Join me for a lunchtime walk I took down K Street in Washington DC about ten years ago.
Half a block ahead of me was a well-dressed woman in standard DC garb: jacket, skirt, and heels. Suddenly she tumbled to the ground and hit it with an audible thud. She stayed down and was writhing in obvious pain. Within seconds a crowd gathered. Someone's sport coat was put under her head and her swelling ankle examined. A call to 9-1-1 was made and a water bottle offered. What are we to make of this? Perhaps a rare instance of DC denizens helping a stranger? Or is helping someone in need a more typical behavior? If we look around us, we see strangers helping others all the time, from opening doors for others to sending checks to aid disaster victims.
For some reason, human beings have a strong inclination to help others, even strangers. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has called this our moral instinct: we often and with little thought actively help others or avoid hurting them. The moral instinct allows us to live around, and obtain the value of cooperating with, complete strangers. Indeed, this is the hallmark of civilization, a group of mostly unrelated people who live and work together.
The reasons that we humans have a moral instinct are just starting to be understood with recent advances in the "neuro hyphen" fields, including neuroethics, neurophilosophy, and neuroeconomics. The discovery by my lab in 2004 of a measurable and manipulable brain chemical called oxytocin that drives moral behaviors has moved our understanding of the moral instinct forward several steps (see "The neurobiology of trust," Scientific American, June, 2008). These discoveries not only revealed how the brain balances virtue and vice, but have allowed us to explain a variety of quirky or apparently pathological behaviors. The quirky stuff includes why we pamper our pets so much, why marriages between robots and humans are coming, why a man shot his lawnmower, and why humans have evolved a custom of touching their palms to others' palms. These all make sense when one understands oxytocin, the moral molecule. More weighty (but still fun) topics include how we pick our elected leaders, why "virtue" is a new business buzz word, and how markets promote and inhibit moral behaviors (Enron explained). All in all, I promise you an entertaining new take on human behavior with The Moral Molecule.
