Thought on Doing Unto Others Written Into Our Genes

Thoughts On Doing Unto Others Written Into Our Genes


Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents some very provocative views, and I agree that we – at least most of us - do seem to be hard-wired for curbing selfishness as a kind of built in mechanisms that allows us to live in social groups. As the article points out, this has some interesting applications for several areas, including the political arena. And although it does not discuss it in the article, it would seem to surely have applications to the area of business too.

I was curious about what my niece, who is a forensic psychologist, would have to say about some of Haidt’s premises. She has done studies and work in some interesting areas, including autisms in children, neurological development of premature infants, and psychological evaluations of adult individuals in the prison system. I asked her if she thinks there is something within people generally that genetically predisposes them to behave morally or selflessly, and she said, “Absolutely.”

She went on to say that humans have a very strong need to affiliate and this is one of the reasons we often behave in what seems to be selfless and altruistic ways. We are moral and selfless because of our selfish need to belong, to be part of a group or a community. It’s also a vital key to our development. Otherwise we will be developmentally stunted and behave in aberrant, crazy ways, which removes us from the mainstream of society, the very thing we want.

This made me think of some of the stories and TV reports I’d seen on Russian and Romanian orphanages, in which children had been warehoused and deprived of human and social contact. I asked my niece if she’d seen any of those, and she said, yes, that they were a good example of our being hard-wired. If we are deprived of what we are hard-wired to do – which is to affiliate, to belong, to be part of a group, we go hay-wire.

I thought about how all of this applies to the profit-driven business world, in which some of us will soon find ourselves, and I thought about how this ties into corporate social responsibility. Of course, one of the primary reasons businesses participate in charitable and other community related activities is because it is ultimately good for their profits.

Being in community with others isn’t just about survivability (or as the meaning of “survivability” is defined in the corporate world as “beating the competition”), growth (profits) and reciprocity. It is also about our continued development and evolution as human beings. Our genetic hardwiring drives us to plug into a social system that increases and enhances our survivability. And being in community with others gives us the opportunity to become even more virtuous and moral than the basic subconscious morality that first drove us, which, in turn, allows us to become something far more than what we are or originally were. It has a kind of transcendental quality to it.

Working with and for the community also has a kind of additional built-in system of checks and balances for ethical behavior as well: Closeness to the community also means more visibility and more scrutiny. Behavior doesn’t fly under the radar undetected. Many in that type of community scenario watch it.