David DeSteno, a psychology professor at Northeastern University, blogged here earlier this week about his research on moral hypocrisy. This is his last of three posts on the subject.
On Wednesday, I ended by suggesting that humans might just be good at heart. Sappy, I know, but nonetheless true (well, at least partially). For a long time, emotions have taken the rap for much of the dark side of human nature — violence, prejudice, greed. Yes, there is evidence to support each of these (some even from my lab).
However, just because emotions sometimes lead to undesirable behaviors does not mean that they must always be controlled for virtuous behavior to emerge.
A principal function of emotions is to provide an ongoing assessment of one’s environs and to constrain subsequent behaviors to increase adaptive responding. To use the classic example, the state that we call fear increases the likelihood of subsequent responses meant to avoid danger.
For humans, though, problems of predation or contracting communicable diseases may be no more important to flourishing than ones integrally involved in successfully navigating social life. Simply put, building social and economic capital is central to our success and depends on correctly dealing with questions like: “Who should I trust?” “Should I pay you back?”
Consequently, humans should possess a class of emotional responses that prod them to be “good partners.” As my collaborator Robert Frank has argued, many of these social emotions should help us control our greedy “id-like” impulses.
Now, the idea of such “moral sentiments” has been kicking around at least since Adam Smith, but supportive data has been hard to come by, at least until recently.
Consider the following experiment conducted by Monica Bartlett and myself. We brought people into the lab and set up 2 situations: One in which they confronted a problem which would require them to complete an onerous task and one where they didn’t face any problem. In the first case, a confederate, at some cost to herself in terms of time and effort, helped the participant solve the problem, which led to measurable feelings of gratitude. In the second, the confederate was just another person in the session.
After leaving the lab, all participants just happened to encounter someone asking for help on a different onerous task. This person was either the known confederate (labeled benefactor in the figure) or someone who was a complete stranger.
Looking at the first two bars, you can see that grateful participants helped the known confederate much more than neutral participants.
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. This doesn’t prove anything! They may just be following a reciprocity norm. Fair enough. But look at the second set of bars. If it were really reciprocity, then no increased helping should occur when a stranger requests help, as participants don’t owe this stranger anything. Yet, those who were feeling grateful still helped more. Simply put, gratitude functioned to push people to acquiesce to requests for help — even onerous ones from unknown others.
Importantly, another study showed that if we reminded the participants before they left that they were helped by the confederate, they didn’t help the stranger any more than control participants. By binding the emotional state so saliently to one person, it couldn’t be misattributed as a cue to help another, thereby indicating that the increased helping isn’t just adherence to a “pay-it-forward” norm. Yet participants still were paying-it-forward.
To me, this represents a spandrel effect for gratitude. Although its primary function is to make you feel grateful toward benefactors and thereby repay them at cost to yourself, there is a side benefit at the group level. If someone else just happens to ask for a favor while you’re feeling grateful, your odds of agreeing are higher.
As work by Nowak and Roch has suggested, mechanisms for such upstream reciprocity are fundamental to the development of cooperative society. But then again, they could also make you a sucker to a good con artist! On balance though, such emotional responses continue to lead me to believe that at heart, we’re designed to be prosocial.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
One thing I forgot to mention, so let me tell you before you ask for it. In all cases, the time spent helping the other was directly predicted by the intensity of gratitude participants reported.
Thanks for all your comments this week. I’ve enjoyed them!
Couldn’t the effect you observed be explained by some variation of the availability heuristic? That is: with a concrete example of receiving assistance fresh in their mind, people are more likely to engage in that behavior when the opportunity presents itself.
Have similar experiments been performed with emotions that are not “prosocial?” I would find your interpretation more persuasive if, when antisocial emotions were induced in subjects, it was found that they did NOT repeat the emotion-inducing behavior when given an opportunity to do so.
Our human brains have sufficiently evolved to the point that generally we can think in terms beyond “id-generated” impulses.
However, a sizeable percentage of our population (I don’t know the exact amount) cannot control their “id” and kill, rape, steal, cheat, etc.
As humans we are animals with a larger, higher functioning brain, but animals nontheless. If one were to put a human, dog, worm, bird, etc. on side by side autopsy tables we all share remarkable inner workings, not to mention a surprisingly large amount of DNA!
I don’t think we’ll ever evolve to the point that an even larger percentage, nearing 100%, will be grateful or otherwise good at heart in all situations. To me an otherwise “id-controller” who loses his temper and yells and screams represents evolutionary influences not lost during the eons of time we’ve been on this planet in one form or another.
We’ll still need rules and laws to govern our behavior and punishment for id-noncontrollers. I wonder if laws would have any effect either way, moving the mass toward “higher” functioning or “lower” functioning?
And, aside from relatively new social structures such as religion, government, countries, nationalities, I wonder if our brains are evolving in the “right” direction anyway. With all this new stuff have we lost the old environmental influences that would move in the proper direction.
What’s interesting to me is that the known neutral confederate got more cooperation than the unknown stranger — even after the subject had been the beneficiary of cooperation. I guess a known (non-evil) is still better than an unknown.
Very interesting research.
“A principle function of emotions is to provide an ongoing assessment of one’s environs and to constrain subsequent behaviors to increase adaptive responding.”
According to this theory, what then is the scientific explanation for intense grief, for instance at the death of a parent?
What would be interesting to me is the extent of the contextual halo. You’ve established a context and extended that, it appears, to just outside the lab, which is closely related in time and in space. If you tested the same people hours later, days later, in a different location, the same location, without going through the gratitude generating exercises, would there be a difference in the groups?
In child development, we see awareness expand as a young person connects actions over time and space. Context is built in. The idealists believe we can construct a greater context – silly – but it is interesting to know how context can be created and manipulated and how far it naturally tends to extend.
Unfortunately, Man in inherently evil. We are all born with a sinful nature. Total depravity does not mean, however, that people are as evil as possible. Rather, it means that even the good which a person may intend is faulty in its premise, false in its motive, and weak in its implementation; and there is no mere refinement of natural capacities that can correct this condition. Thus, even acts of generosity and altruism are in fact egoist acts in disguise. (Borrowed from Reformed Perspectives)
Hey, helping people just feels good.
I ran after a young lady in Midtown NYC yesterday to return the watch she had dropped.
I felt good for the rest of the day even though all I
objectively obtained was a quick “Thanks”.
Go figure.