Mood transfer via facial expressions and body language is so powerful that people doing it on a daily basis literally start to look alike. This has been tested with portraits of longtime couples: One set of pictures was taken on their wedding day and another set twenty-five years later. Presented with separate portraits of these men and women, human subjects were asked to match them on similarity. For the set taken at an older age, they had no trouble deciding who was married to whom. But for the pictures taken at a younger age, subjects flunked the task. Married couples resemble each other, therefore, not because they pick partners who look like them, but because their features converge over the years. The similarity was strongest for couples who reported the greatest happiness. Daily sharing of emotions apparently leads one partner to “internalize” the other, and vice versa, to the point that anyone can see how much they belong together.
I can’t resist throwing in here that dog owners and their pets also sometimes look alike. But this isn’t the same. We can correctly pair photographs of people and their dogs only if the dogs are purebreds. It doesn’t work with mutts. Purebreds, of course, are carefully selected by their owners, who pay high sums for them. An elegant lady may want to walk a wolfhound, whereas an assertive character may prefer a rottweiler. Since similarity doesn’t increase with the number of years that owners have had their pets, the critical factor is the choice of breed. This is quite different from the emotional convergence between spouses.
Our bodies and minds are made for social life, and we become hopelessly depressed in its absence. This is why next to death, solitary confinement is our worst punishment. Bonding is so good for us that the most reliable way to extend one’s life expectancy is to marry and stay married. The flip side is the risk we run after losing a partner. The death of a spouse often leads to despair and a reduced will to live that explains the car accidents, alcohol abuse, heart disease, and cancers that take the lives of those left behind. Mortality remains elevated for about half a year following a spouse’s death. It is worse for younger than older people, and worse for men than women.
For animals, things are no different. I myself have lost two pets this way. The first was a jackdaw (a crowlike bird) that I had reared by hand. Johan was tame and friendly, but not attached to me. The love of his life was a female of his species, named Rafia. They were together for years, until Rafia one day escaped from the outdoor aviary (I suspect that a neighbor child had gotten curious and unlatched the door). Left behind, Johan spent days calling and scanning the sky. He died within weeks.
And then there was our Siamese cat, Sarah, who had been adopted as a kitten by our big tomcat, Diego, who would lick and clean her, let her knead his tummy as if she were nursing, and sleep with her. For about a decade they were best buddies, until Diego died of old age. Even though Sarah was younger and in perfect health, she stopped eating and died two months after Diego for no reason that the veterinarian could determine.
There exist of course thousands of such stories, including of animals that refuse to let go of loved ones. It is not unusual for primate mothers to carry their dead infants around until there’s nothing left of them but skin and bones. A baboon female in Kenya who had recently lost her infant got extremely agitated when a week later she recognized the same bush on the savanna where she’d left its body. She climbed a high tree from which to scan while uttering plaintive calls normally used by baboons separated from their troop. Elephants, too, are known to return to the remains of dead companions to solemnly stand over their sun-bleached bones. They may take an hour to gently turn the bones over and over, smelling them. Sometimes they carry off bones, but other elephants have been seen returning them to the “grave” site.
Impressed by animal loyalty, humans have dedicated statues to it. In Edinburgh, Scotland, there’s a little sculpture of “Greyfriars Bobby,” a Skye terrier who refused to leave the grave of his master, buried in 1858. For fourteen whole years, Bobby guarded the grave while being fed by his fans, until he died and was buried not far away. His headstone reads “Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.” A similar statue exists in Tokyo for an Akita dog named Hachiko, who every day used to come to Shibuya Station to greet his master returning from work. The dog became famous for continuing this habit after his master had died in 1925. For eleven years, Hachiko waited at the appropriate time at the station. Dog lovers still gather once a year at the exit, now named after Hachiko, to pay homage to his faithfulness.
Touching stories, one might say, but what do they have to do with human behavior? The point is that we are mammals, which are animals with obligatory maternal care. Obviously, bonding has incredible survival value for us, the most critical bond being the one between mother and offspring. This bond provides the evolutionary template for all other attachments, including those among adults. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, if humans in love tend to regress to the parent-offspring stage, feeding each other tidbits as if they can’t eat by themselves, and talking nonsense with the same high-pitched voices normally reserved for babies. I myself grew up with the Beatles’ love song lyrics “I wanna hold your hand”—another regression.
One set of animal studies has, in fact, had a huge, concrete influence on how humans treat one another. A century ago, foundling homes and orphanages followed the advice of a school of psychology that, in my opinion, has wreaked more havoc than any other: behaviorism. Its name reflects the belief that behavior is all that science can see and know, and therefore all it should care about. The mind, if such a thing even exists, remains a black box. Emotions are largely irrelevant. This attitude led to a taboo on the inner life of animals: Animals were to be described as machines, and students of animal behavior were to develop a terminology devoid of human connotations. Ironically, this advice backfired with at least one term. Bonding was originally coined to avoid anthropomorphic labels for animals, such as friends or buddies. But the term has since become so popular for human relationships (as in “male bonding,” or “bonding experience”) that now we probably will have to drop it for animals.
That humans are controlled by the same law-of-effect as animals was convincingly demonstrated by the father of behaviorism, John Watson, who inculcated in a human baby a phobia for hairy objects. At first, “Little Albert” happily played with the white rabbit he had been given. But after Watson paired each appearance of the rabbit with the loud clanging of steel objects right behind poor Albert’s head, fear was the inevitable outcome. From then on, Albert placed his hands over his eyes and whimpered each time he saw the rabbit (or the investigator).
Watson was so enamored by the power of conditioning that he became allergic to emotions. He was particularly skeptical of maternal love, which he considered a dangerous instrument. Fussing over their children, mothers were ruining them by instilling weaknesses, fears, and inferiorities. Society needed less warmth and more structure. Watson dreamed of a “baby farm” without parents so that infants could be raised according to scientific principles. For example, a child should be touched only if it has behaved incredibly well, and not with a hug or kiss, but rather with a little pat on the head. Physical rewards that are systematically meted out would do wonders, Watson felt, and were far superior to the mawkish rearing style of the average well-meaning mom.
Unfortunately, environments like the baby farm existed, and all we can say about them is that they were deadly! This became clear when psychologists studied orphans kept in little cribs separated by white sheets, deprived of visual stimulation and body contact. As recommended by scientists, the orphans had never been cooed at, held, or tickled. They looked like zombies, with immobile faces and wide-open, expressionless eyes. Had Watson been right, these children should have been thriving, but they in fact lacked all resistance to disease. At some orphanages, mortality approached 100 percent.
Watson’s crusade against what he called the “over-kissed child,” and the immense respect accorded him in 1920s public opinion, seem incomprehensible today,
but explains why another psychologist, Harry Harlow, set out to prove the obvious, which is that maternal love matters … to monkeys. At a primate laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, Harlow demonstrated that monkeys reared in isolation were mentally and socially disturbed. When put in a group they lacked the tendency, let alone the skill, to interact socially. As adults, they couldn’t even copulate or nurse offspring. Whatever we now think of the ethics of Harlow’s research, he proved beyond any doubt that deprivation of body contact is not something that suits mammals.
With time, this kind of research changed the tide and helped improve the fate of human orphans. Except, that is, in Romania, where President Nicolae Ceauşescu created an emotional gulag by raising thousands of newborns in institutions. The world got a reminder of the nightmare of deprivation-rearing when Ceauşescu’s orphanages opened after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The orphans were incapable of laughing or crying, spent the day rocking and clutching themselves in a fetal position (strikingly similar to Harlow’s monkeys), and didn’t even know how to play. New toys were hurled against the wall.
Bonding is essential for our species, and it is what makes us happiest. And here I don’t mean the sort of jumping-for-joy bliss that the French leader General Charles de Gaulle must have had in mind when he allegedly sneered that “happiness is for idiots.” The pursuit of happiness written into the U.S. Declaration of Independence rather refers to a state of satisfaction with the life one is living. This is a measurable state, and studies show that beyond a certain basic income, material wealth carries remarkably little weight. The standard of living has been rising steadily for decades, but has it changed our happiness quotient? Not at all. Rather than money, success, or fame, time spent with friends and family is what does people the most good.
Romania’s orphans were raised according to “scientific” principles that ignored emotional needs.
We take the importance of social networks for granted to the point that we sometimes overlook them. This happened to my team of primate experts—even though we should have known better—when we built a new climbing structure for our chimpanzees. We focused too much on the physical environment. For more than thirty years, the apes had lived in the same outdoor enclosure, a large open area equipped with metal jungle gyms. We decided to get large telephone poles and bolt them together into something more exciting. During the construction, the chimps were locked up next to the site. At first they were noisy and restless, but upon hearing the huge machine that put in the poles, they turned silent for the rest of the time: They could hear that this was serious business! The poles were connected with ropes; we planted new grass, dug new drains, and eight days later we were ready. The new structure was ten times taller than the one we had before.
At least thirty workers of the field station came to watch the release. We even had a betting pool about which chimp would be the first to touch wood, or climb to the top. These apes had not smelled or touched wood for decades; some of them never had. As one might imagine, the director of the primate center guessed that the highest-ranking male and female would be the first, but we knew that male chimps are no heroes. They are always busy improving their political position, taking great risks in the process, but they literally get diarrhea of fear as soon as something new comes around the corner.
Standing in the tower overlooking the compound with all cameras running, we released the colony. The first thing that happened was unexpected. We were so enamored with our wonderful construction, which had taken so much sweat to cobble together in the summer heat, that we had forgotten that the apes had been locked up for days in separate cages, even separate buildings. The first minutes following the release were all about social connections. Some chimps literally jumped into each other’s arms, embracing and kissing. Within a minute, the adult males were giving intimidation displays, with all their hair on end, lest anyone might have forgotten who was boss.
The chimps barely seemed to notice the new construction. Some of them walked right underneath it as if it were invisible. They seemed in denial! Until they noticed the bananas we had placed at strategic locations visible from the ground. The first ones to get into the structure were the older females, and, ironically, the very last chimp to touch wood was a female known as the group’s bully.
As soon as the fruits had been collected and eaten, though, everyone left the structure. They clearly weren’t ready for it. They gathered in the old metal jungle gym, which my students had tested out the day before, finding it most uncomfortable to sit on. But the chimps had known it all their lives, so they lazily lay around in it looking up at the Taj Mahal that we had erected next to it, as if it were an object to be studied rather than enjoyed. It was months before they spent significant amounts of time in the new climbing frame.
We had been blinded by our own proud achievement, only to be corrected by the apes, who reminded us of the basics. It made me think again of Immanuel Kant, because isn’t this the problem with modern philosophy? Obsessed by what we consider new and important about ourselves—abstract thought, conscience, morality—we overlook the fundamentals. I’m not trying to belittle what is uniquely human, but if we ever want to understand how we got there, we will need to start thinking from the bottom up. Instead of fixating on the peaks of civilization, we need to pay attention to the foothills. The peaks glimmer in the sun, but it is in the foothills that we find most of what drives us, including those messy emotions that make us spoil our children.
Macho Origin Myths
It was a typical primate conflict over dinner in a fancy Italian restaurant: one human male challenging another—me—in front of his girlfriend. Knowing my writings, what better target than humanity’s place in nature? “Name one area in which it’s hard to tell humans apart from animals,” he said, looking for a test case. Before I knew it, between two bites of delicious pasta, I replied, “The sex act.”
Perhaps reminded of something unmentionable, I could see that this took him aback a little, but only momentarily. He launched into a great defense of passion as peculiarly human, stressing the recent origin of romantic love, the wonderful poems and serenades that come with it, while pooh-poohing my emphasis on the mechanics of l’amore, which are essentially the same for humans, hamsters, and guppies (male guppies are equipped with a penislike modified fin). He pulled a deeply disgusted face at these mundane anatomical details.
Alas for him, his girlfriend was a colleague of mine, who with great enthusiasm jumped in with more examples of animal sex, so we had the sort of dinner conversation that primatologists love but that embarrasses almost everyone else. A stunned silence fell at neighboring tables when the girlfriend exclaimed that “he had such an erection!” It was unclear if the reaction concerned what she had just said, or that she had indicated what she meant holding thumb and index finger only slightly apart. She was talking about a small South American monkey.
Our argument was never resolved, but by the time desserts arrived it fortunately had lost steam. Such discussions are a staple of my existence: I believe that we are animals, whereas others believe we are something else entirely. Human uniqueness may be hard to maintain when it comes to sex, but the situation changes if one considers air-planes, parliaments, or skyscrapers. Humans have a truly impressive capacity for culture and technology. Even though many animals do show some elements of culture, if you meet a chimp in the jungle with a camera, you can be pretty sure he didn’t produce it himself.
But what about humans who have missed out on the cultural growth spurt that much of the world underwent over the last few thousand years? Hidden in far-flung corners, these people do possess all the hallmarks of our species, such as language, art, and fire. We can study how they survive without being distracted by the technological advances of today. Does their way of life fit widely held assumptions about humanity’s “state of nature”—a concept with a rich history in the West? Given the way this concept figured in the French Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, and other historical step
s toward modern democracy, it’s no trivial matter to establish how humans may have lived in their original state.
A good example are the “Bushmen” of southwest Africa, who used to live in such simplicity that their lifestyle was lampooned in the 1980 movie The Gods Must Be Crazy. As a teenager, anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas went with her parents, also anthropologists, to the Kalahari Desert to live among them. Bushmen, also known as the San, are a small, lithe people who have carved out a very modest niche in a grassy, open ecosystem that for half of the year is so low on water that the few reliable water-holes seriously restrict human movement. They have lived this way for thousands and thousands of years, which is why Marshall Thomas titled her book on them The Old Way.
A Bushman mother offers a child a drink from an ostrich eggshell filled with water.
The old way includes minimal clothing made out of antelope hides, a modest grass shelter, a sharpened digging stick, and an ostrich eggshell to transport water on day trips. Shelters are built and rebuilt all the time by putting a few sticks into the ground, intertwining the top, and covering the frame with grass. It reminded Marshall Thomas of the way apes build one-night nests in the trees by quickly weaving a few branches together into a platform before they go to sleep. This way, they stay off the ground, where danger lurks.
The Age of Empathy Page 2