corporations come in, they see how powerful emotion is and then, they try to commodify it and make money off of it by producing rituals and products that we can buy.
HS: I was very intrigued. Page 23 of your book, "The Compassionate Instinct" , mentions that empathy is fragile in the sense that it is switched on within your own community and switched off with outsiders.
Could you elaborate? How can it be changed to be uniform?
DK: This is one of the great challenges of today right. Political polarization, nationalism, white supremacy, mass incarceration, racial bias- all of the social problems of today. Our problems in many ways are problems of empathy, how do we emphasize with people who are different from us. There are a lot of data that show that it's easier to empathize with our own kind and harder to understand people who are different from us.
One of my favorite studies in this is by Carsten de Dreu and there was research on oxytocin, this neuropeptide that shows that if I get a whiff of oxytocin, I emphasize with people more. But he found it really strong for people who are like us and not for other people who are different from us. So I really think this is the challenge of the day, where we are better to people who are like us and not empathetic to people who are not like us. We have a criminal justice system that punishes people of color unjustly and in a way that’s a failure of empathy. How do we change this. I think we have to promote diversity and we have to teach empathy. We have to get people to be thinking about the minds of others.
HS: For our readers could you elaborate on the idea that Positive emotions like kindness, altruism, and compassion are in fact hyper-contagious? (From "The Compassionate Instinct," Page 6). Also the idea of spreading kindness/gratitude through a tactile modality like touch.
DK: one of the really interesting questions is how can I spread kindness through my social network. If I am really kind to an individual and that individual decides to take advantage of me, how can I try to prevent that.
And what studies have found is that emotions are contagious - we can can build up, we can capitalize on how contagious it is. Here are some examples.
One is laughter. Laughter is super contagious and people will unconsciously imitate other people’s laughter and that produces a sense of goodwill around us. Another is that Kindness is really contagious. There are studies that show that if I go work for an organization that is more generous to charity, I become more generous. It just creates this atmosphere of contagion. Famous studies by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler, found that my positive feeling, tends to spread to the people around me, my neighbors, my friends, my kids, my colleagues, because we tend to imitate and pick up emotions of people around us. Recent research finds that in fact positive states are more contagious than negative states. So what that tells us is that kindness, laughter, feeling good, caring things is pretty contagious, it kind of seeps into us, produces behaviors that results in cooperative social networks.
HS: On the emotion of awe and that the “human capacity for awe is our defining feature.”
From what I gather, you say that traditionally awe was largely associated with either religion/spirituality or nature.
Could you explain to our readers, what makes awe so great?
DK: (Laughs). I think there are two ways. So when I say that awe is our defining feature as a species, I’m being provocative cuz a lot of these emotions are important to us but one of the really defining qualities of humans is that we are a hyper social species. We have communities, tribes, collectives, sports teams - just love being part of social networks. And that’s really different from a lot of our mammalian relatives. And I think awe emerged in our evolution to help us be part of things that are bigger than ourselves, to be part of community.
So why is awe great? I think it's really a couple of things. The feeling of awe helps us connect to others, helps us share, helps us feel like we are a part of other people, helps us build strong ties, so it's great in the sense of giving us a sense of community. Awe is great in the sense that it is an engine of exploration and discovery and it opens up our minds and helps us look for things, discover things and see big patterns in life, helps poor kids do better in school as recent research shows. And it's great because a lot of the things we love the most in life that are part of our culture are inspired by awe. So music is a great source of awe, classical music and rock and roll and hip hop comes out of our experience of awe.
Nature, our love and relationship to nature is animated by feelings of awe, the patterns of nature. And I would say that our love of human nature and out of a sense that other people can be good and strong and overcome obstacles, comes out of feelings of awe.
Why is it great? It helps us to connect to others, discover things and create what is really incredible about culture
HS: I also wanted to ask the location of the “tallest stand of eucalyptus trees in North America” that you used in your Awe experiments. Where you had one group stare at the trees and the other at the buildings - the former were more likely to help passerby accidentally spilling their pencils. Are these trees by the side of the Valley Life Sciences Building. I love that area.
DK: yeah. Laughs. I’m not sure if they are the tallest. I’ve been told that’s the case. I think it's on a Wikipedia page, yeah that’s where they are, right by the VLSB.
HS: Do you think it’s our awe of nature that leads us to activism over climate change?
For example, when we feel we are but a microcosm in the vast macrocosm of the universe, it brings out a protective/nurturing urge rather than contribute to destroying this wonder?
DK: Yeah. Thank you for asking that Hari. So one of the things we are learning and this was known by the indigenous people. The tribes of different native Americans that populated north and South America 10-12,000 years ago, they had a very deep awe based relationship to nature. They saw patterns in nature, ideas of ecosystem, they saw that different species were collaborating with each other, had sophisticated ideas about weather, grain, the power of plants. So they had this awe filled understanding of the natural world. And they protected it and they lived in greater collaboration with the natural world.
We’ve become disconnected with the natural world. Now I think we’ve finding our connections again. And there are studies that show that if I feel awe, I want to take care of nature, I’m more inclined to recycle, more interested in doing carbon offsetting for things that I do. So awe is going to be critical to fighting climate change and carbon emissions. Great question
HS: You also mention the democratization of awe, the power of regular, small doses of awe, that we need at least 2 small doses of awe a week.
How can we get these small doses of awe from everyday experiences?
I know my experience at Berkeley has had a number of awe experiences - GBO, Sproul Plaza during the first week of the semester, Wheeler Auditorium which was the site of a Nobel ceremony, top of the Campanile etc.. The list goes on, and I imagine it’s the same for my fellow students.
But I wonder how can we get a steady stream of these small doses of awe in our post-Cal, real-world adult life.
DK: Laughs. You are asking amazing questions. Democratization of awe is one of the biggest surprises in our awe research. We ask people to keep track of whether they felt awe each day. And we find people feel a couple of experiences of awe each week and we find it actually matters a lot for the health of their minds and their nervous systems. I think that there are really important way to go find regular awe. One is get outside. We are doing work with UCSF showing, regular walks where you really encounter nature or beautiful things in cities or meaningful parts of your environment give you awe. People who inspire you morally, people who have overcome obstacles, people you think are awe inspiring and to just reflect on them and to make them part of who you are. A third is to find music that gives you awe. Americans spend a lot of time listening to music. Music is one of the most powerful sources of awe. So get out and do that. I would say a fourth is a regular mindfulness meditation practice, like yoga or breathing and I would say that you need to throw yourself into forms of knowledge that are larger than the self, whether its a spiritual knowledge, historical knowledge , cosmological, really try to find a system of knowledge that helps you understand big questions like why we live, why we exist , what is a person. And I think in terms of everyday awe; a final recommendation is to be giving yourself time, slowing down, wandering a bit, not forcing things, just being open as a mindset to cultivate awe. So I wish you the best of luck after Berkeley in getting those steady doses of awe.
HS: I like to write poetry. May I relate a personal experience - would you consider experiences like this a “small dose of awe.”
Gazing with half-closed eyes
Reclines the lone bovine.
Rhythmic mastication as the jaws chew
Yonder meadow is a laded plush green.
Molars gnash, the molars grind.
Cud cycles in gastro-tract
The cow - at complete peace is She!
Cud is the ego, arrogance, and greed.
Cud is the anger and hate's burning seed
Grind and mash, negatives obsolete.
Digestion Complete! It's Ultimate Reality!
DK: I love that. I think this has important qualities of awe like noticing things in a new way. So much of poetry is about slowing down, noticing, putting aside our typical categories of making sense of the world. And I love the deep reflection upon how to transcend the self. The digestion and ultimate reality is different than the cud and things that so I think it has a lot. your poem is powerful and has many properties of awe.
HS: For our readers, could you elaborate on some of the neural correlates and physiological benefits of cultivating these positive traits?.
Often these scientific findings serve as great motivation to cultivate these traits - oxytocin, Nucleus Accumbens, vagus nerve, etc). Especially for the non STEM readers could you explain in layman’s terms, the main benefits, as backed by scientific research?
DK: I think the simple way to think about this is part of our nervous system is really about flight or fight physiology and protecting ourselves. And detecting threat and acting in ways to help us avoid threat. And we have big branches to our nervous system that are really about connecting and caring and finding beauty in the world.
So I will give you my favorites. Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that is produced in the brain. It goes up into your brain and into the blood system. Studies show that oxytocin, which is involved in childbirth and breast feeding is also involved in empathy and sharing. So very important story.
The Nucleus Accumbens is part of your reward circuitry in the brain that also includes the ventral Tegmental Area, prefrontal cortex. What is amazing is that the Nucleus Accumbens is part of the dopaminergic network, where the neurotransmitter dopamine is sort of situated and studies show that when you cooperate with other people, when you express gratitude, when you volunteer for other people, you get increased activation in this region of the brain. So this tells us that when I am good to others, it actually feels good.
The vagus nerve is amazing, its a large bundle of nerves that starts at the top of your spinal cord, wanders through your throat, slows your heart rate down, deepens your breathing, helps you digest, projects into the intestinal wall into the flora and fauna and its unique to mammals, it helps you calm down, helps you connect and we have a lot of research showing that when I feel compassion, it activates the vagus nerve, so the vagus nerve is important
Another really important thing you should know about is the inflammation response and the immune system has these cells called the cytokines cells that attack pathogens in your body when you are sick and when you are stressed or rejected or really grew up in poverty, you have elevated inflammation in your body which is really bad for your heart and your digestion and your brain. There are about 15 studies now showing that awe and other positive emotions reduce inflammation in your body
And what’s really exciting, a final piece is new work on the Default Mode Network, which is parts of your cortex, ventral medial, prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex that are about the self, about the ego, about me achieving my goals, and self interest and so forth. And what studies are showing is that mindfulness, meditation, and awe reduce activation of DMN. That DMN or where the ego is in the brain tends to be associated with rumination, self focus and even depression. And here we find that positive states actually reduce the activation of the DMN.
So those are some of the big highlights of this literature that tell us that happiness and all these things we’ve been talking about really matter for your body.
HS: In one of your talks, you say that “awe” is the “only” positive response to reduce inflammation as it directly impacts the vagus nerve.
So is awe the master emotion we should then target over other emotions like compassion, altruism etc?
That is, does the cultivation of ‘awe’ naturally lead to many of the other positive emotions?
DK: Yes, I think the 2 best candidates for master positive emotions, as you talked about Hari are awe and compassion. I think if you cultivate feelings of compassion, if you feel wonder and awe for the world, you are gonna feel a lot of other positive emotions. What this finding that you speak of which is a Berkeley finding by Jennifer Stellar in our lab is that awe, feelings of wonder and awe were the only positive states to be related to reduced inflammation, not other emotions like pride or love. And what I believe we are eventually going to learn is positive emotions like awe and compassion and pride and excitement and laughter help our health through different pathways. Awe through reduced inflammation, compassion I really think through elevated vagal tone, but those are really questions we will figure out down the road. We need to understand.
HS: A Big Ask. Could you give us students practical everyday tips to cultivate/ incorporate these qualities, and also how to reconcile them with more negative qualities demanded of us by society?.
Not just during our time at Cal, but also say for the next decade or so into our adult life. How do we walk the walk rather than talk the talk? How do we personally lead a life that is productive and meaningful and to quote you, “find purpose and sustainable connectivity that brings you meaning”
And how do we deal with the negatives such as the related stresses and powerlessness that often accompany disability or other pathology or marginalized groups?
DK: So I wanna thank you Hari for such a great question. And really great questions. So I think the first thing is how to find this for yourself and how to walk the walk.
I hope Berkeley students all go to the greater good science center and try things. Here’s what I would recommend
The first is really learn how to breathe mindfully (laughs when Hari demonstrates). Exactly, so we know just everyday just practice some deep breathing
Number 2. Try to practice gratitude once a week. One of my favorite things to do is at nighttime, because we know sleep is important, calm is important, at night, try to think of a couple of things you are grateful for in your lives. And that’s really powerful.
Number 3 is choose social ties over money. Most Berkeley undergraduates are going to do pretty well and I think we all too often in life we choose work or making more money over friendship and I hope your generation will change that.
Number 4 is find a source of awe out in your life. Get outside, go for a walk. Take a moment to stop and be near bodies of water, look at clouds. Find your sources of awe.
Number 5. Think of service. think of one way your life or your work serves other people. Form of volunteerism
So I think that if you can use the Greater Good Science Center, find 5 or 6 things that you could be doing each week, you’ll be ok.
And to your question about the negativity in our world today, I would say a couple of things which I teach in Human Happiness. One is there is a lot of stress today, climate change, toxic politics, mass incarceration, economic inequality. And you need to train your mind through mindfulness techniques to really handle stress, to label it and make sense of it.
The second thing is to find a source of injustice in the world you want to improve and what I teach in Human Happiness is there are certain kinds of anger that feel good, that are good for society , that are good for bringing about positive social change and I think here at Berkeley, we care about positive social change and we find something that you consider to be injust, and take action.
HS: Another Big Ask. "The Compassionate Instinct," book (page 14) had mentioned that positive emotions are not heritable but rather ‘plastic’ and can be shaped by environmental input.
So how do we change the world around us to act likewise (kinder benevolent tendencies)?
DK: yeah so I think we are learning that, a big chunk; part of your positive emotions is heritable, almost everything in humans is heritable to some degree or most things. Thought I would correct that.
Let me give you some examples of how to change the world. And this is really the question for your generation. Ok we know this stuff, how do we make the world better. People are already doing this so. So something you can start to do is incorporate this knowledge into the work that you do. And so what we are seeing at the Great Good Science Center as two examples is teachers are using this more in their classrooms, they are teaching this kind of stuff. We've touched thousands of schools. Health care professionals, medical doctors and nurses are starting to teach this stuff and to prescribe this stuff to other people. To tell a patient with diabetes to get outdoors more because its good for your body. To tell a really stressed out teenager to learn how to do some breathing and mindfulness. So incorporate it into your work.
And then what I encourage and teach the students in Human Happiness here at Berkeley is really by the time you leave Berkeley to have a life philosophy that helps you incorporate some of these ideas . To have a philosophy about how you practice gratitude, to have a philosophy about how you find calm and quiet, to have a philosophy about how you benefit nature.
So I think the first is to really build it into work. Second is to develop a life philosophy. Third is really think about the big life choices and make sure that happiness matters. And I think we are really gonna need to change institutions and that’s where we are lagging behind in the application of knowledge. Criminal justice for example.
HS: Any other thoughts or comments or advice for students? Anything important I may have missed?
DK: Berkeley is a hotspot for this kind of conversation and we have a lot of interesting work going on on this. And I think what would really encourage your readers and Berkeley students to do is like the millions of readers worldwide is to go to the Greater Good Science Center which is a Berkeley thing and to find 5 things that they will consider their happiness exercises and to start doing them.
We think a lot about diet. We think a lot about exercise. We think a lot about study habits, now they need 5 things from the GGSC and they will be on their way.
