Someone Else’s Shoes
Sympathy … cannot, in any sense, be regarded as a selfish principle.
—ADAM SMITH, 1759
Empathy may be uniquely well suited for bridging the gap between egoism and altruism, since it has the property of transforming another person’s misfortune into one’s own feeling of distress.
—MARTIN HOFFMAN, 1981
Walking into Moscow’s State Darwin Museum, the very first display will surprise anyone familiar with the history of evolutionary thought. It’s a life-size statue of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the French evolutionist whose ideas are often contrasted with those of Darwin himself.
Lamarck is depicted leaning back in an armchair with two teenage daughters standing by his side. The daughters look remarkably alike, and also resemble the bust, seen a little farther on, of Nadia Kohts, the Russian pioneer of animal studies, whose background I had come to investigate. The resemblance is no coincidence: Kohts posed for the sculptor of the statue. Photographs of her intelligent, dark-eyed face are featured in display after display in the museum: She was famous in Russia, and remains so today.
Even though we’re used to primatological heroes of the female gender, the best-known among them have caught our attention by living close to dangerous creatures in the forest, defying the stereotype that only men would be brave enough to do so. Kohts was brave, too, but instead of lurking in the forest, the danger of her place and time resided in the Kremlin. Stalin, under the dark influence of his protégé, the amateur geneticist Trofim Lysenko, had many a brilliant biologist publicly recant their ideas, sent to the gulags, or quietly disappear. Names of the persecuted became unmentionable. Entire research institutes were closed down.
Thanks to its secular worldview, evolutionary theory was in favor with the Bolsheviks. Except, that is, for the idea of genetic change. Since this is a bit like accepting gravity without its pull, scientists had trouble with the tortuous way communism looked at evolution. Staying out of trouble became a major preoccupation for Kohts and her husband, Aleksandr, director of the museum. They hid their most sensitive documents and data among the stuffed animals in the basement, and made sure Lamarck received a prominent place in the museum. His theory, formulated before Darwin’s, posited that acquired characteristics (such as the stretching of legs by wading birds or the lengthening of the giraffe’s neck) can be passed on to the next generation. No genetic mutations are needed. The Lamarckian façade helped make the museum palatable to the powerful.
Kohts’s isolation in Moscow had its advantages, though. She was oblivious to the doctrinal battles in the West, where scientists were busy closing the book on the animal mind. Acting as a surrogate mother for Yoni, a young chimpanzee, Kohts opened her heart and eyes to his every expression of sensitivity and intelligence. Rather than regarding him as a robot, devoid of thoughts and feelings, she saw him as a living being, not all that different from her own little son, Roody, She documented the development of her two charges in loving detail, being one of the first modern scientists to fully appreciate the emotional life of animals.
Kohts investigated Yoni’s reactions to pictures of chimpanzees and other animals, to furs, and to his own reflection in a mirror. Even though Yoni was still too young to recognize what the mirror showed him, Kohts describes how, once he had gotten used to it, he would entertain himself by moving his tongue back and forth, and writhe and rotate it, closely studying its movements in the mirror. Kohts reports every aspect of Yoni’s emotional development, from joy, jealousy, and guilt to sympathy and protection of loved ones. The following passage relates the extreme concern and compassion Yoni felt for Kohts:
If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Yoni immediately stops his play or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties. He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists.
What better evidence for the power of simian sympathy than the fact that an ape who’d refuse to descend from the roof of the house for food that was waved at him would do so instantly upon seeing his mistress in distress? Kohts describes how Yoni would look into her eyes when she pretended to cry: “the more sorrowful and disconsolate my crying, the warmer his sympathy.” When she slapped her hands over her eyes, he tried to pull them away, extending his lips toward her face, looking attentively, slightly groaning and whimpering. She describes similar reactions from Roody, adding that her son went further than the ape in that he’d actually cry along with her. Roody cried even when he’d notice a bandage over the eye of his favorite uncle or when he’d see the maid grimace while swallowing bitter medicine.
The one limitation of Kohts’s work was that she studied a single chimpanzee, and that he was so young. She never got to see the species’ mature psychology and knew nothing about the way chimpanzees live in the wild. A psychologist who studied a single boy of a few years old would similarly be unable to generalize about the human species as a whole. On the other hand, because she was in contact with Yoni every day, and collected all possible information about him, Kohts was able to see a chimp up close in a way very few people have. She looked into the ape’s heart and was impressed by what she saw.
Kohts included perceptive remarks about human behavior. For instance, when she sought a comparison for the temper tantrums that Yoni threw if he didn’t get his way or was temporarily left alone, Kohts saw parallels gazing out the window of her study, which overlooked a morgue. Responding to the loss of a family member, especially in a case of accidental death, people utter heartbreaking cries while bending to the ground, almost under the wheels of the funeral carriage, making fitful, desperate gripping movements with their hands. She went on to comment on the human habit to gesticulate as a way of expressing and alleviating grief, comparing this to Yoni’s hand gestures, which she found strikingly similar.
Having walked by Kohts’s original writing desk in the museum, a photograph of her sitting next to her husband, another one in which the American expert of ape psychology Robert Yerkes talks with her via an interpreter, and a somber gallery of portraits honoring the many scientists executed under Lysenko and Stalin, I ran into a most unexpected display. Amid photos of Yoni laughing while being tickled and crying when frustrated, and an arrangement of his wooden toys and climbing ropes, stood Yoni himself. He has been preserved in a typical hooting posture—the way chimpanzees look when they are excited about something, such as food or company. The taxidermy is superb, as one would expect given that it was Aleksandr Kohts’s specialty.
At first, I found it macabre to see the object of so much of Nadia Kohts’s love and affection standing there as if still alive. But upon reflection, I concluded that preserving Yoni made sense for a couple as devoted to the traditional ways of natural history museums as the Kohtses were. After all, each had given the other a preserved animal as a wedding gift. For them, the best way to honor and commemorate Yoni must have been to make him part of their collection.
One of the greatest but least-known pioneers of primatology had left us her subject in an active pose, so that his obvious emotionality would catch our eye, as it did hers.
Sympathy
A monkey or rat reacting to another’s pain by stopping the behavior that caused it may simply be “turning off” unpleasant signals. But self-protective altruism can’t explain Yoni’s reaction to his surrogate mother. First, because he hadn’t caused her distress himself, and second, because he could easily have moved away when he saw her crying from the roof of the house. If self-protection had been his goal, he also should have left her hands where they were when she cried behind them. Clearly, Yoni wasn’t just focusing on his own situation: He felt an urge
to understand what the matter was with Kohts.
If Yoni were human, we’d speak of sympathy. Sympathy differs from empathy in that it is proactive. Empathy is the process by which we gather information about someone else. Sympathy, in contrast, reflects concern about the other and a desire to improve the other’s situation. American psychologist Lauren Wispé offers the following definition:
The definition of sympathy has two parts: first, a heightened awareness of the feelings of the other person, and, second, an urge to take whatever actions are necessary to alleviate the other person’s plight.
Let me illustrate the distinction between sympathy and empathy by revealing something about myself: I have more empathy than sympathy. I’m not sure that this is a generalizable gender difference, but my wife seems to have equal amounts of both.
My profession depends on being in tune with animals. It would be terribly boring to watch them for hours without any identification, any intuition about what is going on, any ups and downs related to their ups and downs. Empathy is my bread and butter, and I have made many a discovery by closely following the lives of animals and trying to understand why they act the way they do. This requires that I get under their skin. I have no trouble doing so, love and respect animals, and do believe that this makes me a better student of their behavior.
But this is not sympathy. I have plenty of this as well, but it is less spontaneous, more subject to calculation, sometimes quite selfish. I am no Abraham Lincoln, who apparently interrupted a journey to pull a squealing pig from the mud. I don’t necessarily stop for a lost dog or cat, whereas my wife, Catherine, picks up any stray she sees and works hard to locate its owner. If I know that one of my primates is gravely injured or ill—and under veterinary care—I am able to put it out of my head if I’m busy with something else. My mind is compartmentalized. Catherine worries without interruption about anyone who has fallen ill, whether human or animal, and will do anything within her power to take care of them. She’s far more generous than I am. Perhaps I am more Kantian: thinking what’s the right thing to do, weighing the pros and cons. Instead of flowing straight from my empathy, my sympathy takes a detour through a rational filter.
I recognize myself in a famous experiment, mischievously carried out on (male) seminary students. The students were ordered to walk to another building to lecture on the Good Samaritan, a religious outcast in a biblical parable who assists a man left for dead by the side of the road. On their way to the lecture hall, the students would pass a slumped person planted in an alleyway. The groaning “victim” would sit still with eyes closed and head down. Only 40 percent of the budding theologists asked what was wrong and offered assistance. Students who had been urged to make haste helped less than students with more time. Indeed, some students hurrying to explain the quintessential helping story of our civilization literally stepped over the stranger in need.
Thus, while empathy is easily aroused, sympathy is a separate process under quite different controls. It is anything but automatic. Nevertheless, it is common in both humans and other animals. When, in the 1970s, I first saw chimpanzees behave as solicitously as Yoni—albeit not to humans, but to one another—I labeled their behavior “consolation.” You’d think that this was when my interest in empathy started, but instead of studying consolation in detail, I moved on. I was too fascinated by the way chimps make peace after fights with a kiss and embrace to pay attention to these other friendly contacts. It took me two decades to return to consolation, which happened when I realized how perfectly it fits the definitions of what psychologists call “sympathetic concern.”
I have seen literally thousands of consolations—that’s how common the behavior is. We have a massive computer database, compiled over many years, to tell us what happens after spontaneous fights among chimpanzees. Consolation is the most typical outcome. A victim of aggression, who not long ago had to run for her life, or scream to recruit support, now sits alone, pouting, licking an injury, or looking dejected. She perks up when a bystander comes over to give her a hug, groom her, or carefully inspect her injury. Consolations can be quite emotional, with both chimps literally screaming in each other’s arms. Combing through the data to determine who shows consolation to whom, we found that it’s mostly done by friends and relatives of the harmed party. Like Yoni, our chimps are sensitive to the plight of others, and go out of their way to alleviate suffering.
Ironically, this has been clear for a long time, but developments have conspired against it becoming widely known. First of all, until recently empathy was not taken seriously by science. Even with regard to our own species, it was considered an absurd, laughable topic classed with supernatural phenomena such as astrology and telepathy. A trailblazing child-empathy researcher once told me about the uphill battle to get her message across thirty years ago. Everything connected with empathy was seen as ill-defined, bleeding-heart kind of stuff, more suitable for women’s magazines than hard-nosed science.
With regard to animals, the same resistance still exists. I had to think of this when seeing the picture of Yerkes chatting with Kohts, because those two were soul mates when it came to animal emotions. In one of his books, Yerkes complained how sympathy was the one topic he wasn’t allowed to talk about despite his conviction that apes possessed it. He had often seen apes provide solace, even very young ones: “Impressive indeed is the thoughtfulness of the ordinarily carefree and irresponsible little chimpanzee for ill or injured companions.” Yerkes rightly feared that he might be accused of idealizing animals if he told too many of these stories, especially about his favorite bonobo, Prince Chim. Of all the great apes, bonobos seem to have the highest level of empathy. In the 1920s, the species distinction between bonobos and chimpanzees was yet to be made, however, which is why Yerkes thought Prince Chim was just a special chimpanzee.
Of the many instances of bonobo sympathy known to me, perhaps the most remarkable one concerns a reaction to a bird. I’ve described this event before and normally would not repeat it here but there was an intriguing follow-up. The event concerns Kuni, who had found a stunned bird that had hit the glass wall of her zoo enclosure. Kuni took the bird up to the highest point of a tree to set it free. She spread its wings as if it were a little airplane, and sent it out into the air, thus showing a helping action geared to the needs of a bird. Obviously, such helping would not have worked for another bonobo, but for a bird it seemed perfectly appropriate. Kuni’s reaction was probably based on what she knew about birds, seeing them fly by every day.
The parallel story that I recently heard concerned a bird, too. It happened at my old stomping ground, the Arnhem Zoo, where chimpanzees live on an island surrounded by a moat. The moat is full of life, such as fish, frogs, turtles, and ducks. One day, a couple of juvenile chimps had picked up a little duckling and were swinging it around, being far too rough with it, competing over who could play with it. When they tried to grab one of the other ducklings, which were wisely hurrying back to the water, an adult male ran over in an intimidating manner and scattered the young apes. Before leaving the scene, he walked over to the last duckling still on land. With a quick hand movement, like that of a child playing marbles, he flicked it into the moat.
In this case, too, it was as if the ape imagined what might be best for a different organism, obviously having learned to associate ducks with water. I call this targeted helping, which is assistance geared toward another’s specific situation or need. I believe that apes are masters at this kind of insightful help. Yoni’s behavior toward Kohts was anything but exceptional: It is part of the strong sympathetic tendencies of apes recognized by those who work with them. We also don’t need to rely on anecdotes, such as Yoni’s or Kuni’s, since consolation and helping are so common that one can actually measure how apes act around distressed individuals and demonstrate that it’s quite different from their usual behavior. By now, consolation is a well-studied phenomenon, as solidly established as aggression or play.
It is unclea
r how widespread this phenomenon is in other animals, but man’s best friend, the dog, may need to be included. There are obviously many anecdotes of people who have received comfort from their dog in times of distress. Take Marley, the Labrador in John Grogan’s Marley & Me, who was notoriously destructive and boisterous, yet stood perfectly still and silently pressed his head against the belly of Grogan’s weeping wife, Jenny, after she had learned about her miscarriage. Charles Darwin relates how a particular dog would never walk by a basket where a sick friend, a cat, lay without giving her a few licks with his tongue. Darwin saw this as a sure sign of the dog’s kind feelings.
In the case of canines, too, we don’t necessarily need to rely on stories, since there are serious studies. The first one occurred unintentionally, when American psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler sought to determine at what age children begin to comfort family members instructed to sob or cry “Ouch.” It turns out that children do so already at one year of age, long before language plays much of a role in their reactions. In the same study, the investigators accidentally discovered that household pets react similarly. Appearing as upset as the children by the distress-faking family members, the pets hovered over them, putting their heads in their laps with what looked like great concern.
But perhaps pets only act like this around humans—who feed and command them—but not with one another? This question was answered by a study modeled after those done on primates, which measured the aftermath of dog fights. Belgian biologists watched close to two thousand spontaneous fights among dogs released every day onto a meadow at a pet food company. After aggressive outbursts, nearby dogs would approach the contestants—most often the losers—to lick, nuzzle, sit together, or play with them. Doing so seemed to settle the group, which quickly resumed its usual activities.
The Age of Empathy Page 10