The Balance of Being Human

There are precious few of us humans — and most likely none — who are all good or all bad. Mostly we bumble around doing good things sometimes and naughty things other times, feeling just about as human as we are.

According to researchers at Northwestern University, there's a good reason for that. Political theorist Hannah Arendt said that "most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." And this, the researchers say, is exactly their point.

Their study discovered that we all have what could be called an internal goodness set-point, a level of moral functioning at which uprightness and turpitude balance each other out. We don't make up our minds to be good or evil, we just act on our deep impulses, doing good things to compensate for too many bad ones or bad ones to make up for too much good.

Professors Sonya Sachdeva, Rumen Iliev and Douglas Medin co-authored the study, “Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners: The Paradox of Moral Self-Regulation,” published by the journal Psychological Science.

Study subjects were told they were doing a handwriting test. They were asked to write a story using either positive or negative words after thinking about the meaning of each word. They were also asked if they wanted to donate to charity. In one experiment, those who wrote using the negative words — such as "selfish," "dishonest" and "cruel" — donated five times as much as those who had been writing about positive words like "kind," "caring" and "generous."

Could NGOs take a page from this book in service to their causes? Perhaps messages using words like selfish, dishonest and cruel will jumpstart activism and generosity. Seems unlikely, but then again, we're only human.