From Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman of Sinai and Synapses:

Compassion is a deep-seated value in every religious tradition. Judaism teaches that the world stands on Torah, on prayer, and on acts of loving kindness. Christians celebrate the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke. And a major reason the Dalai Lama is so honored is because of his Buddhist teachings on compassion.

But compassion can also be studied scientifically, and one of the foremost researchers on compassion is Professor David DeSteno, author of the book Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us and the director of the Social Emotions Lab at Northeastern University.

I had an opportunity to ask him some questions about how the science of compassion can inform our religious and ethical outlooks:

GM: Does religion foster or hinder our ability to be compassionate?

DD: It’s a trickier question than one might think. There’s been a debate going on in psychological science for the past decade about the nature of morality. Do our moral sentiments spring from innate intuitions (e.g., ubiquitous evolved responses) or from conscious dictates (e.g., religious doctrines, ethical principles). There’s data to support both sides, and therein lies the reason for the ongoing debate. It’s not simply one or the other. It is true that the challenges of human social life, among which is the question of when to feel compassion and act altruistically, have existed for much longer than we’ve had the cognitive wherewithal to engage in rational analysis. So, it makes good sense that we have moral intuitions that automatically guide our actions. We never would have made it out of the “ancestral savannah” if we didn’t.

Of course, the more recent ability of the human mind to engage in abstract reasoning opened up additional ways for us to embrace (or avoid) ethical actions. The result is that we’re of two minds—an intuitive one and a deliberative one. The trick is to realize that they’re both attempting to solve the same problem—how to navigate the social world optimally. Neither “mind” is more moral than the other, and that’s the most important fact to understand in learning how to live more ethically. You can’t always trust your intuitions or your rational mind. Both are capable of leading you astray.

When it comes to compassion, I think we can all agree that most religions embrace the view that compassion is a virtue and that we should help those in need. So, at a conscious level, I think religion works to increase the likelihood that we will help others. However, religion also functions as a social category; it can divide us into “us” and “them,” into believers and nonbelievers.

What we know from our own research is that, on the intuitive level at least, how much compassion we feel for others is a direct function of how similar we feel to them. For example, our work has shown that simply having people wear similar color wristbands to denote their membership in a recently created “team” alters the levels of compassion they feel for each other. When one individual is harmed, the level of compassion another feels for him is modulated up or down depending on whether the victim is wearing the same color wristband.

Consequently, we have to be aware that while our religious beliefs may be urging us to act compassionately, our religious identities may be introducing an asymmetry into our responses. We may feel the pain of our brethren more and the pain of others less.

An interesting fact here can be seen in some traditions of Buddhist meditation. A basic technique of compassion meditation is to realize that all beings are equally similar. That technique is quite congruent with our findings. The more the mind automatically comes to see all beings as alike, the more ready it is to feel compassion equally for all in pain.

GM: What situations most bring out our compassion? What situations bring it out the least?

DD: As I’ve hinted at above, the level of compassion we feel for others is greatly influenced by whether we see ourselves in them. If you think about it, it makes great sense biologically. Feeling compassion usually motivates us to act to help others, often at a cost to ourselves. If a person were moved to feel compassion for everyone in every instance, it could become paralyzing. That person would experience constant sorrow and utilize all of her or his resources to help others. Now, this might be a noble goal, but in terms of evolutionary logic, it’s anathema.

Consequently, the intuitive mind makes us feel more compassion for those with whom we share some affiliation. Of course, that affiliation can take many different forms—familial, team membership, or group-based identities along various social dimensions (e.g., vegetarians).

In short, it’s not just the nature of the tragedy that makes us feel compassion; it’s also whether the victim is likely to help us in the future. No one would be surprised that an American soldier would feel more compassion for a wounded comrade than for a Taliban fighter who sustained the same injury. But this phenomenon of relativism is so deeply ingrained in the mind that we find the same asymmetry simply due to mirroring another’s movements. If you tap your hands in time with a person right before they are victimized, you’ll feel their pain more and work longer and harder to help them than if you didn’t tap your hands in time with them. Synchronous movement, after all, is an ancient marker for joint purpose.

GM: What’s the relationship between compassion and ethical action?

DD: Compassion, like all emotions, is a feeling state that serves as an engine for action. Once we feel an emotion, it increases the likelihood that we’ll engage in certain behaviors (or at least makes us work harder to avoid them). Fear prepares us to flee. Anger prepares us for conflict. Compassion prepares us to support others. If you accept the view that emotions function to increase adaptive responding, then it makes great sense that humans have a suite of emotional responses that impel them to build social capital. We’re a social species at heart. We depend on others to flourish. Consequently, we have to possess emotional responses that enhance prosocial actions and not just ones that are aimed at selfish pleasure or competition and aggression.

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In Judaism, compassion is not primarily a feeling—it is an action. “Just as God is compassionate, we should be compassionate. Just as God clothed the naked (by making clothes for Adam), we should clothe the naked. Just as God visited the sick (by going to see Abraham after he was circumcised), we should visit the sick. Just as God comforted mourners (by speaking to Isaac after his father died), we should comfort mourners. Just as God buried the dead (by burying Moses), we should bury the dead.” (Sotah 14a)

As DeSteno noted, there often is tension between our religious beliefs and our religious identities—between our religious teachings that tell us to be compassionate to all people, and the way religious groups can create an “us” and “them” mentality.

But “who we are” is very much “what we do.” If we act compassionately, we begin to view ourselves as “compassionate people.” Our sense of identity arises not only from the group we associate with, but also from the actions we take.

So when we think about using religion to foster compassion, then, the focus should not be on how we strengthen our sense of identity—that simply reinforces divisiveness. Instead, as DeSteno’s research on science of compassion shows, we should aim to strengthen our values, to think about how we behave, and to consciously expand how we can “see ourselves” in others.

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

There’s quite a lot of research showing that subtly reminding people of death can make them more religious. But what’s not clear is why that should be—and in particular, whether nonreligious people also become more religious.

Jonathan Jong, a new doctoral graduate from the University of Otago in New Zealand, has conducted a series of fascinating studies to investigate just this. You can find his thesis here. There’s a lot in it, but here’s two key studies that will make you think.

In the first study, Jong asked students to write either about what they thought would happen to them when they die (the death condition) or about watching TV (the control condition). Then he asked them a series of questions about religious beliefs (with a Christian slant)—the Spiritual Belief Scale.

You can see in the figure below that religious people have, as you would expect, high levels of belief in the supernatural—and this increases still further in the “death” condition versus the TV condition.

Nonreligious people had lower beliefs to start with, and they got lower still after death reminders. They become stronger in their rejection of religious beliefs.

OK, so far so good. But this is just what people are saying—and what people say and what they think instinctively are not necessarily the same.

Then Jong ran a version of the Implicit Association Test. This is basically a computerised quiz in which you have to classify words into different groups. Some classifications go against your instinctive beliefs—and these classifications will make you stumble a little, and so take you a little bit longer.

So, in this case, the subjects had to classify supernatural (angel, devil, God, heaven, soul, etc.), real (eagle, helicopter), and imaginary (Batmobile, fairy, genie, mermaid, Narnia) entities as either real or imaginary. For the nonreligious, being asked to classify supernatural and real objects together as real, and distinct from imaginary objects, is tough to do. It goes against their instincts, and so they took significantly longer to do it.

However, if they were primed with death thoughts beforehand, they found the task easier. In fact, the improvement in speed was pretty much as large as it was for the religious. What this suggests is that the idea that supernatural entities are real is easier to contemplate for everyone—including the nonreligious—if they have been thinking about death. Jong thinks that what we’re seeing here is evidence that reflective, conscious thoughts can be decoupled from instinctive, implicit beliefs.

What may be happening is that all of us—religious and nonreligious alike—have a kind of innate response to the fear of death that makes us more accommodating to the idea of supernatural beings (at least, those ones that are culturally accepted as possibly real and not complete fantasies).

Countering this, on the other hand, is something called “worldview defense.” This is the well-known phenomenon that when we are reminded about death, we tend to cling onto comforting, reassuring beliefs about the world. We become more positive about our own ethnic group or nation, for example, and more hostile to strangers.

For the religious, this also includes a heightened attachment to religion. For the nonreligious, however, the reverse effect seems to occur. For the nonreligious, being reminded of death makes them instinctively more superstitious, but also overtly more hostile to religion.

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Does a traumatic experience encourage people toward religion, or does it have the opposite effect? In a previous post, I ran through the evidence that Americans who had lost a relative in the 9/11 terrorist attacks tended to become less religious afterward.

So what about a different country, and a different trauma? Ajmal Hussain, at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies in Oslo, quizzed 1,000 Norwegian tourists who were in South East Asia at the time of the 2004 tsunami—a major disaster that killed more than 200,000 people.

The survey was run two years after the disaster, at which time 8 percent reported their religious beliefs had strengthened since before the disaster, and 5 percent reported that their beliefs had weakened.

Those whose beliefs strengthened also tended to report they had pre-tsunami mental health problems, felt that their life was threatened more, that they had lost a family member or close friend, that they had suffered injuries themselves, and that they had experienced post-traumatic stress and post-tsunami adverse life events. However, after putting all the different factors into a statistical pot (including factors like age, sex, and education), only two factors remained important: pre-tsunami mental health problems (which increased the chances of becoming more religious by 80 percent) and post-traumatic stress (which increased the chances by 62 percent).

However, those whose beliefs weakened also tended to report that their life was threatened more, and that they had post-traumatic stress and post-tsunami adverse life events! They also tended to be younger—and both age and post-traumatic stress remained important after adjusting for other factors.

Hussain concludes that living through the terrifying events of the tsunami did not have much effect on the religious beliefs of Norwegians (they were, after all, repatriated within days of the event and, apart from this event, live mostly trauma-free lives).

However, those who were the most traumatized were more likely to change their religious beliefs—but the effect could go either way. To me, this suggests that whether trauma makes you more or less religious probably depends a lot on your cultural background.

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries a signal across nerve junctions. You might know of it because of its links to Parkinson’s disease, but it’s actually pretty widespread in the brain and does a number of interesting things.

Variants of one particular molecular receptor for dopamine, the D4 receptor, seem to have interesting links with risk taking and novelty seeking. But the links are not at all straightforward, and recent research suggests that what it actually does is tweak your susceptibility to environmental influences.

Joni Sasaki at the University of California, Santa Barbara wanted to know if this could help explain the mixed responses to religious priming that have been reported before. As regular readers of this blog will know, giving people subliminal religious prompts seems to make them more prosocial, but the effect doesn’t seem clear cut.

So what Sasaki and her colleagues did was to run a straightforward religious priming experiment. The subjects (all undergraduates) had to unscramble words to form sentences. Half the subjects were given sentences that had a religious theme, the other had nonreligious sentences. The idea is to get people thinking about religion without realizing what they are doing.

Afterward, they measured their subjects’ willingness to volunteer for a bunch of actual organizations and clubs around the college.

The top line results were similar to other studies. Overall, religious people were no more willing to volunteer than the nonreligious, but people who had been primed with religion were more willing to volunteer—regardless of whether or not they were religious themselves.

But not everybody responded to the priming. As the graphic below shows, the response depended on the variant of the D4 gene. People with one particular variation (2-/7-repeat allele) got a really big prosocial boost from the religious prime. People with the other variant were pretty prosocial without the prime, and their prosociality actually decreased with priming!

All this goes to show that the relationship between genetics and religion is not at all straightforward (something I’ve touched on before.) This particular gene variant seems to make people more susceptible to environmental influences—whether religious or otherwise.

If you looked at these people in a religious environment, then you would say that this is a gene “for” religion. Put these same people in a nonreligious environment, and you would say that is a gene “against” religion!