Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery Read Free Book Online Page B

gather with family, friends, the community, and sometimes even strangers to find the best part of ourselves.
    As it happens, we are hardwired to trust one another, in spite of our natural wariness of strangers. Economics once put this down to sheer self-interest: the more we trust one another, the more we can maximize utility by, say, cutting more ambitious deals to trade goods or services. But Paul Zak, an economist working out of a lab at Southern California’s Claremont Graduate University, found much deeper, physiological processes at work when he took a neuroscientist’s approach to trust. A man even cheerier than John Helliwell, Zak set up various games in which anonymous participants would trade money back and forth with strangers. Traditional economics tells us that each player will do what it takes to walk away with as much money as possible. That’s how the economic man of their theories should behave. But it is not how Zak’s volunteers treated one another. Zak found that most of them were generous with one another, even when it would not lend to financial reward. They were choosing altruism over profit. Intrigued, he took samples of their blood. Remarkably, Zak found that the blood of players who engaged in cooperative, trusting exchanges was awash with the molecule oxytocin.
    Oxytocin is most commonly known as the hormone that washes through women when they give birth and breast-feed. Released by the pituitary gland in the hypothalamus region of the brain, it is a neurotransmitter whose first task is to tell receptors in the pleasure centers of the brain that it’s time to feel what we typically describe as “warm and fuzzy.” Its happy message travels down into the chest along the vagus nerve, where it can slow the heart to a more languid pace. It produces a feeling of heightened calm that can last a few seconds or as long as twenty minutes. As long as you have it, you are more likely to trust other people. You are more likely to cooperate and pay forward favors of generosity and kindness. The oxytocin studies point to a dynamic, generative quality in societal trust. The molecule is both an incentive and a reward for altruism. Not only does it feel good to experience positive social signs from others—smiles, handshakes, opened doors, bargains kept, and cooperative merging in traffic—but it feels good to reinforce those feelings of trust among both friends and strangers. It works best of all when we do it face-to-face: in the kitchen, over a fence, on the sidewalk, in the agora. Distance and geometry matter, as we will see.
    The Tug-of-War
    It’s important here to acknowledge the implications of this physiological aspect of trust. Ever since Charles Darwin pondered the self-sacrifice committed by certain honeybees (who die in the attempt to remove their barbed stingers from the skin of an intruder), evolutionary biologists have marveled at evidence of what most of us might call altruism in particular species. * Animals that live in groups are more successful when they cooperate with one another. The consensus seems to be that such cooperation is more than just a habit. The urge is woven into the genetic code of species from bees, wasps, and termites all the way to apes and, yes, humans, the most social animals on the planet. The oxytocin effect is physiological proof. Of course this is what philosophers and spiritual leaders have been saying all along. For all the weight that proponents of classical economics place on selfishness, Adam Smith himself grasped the duality of human need. In his other great treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments , Smith argued that human conscience comes from social relationships, and that the natural empathy produced by being among other people is an essential part of well-being and should guide our actions. The father of economics was more Athenian than his modern followers admit.
    Although humans are certainly not as helpless in the face of instincts as honeybees, each