An Endless Cycle of Good Deeds

By Jonathan Haidt, Greater Good. Posted October 12, 2005.

Here's a puzzle: Why do we care when a stranger does a good deed for a stranger? Most theories in the social sciences say that people's actions and feelings are motivated by self-interest. So why are we sometimes moved to tears by the good deeds or heroic actions of others? I believe we cannot have a full understanding of human morality until we can explain why and how human beings are so powerfully affected by the sight of a stranger helping another stranger.

For the past several years, I have studied this feeling, which I call "elevation." I have defined elevation as a warm, uplifting feeling that people experience when they see unexpected acts of human goodness, kindness, courage, or compassion. It makes a person want to help others and to become a better person himself or herself.

Elevation is widely known across cultures and historical eras. You probably recognize it yourself. But for some reason no psychologist has studied it empirically. Instead, psychologists have focused most of their energies on the negative moral emotions, especially guilt and anger. Psychologists have thought about morality primarily as a system of rules that prevents people from hurting each other and taking their possessions.

But I believe that morality is much richer and more balanced. Most people don't want to rape, steal, and kill. What they really want is to live in a moral community where people treat each other well, and in which they can satisfy their needs for love, productive work, and a sense of belonging to groups of which they are proud. We get a visceral sense that we do not have such a moral world when we see people behave in petty, cruel, or selfish ways.

But when we see a stranger do a simple act of kindness for another stranger, it gives us a thrilling sense that maybe we do live in such a world. The fact that we can be so responsive to the good deeds of others, even when we do not benefit directly, is a very important facet of human nature. Yes, people can be terribly cruel, and we must continue our study of the conditions that lead to racism, violence, and other social ills. But there is a brighter side to human nature, too, and psychology ought to look more closely at it.

Beyond Disgust

I started examining elevation only after years of studying its opposite: disgust. It makes good evolutionary sense that human beings should have an emotion that makes us feel repulsion toward rotten food, excrement, dead bodies, and other physical objects that are full of dangerous bacteria and parasites. It also makes sense that disgust should make us hypersensitive to contagion -- that is, we feel disgust toward anything that touched something that we find disgusting.

But when my colleagues and I actually asked people in several countries to list the things they thought were disgusting, we repeatedly found that most people mentioned social offenses, such as hypocrisy, racism, cruelty, and betrayal. How on earth did a food-based and very corporeal emotion become a social and moral emotion? The short version of our attempt at an answer is that while disgust may motivate people to distance themselves from physical threats, it is well-suited for dealing with social threats as well. When we find social actions disgusting, they indicate to us that the person who committed them is in some way morally defective.

In this light, we seem to place human actions on a vertical dimension that runs from our conception of absolute good (God) above, to absolute evil (the Devil) below. This vertical dimension is found in many cultures -- for example, in Hindu and Buddhist ideas that people are reincarnated at higher or lower levels depending on their moral behavior in this life.

Social disgust can then be understood as the emotional reaction people have to witnessing others moving "down," or exhibiting their lower, baser, less God-like nature. Human beings feel revolted by moral depravity, and this revulsion is akin to the revulsion they feel toward rotten food and cockroaches. In this way, disgust helps us form groups, reject deviants, and build a moral community.

I thought about the social nature of disgust in this way for years, and about what exactly it means when someone moves "down" on the vertical dimension from good to evil. But then, one day in 1997, I looked up. I had never thought about what emotion we feel when we see someone move higher on the vertical dimension, acting in an honorable or saintly way.

But once I began to investigate, I saw a whole new set of emotional responses that were triggered by virtuous, pure, or super-human behavior. I have called this emotion "elevation" because seeing other people rise on the vertical dimension, from evil to goodness, seems to make people feel higher on it themselves.

Once I began looking for elevation, I found it easily. I saw that most people recognize descriptions of it, and the popular press and Oprah Winfrey talk about it (as being touched, moved, or inspired). Yet research psychologists had almost nothing to say about it.

Jonathan Haidt is an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. This essay draws from his chapter in Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived.

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