One of the hardest questions when you think about the evolution of the human species,
from the standard framework of evolution, which really is about individual survival,
competing, getting your genes to the next generation -- one of the hardest questions
within that framework is why are people so frequently and routinely good and generous
and sacrificing, right?
And you know, most people think that Darwin had this idea of "survival of the fittest"
that really it's the most ruthless and bloodthirsty who really thrive and survive.
That is not Darwin's view of human evolution at all he really felt that sympathy is the
strongest instinct that human's have.
Communities that have the most sympathetic members will flourish and raise the greatest
number of offspring.
That notion of Darwin's led to this sense that out of the vulnerability of our offspring
emerged, first of all social structures like cooperative care giving and then also physiological
systems shaped by evolution to help take care of the carriers of our genes:our offspring.
We have learned from neuroscience down at UCLA that if you feel physical pain, a part
of your brain lights up and if I see you have that physical pain, the same part of my brain
lights up.
It's as if we're wired to have the same experience of other people.
Empathy is this really complicated task.
It really engages the frontal lobes, these newer regions of the cortex that are involved
in more complex symbolic processes like language and imagining the future.
Because empathy requires that you think: there's someone else out there who has feelings and
thoughts that may be different from mine -- that's a really complicated cognitive achievement.
In my lab, the Berkeley social interaction lab, we showed images of prototypical suffering
to our participants.
They trigger massively powerful reactions of compassion and what we found in the brain
is that a very old part of the brain called the periaqueductal gray, which is common to
mammals when they take care of things, lights up when you feel compassion.
So that tells us, compassion is really old in the nervous system as Darwin speculated.
My students and I got really interested in social class.
What does it do to the human mind?
Our lab and other labs are interested in something called the vagus nerve.
It's the longest bundle of nerves in the human nervous system.
In our research compassion, the feeling of caring for someone in need, activates the
vagus nerve.
Lower class individuals, if we show them images of suffering, they have a vagus nerve response.
You don't see that in upper class individuals.
It literally is a compassion deficit that's produced by lots of wealth.
Next set of studies on charity: who gives?
Economic analyses would say if I have a lot of money, it should be easy to give.
If I have 900 bucks in my bank account, giving away money -- it really matters, you know,
it matters what you put in your fridge.
And in spite of that what we find is lower class individuals give more, and this is replicated
in studies of philanthropy.
You know one of things this science tells us is there is enormous strength in these
poorer communities of generosity and empathy that you know, many people in more privileged
circumstances miss -- it's strong community.
Yeah, you know 60 percent of what we do is really about maximizing an individual's personal
gratification and desire, just the classic survival of the most competitive -- but 40
percent of the time, we're really doing things for other people and we sacrifice and we risk
exploitation and we still do it.
And not only that but, it actually becomes personally fulfilling and inspiring to engage
in that work, we find these secondary delights in enacting on behalf of others.
And I think that it really requires that we redefine human self-interest.
You know, the great ethical traditions have always been encouraging this and now we're
seeing the science say, yeah that brain really cares about other people.