Forget the “Selfish Gene”, Humans are Actually Wired For Kindness Says UC Berkeley Professor

Professor of psychology and founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley Dacher Keltner claims that sympathy, not competition, is actually at the center of Darwin’s theory of survival — and there are tons of new studies to back him up.

Consider, for example, a review of the health benefits of volunteering published by the Washington DC based Corporation for National and Community Service. They found that helping others was linked to a surprisingly large number of health benefits, everything from a lower mortality and depression rate to a better functioning immune system.

The problem is that the competitive nature of modern society not only makes selfless action seem counterproductive but it rarely allows time for it in between all the “struggling to survive” — which is touted as reality even in many scientific circles.

The best-selling The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins for example, claims that “pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature… has never existed before in the whole history of the world.”

Statements like that seem to justify a harsh view of reality where things like a half a million people going homeless on the streets of America every night are completely natural, no matter how depressing. And depression is now the leading cause of disability in the world according to the World Health Organization.

But Keltner’s research seems to point to a way out of this. We are wired to respond to human suffering. We are wired for empathy, for kindness. And it may be the repression of this basic nature of ours that is the only problem, making correcting some bad science that had us all on the the wrong track not only the path to healing ourselves, but the whole world.

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Originally published at aplus.com on May 8, 2015.