When Goodness Gets Inside Us (and Try Eating Ginger)
“Witnessing goodness can make us want to become a little better ourselves.”
Every week at church, we ask our youth three simple questions: Where did you give kindness? Where did you receive kindness? Where did you see kindness?
Recently we began talking about how those experiences actually feel. The children agreed that receiving kindness feels good. Makes us happy. Giving kindness feels good, makes us happier too.
Then one child asked a wonderful question: “What is that feeling you get when you see somebody else do something really kind? It makes you happy, but it also makes you feel like you might cry.”
There is actually a name for that feeling: moral elevation. It's a cousin to awe and appreciation of beauty. It's in the larger category of spirituality.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has been one of the major researchers exploring moral elevation. It is that warm, uplifting feeling we can experience when we witness moral beauty—someone showing unusual kindness, courage, generosity, compassion, loyalty, or selflessness.
And that child described it remarkably well. People experiencing elevation sometimes report warmth in their chest, a lump in their throat, chills, or tears in their eyes. Researchers have found that the autonomic nervous system participates in the experience. Goodness, apparently, doesn't just happen in our heads. Sometimes we feel it all the way through us.
When 150 People Who Have Done Good Gather in One Room, What Happens?
I thought about moral elevation recently when about 150 people gathered at our church for a meal. They had spent the day doing good things throughout our community as part of the Shine project which is the brainchild of Christ Center.
Some had picked up litter. Some had packed and distributed appreciation bags for teachers. Others prepared bags of essentials for people who could use a little help. Some decorated cookies with residents of a nursing home. There were projects all over our community, most of them fairly ordinary things. Nobody solved world hunger that day. Nobody won a Nobel Peace Prize.
They simply showed up and cared. And we briefly discussed what happened. We gave out pins that said, “You Make a Difference.” Everyone wanted more pins to share with others who had helped.
Then we ate together.
And something interesting happened as all those people who had spent the day doing good gathered in the same room. We weren't simply eating dinner. We were surrounded by evidence of human goodness.
We also recognized the people and organizations that have cooked for our Community Meal over the years: Methodists, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, Latter-day Saints, Catholics, the Dryden Improvement Club, Kiwanis members, Rotarians, Happy Letters folks, the Collective Church and local businesses such as Stones Gastropub.
Think about that collection of people for a moment. We certainly don't all agree about theology. We don't all agree about politics. We probably don't agree about a great many things.
But for an evening, those differences weren't the most important things about us. We had gathered around something deeper: caring for our neighbors and creating community.
And it was elevating.
There was something moving about simply being in one another's company. We could look around the room and see people who had cooked meals, picked up garbage, thanked teachers, visited older people, helped strangers and given away hours of their lives simply because they wanted their community to be a little better.
That is moral elevation happening in real life.
Goodness Can Be Contagious!
Haidt's early work on elevation suggested something particularly important: witnessing goodness doesn't only make us admire the person doing it. It can make us want to become better ourselves.
Research by Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt found that people experiencing elevation reported wanting to help others, become better people, and emulate the goodness they had witnessed. Later research has continued to connect moral elevation with compassionate goals, social connection, and prosocial behavior.
That means one act of kindness can potentially have at least three beneficiaries. There is the person who receives the kindness, the person who gives it, and the person who happens to witness it.
Goodness has witnesses, and witnesses sometimes become participants.
Perhaps that is part of what happened at our gathering. Someone who packed bags heard about someone who visited the nursing home. Someone who picked up litter sat beside someone who has cooked Community Meals for years. People from different churches discovered that people from other churches were doing some of the same things they cared about.
We elevated one another.
That matters enormously at a time when so many forces are encouraging us to notice the worst in one another. Outrage gets our attention. Conflict gets repeated. A foolish or cruel act can travel around the world before lunch.
Moral elevation asks us to pay attention to something else that is equally real: human goodness.
Moral Elevation and Compassion
This brings me to a very big portal to the good life, compassion.
Compassion involves more than feeling sorry for someone. I think of it as warm-hearted concern joined with the desire to prevent or alleviate suffering and promote well-being. It requires us first to notice—to see another person clearly enough that their life matters to us.
Moral elevation can help create that opening. We see compassion being practiced, we are moved by it, and something inside us whispers, I want to be that kind of person too.
Then perhaps we act compassionately ourselves, and somebody else sees us.
The circle continues.
I don't think compassion grows primarily because somebody lectures us about how compassionate we ought to be. I suspect it grows at least partly because we encounter people whose lives show us what compassion looks like.
That may be one reason stories matter so much. Tell me that generosity is important and I may agree with you. Let me watch someone quietly give away something they treasure to a person who needs it more, and I may feel something in my chest.
That feeling can become motivation.
A Strange Sidebar: Can Ginger Make Us Less Judgmental?
Here is where this gets wonderfully strange.
I had remembered hearing this research associated with food writer Michael Pollan. The research was conducted by psychologists Jessica Tracy, Jason Steckler and Daniel Randles.
They were interested in the relationship between physical disgust and moral disgust. Ginger can reduce nausea, so they wondered: if you reduce physical feelings of disgust, could that actually influence moral judgment?
Their experiments found that ginger reduced disgust and also made people somewhat less severe when judging certain moral violations involving what psychologists call “purity.” We also talk in our weekly compassion circle about times we struggle with kindness and compassion. Maybe a little ginger could help?
I wouldn't start handing out ginger chews before contentious church meetings just yet. The effects were specific, and research connecting physical sensations with moral judgment has sometimes produced mixed results.
But I love the larger idea because it reminds us how strange and wonderfully integrated human beings are.
We tend to imagine morality occurring somewhere in the brain, where a little rational judge examines the facts and announces a verdict. But apparently our stomach gets a vote. Our nervous system gets a vote. Our emotions get a vote. Our relationships and surroundings get votes too.
We are whole organisms.
Moral elevation demonstrates the other side of this same embodied system. Goodness can bring tears to our eyes, warmth to our chest, and sometimes even chills. The autonomic nervous system responds to what we witness.
I would be cautious about saying that moral elevation itself “boosts the immune system.” We don't yet have conclusive evidence for that particular claim
(ALTHOUGH Harvard psychologist David McClelland and Carol Kirshnit published an incredible study in 1988. Participants watched a documentary depicting Mother Teresa caring for sick and dying people in Calcutta. Researchers measured salivary immunoglobulin A (S-IgA), an antibody involved in the body's mucosal immune defenses. S-IgA increased after the Mother Teresa film. The effect became popularly known as the “Mother Teresa Effect.”
There is an especially interesting detail: McClelland reported that the elevated S-IgA could be sustained when participants subsequently spent time recalling experiences of loving or being loved...)
But we do have evidence connecting elevation with physiological responses, positive emotion, compassionate goals, social connection and prosocial motivation.
The body, mind, moral life and community are much more intertwined than we once imagined.
Three New Books—and Really One Question
Three new books I have recently published on Amazon show this connection.
Growing a Good Life asks how we help children and young people grow toward compassion, kindness, wisdom, courage, emotional strength, connection and flourishing. What do we practice with children if we want them not merely to succeed, but to become human beings who contribute goodness to the world?
Compassion Circle grew out of years of sitting in circles with people trying to learn what compassion actually looks like in ordinary life. It explores practices for paying attention, understanding ourselves and others, developing empathy and warm-heartedness, responding to suffering, forgiving without pretending that harm didn't happen, setting boundaries when necessary, and turning compassion into action.
Then there is The Community Meal, a novel inspired by something very close to my heart: what happens when people who might otherwise remain strangers sit down at the same table. It explores belonging, generosity, difference, conflict, forgiveness and the sometimes messy work of becoming a community.
One is especially concerned with growing good lives. One is about practicing compassion. One is a story about creating community.
But underneath all three is really one question:
How does goodness grow?
I think moral elevation gives us one small but important piece of the answer.
We Need to Tell More Stories About Goodness
Our children's little weekly ritual is hugely important.
Where did you give kindness?
Where did you receive kindness?
And where did you see kindness?
That third question may be doing something quite profound. We are teaching children to become observers of goodness.
We could all use some practice at that.
Imagine families asking that question around the dinner table. Imagine workplaces beginning meetings occasionally by asking where someone saw another person do something generous. Imagine churches becoming not simply places that tell people to be good, but places where we deliberately notice, tell and celebrate stories of goodness already happening around us.
That isn't denying suffering, injustice, cruelty or division. Compassion requires us to see those clearly too.
But perhaps flourishing requires a kind of double vision: the ability to look directly at what hurts while refusing to become blind to what heals.
That night with 150 people reminded me of that. Catholics and Methodists, Baptists and Latter-day Saints, Seventh-day Adventists and community clubs, businesses and volunteers, probably Republicans and Democrats and independents, people who would disagree about plenty of things if we gave them enough time.
But they had spent a day caring for their neighbors.
Then they sat down and ate together.
And perhaps some of us experienced exactly what that child was trying to describe: that peculiar feeling of being happy and hopeful and, for reasons we can't quite explain, a little close to tears.
Moral elevation.
Goodness had gotten inside us.
How might we journey to the good life individually, with our families, churches and communities if we became very intentional about noticing and sharing stories of goodness?
(Why all these books are getting published at once. I am figuring out how to use Amazon's self publishing tools. It's a love hate/relationship. I'm sorry if you got the first version of The Community Meal, but I hope it still gives you a little glow. I also have a children's wordless picture book which has been published but had an error and I'm trying to figure out how to fix it. I'm doing my best to get the message out there that the way to a good life and flourishing involves working intentionally with all these intertwined domains - emotional intelligence, social intelligence, spiritual intelligence, wisdom, and maybe even what we eat! And certainly exercise and sleep, even breathing, fit into the equation as well. I just ordered this book to jumpstart my moral elevation this week.)
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