The Age of Empathy

by Frans de Waal

  The ancestor of the dog, the wolf, probably behaves the same way. If “man is wolf to man,” as Thomas Hobbes liked to say, we should therefore take this in the best possible way, including a tendency to comfort the whimpering victims of aggression.

  Changing Places in Fancy

  In Jarhead, Anthony Swofford describes his time as a U.S. Marine in the Persian Gulf War. The day before they were going to fight an enemy believed to have chemical weapons, one of his buddies, Welty, organized a hugging session:

  We are about to die in combat, so why not get one last hug, one last bit of physical contact. And through the hugs Welty has helped make us human again. He’s exposed himself to us, exposed his need, and we in turn have exposed ourselves to him, and for that we are no longer simple grunt savages in the desert ready to jump the Berm and begin killing.

  Comforting body contact is part of our mammalian biology, going back to maternal nursing, holding, and carrying, which is why we both seek and give it under stressful circumstances. People touch and hug at funerals, in hospitals around sick or injured loved ones, during wars and earthquakes, and following defeat in sports. One of the most famous images of a comforting hug is a grainy black-and-white photograph in which an American soldier tenderly holds the head of another against his chest. The latter’s friend had just been killed in action during the Korean War.

  Consolation is a common response to distress, despair, or grief, such as between soldiers in the midst of war.

  For his book Two in Bed, sociologist Paul Rosenblatt interviewed couples who had gone through the nightmare of losing a child, noting how they “quite often would tell me that they dealt with their grief by holding each other and talking together in bed at night.” Given what contact comfort does for our psychological well-being, one can only wonder at the “no-hug policy” of a middle school in Virginia. Students could be sent to the principal’s office for hugging, holding hands, or even high-fiving. Trying to stop inappropriate behavior, the school had come up with a rule that banned the most elementary expressions of affection.

  When we comfort others—or for that matter when dogs or chimps do—what’s the motivation behind it? Some of it may be done to comfort ourselves. Seeing someone cry, we get upset, so by consoling the other, we also reassure ourselves. I am quite familiar with such behavior in young rhesus monkeys. Once, when an infant was bitten because it had accidentally landed on a dominant female, it screamed so incessantly that it was soon surrounded by other infants. I counted eight of them climbing on top of the poor victim, pushing, pulling, and shoving one another as well as the first infant. That obviously did little to alleviate its fright. The monkeys’ response seemed automatic, as if they were as distraught as the victim and sought to comfort themselves as much as the other.

  This can’t be the whole story, though. If these monkeys were just trying to calm themselves, why did they approach the victim? Why didn’t they run to their mothers? Why seek out the actual source of distress and not a guaranteed source of comfort? Surely, there was more going on than emotional contagion. The latter can explain a need for comfort, but not the magnetic pull toward a crying peer.

  In fact, animals as well as young children often seek out distressed parties without any indication that they know what’s going on. They seem blindly attracted, like a moth to a flame. Even though we like to read concern about the other into their behavior, the required understanding may not be there. I will call this blind attraction preconcern. It is as if nature has endowed the organism with a simple behavioral rule: “If you feel another’s pain, get over there and make contact.”

  One might counter that such a rule would prompt individuals to waste energy on all sorts of distraught parties, many of whom they’d better stay away from. Approaching others in a predicament may not be the smartest thing to do. But I don’t think we need to worry about this, given the evidence that emotions are picked up more readily between parties with close ties than between strangers. A simple approach rule would automatically propel individuals toward those distressed parties that matter most to them, such as offspring and companions.

  If true, the sort of behavior that we associate with sympathy arose in fact before sympathy itself. If this seems like putting the cart before the horse, it’s really not as strange as it sounds. There are other examples of behavior preceding understanding. Language development, for example, doesn’t start with children naming things or expressing thoughts. It starts with babbling: Babies crawl around uttering nonsensical strings of “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba,” advancing to “do-ko-yay-day-bu.” When our species claims to be the only talking primate, babbling is obviously not what we have in mind, but this is no reason to belittle it. The fact that everyone’s linguistic career starts with this baby lingua franca—which is identical across the globe—illustrates how deeply ingrained language is. It develops out of a primitive urge without any of the refinements of the final product, exactly what I’m proposing for the impulse to attend to someone else’s distress.

  Preconcern is an attraction toward anyone whose agony affects you. It doesn’t require imagining yourself in the other’s situation, and indeed the capacity to do so may be wholly absent, such as when a one-year-old child is drawn toward an upset family member. Children of this age are not yet capable of grasping someone else’s situation. Preconcern may also explain why certain animals, such as household pets or Oscar the Cat, contact others in pain or near death, or why infant monkeys pile on top of a hapless vocalizing peer.

  With preconcern in place, learning and intelligence can begin to add layers of complexity, making the response ever more discerning until full-blown sympathy emerges. Sympathy implies actual concern for the other and an attempt to understand what happened. Yoni’s pulling at Kohts’s hands comes to mind, as he seemed intent on reading her eyes. The observer tries to figure out the reason for the other’s distress, and what might be done about it. Since this is the level of sympathy that we, human adults, are familiar with, we think of it as a single process, as something you either have or lack. But in fact, it consists of many different layers added by evolution over millions of years. Most mammals show some of these—only a few show them all.

  Fully developed sympathy is unlikely to be found in rodents, and is probably also absent in canines and monkeys, but some large-brained animals may share the human capacity to put themselves into someone else’s shoes. Whether they do or don’t has been debated ever since an American primatologist, Emil Menzel, conducted his studies in the 1970s. Do chimps have any inkling of what others feel, want, need, or know? Menzel’s groundbreaking work is rarely mentioned anymore, but reading his papers always gives me the feeling of fresh discovery. He was the very first to see the importance of this issue.

  Working outdoors in Louisiana with nine juvenile chimps, Menzel would take one of them out into a large, grassy enclosure to reveal hidden food or a scary object, such as a (toy) snake. After this, he would bring this individual back to the waiting group, and release them all together. Would the others appreciate that one among them knew something of importance, and if so, how would they react? Could they tell the difference between the other having seen food or a snake?

  They most certainly could. They couldn’t wait to follow a chimp who knew a food location but were hesitant to stay close to one who’d seen a hidden snake. This was emotional contagion in action: They copied the other’s enthusiasm or alarm. The scenes around food were quite amusing, especially if the “knower” ranked below the “guessers.” The below ensued when Belle had been shown food, whereas the alpha male, Rock, had no clue:

  If Rock was not present, Belle invariably led the group to food and nearly everybody got some. In tests conducted when Rock was present, however, Belle became increasingly slower in her approach to the food. The reason was not hard to detect. As soon as Belle uncovered the food, Rock raced over, kicked or bit her, and took it all.

  Belle accordingly stopped uncovering the food if Rock was close. She sat on
it until Rock left. Rock, however, soon learned this, and when she sat on one place for more than a few seconds, he came over, shoved her aside, searched her sitting place and got the food.

  Later on, Belle learned not to approach the food, not even look in its direction, if Rock could see her. She’d sit farther and farther away, or would lay a false track, such as leading Rock to a spot where only one little piece of food had been hidden. She let him have this, while she rushed to the larger pile. The persistence of Rock in following Belle around suggests a conviction on his part that she knew something that she didn’t wish to reveal, which is the sort of perspective-taking often referred to as theory of mind. Rock seemed to have an idea (a theory) of what might be going on in Belle’s head.

  The problem with this terminology is that it makes it sound as if understanding others is an abstract process not unlike the way we figure out how water turns into ice or why our ancestors started walking upright. I seriously doubt that we, or any other animal, can grasp someone else’s mental state at a theoretical level. All that Rock seemed to be doing was reading Belle’s body language and guessing her intentions. He must have learned that whenever Menzel showed up, there would be yummy food around that Belle would try to lay her hands on. So Rock paid close attention to where she looked, and in which direction she moved; he was acting more like a hunter than a theoretician.

  Emil Menzel was the first to test what apes know about what others know. One juvenile chimp pokes with a stick at a snake in the grass. From the first chimp’s body language, the onlookers know to be cautious.

  Menzel’s guesser-versus-knower test has inspired a huge following, as reflected in numerous studies on children, apes, birds, dogs, and so on. This research has taught us that taking someone else’s perspective is not limited to human adults. It is best developed in animals with large brains, but those with smaller brains don’t necessarily lack the capacity. Let me give three typical examples of how this has been evaluated:

  Human children are champion mind readers. Already at an early age, they realize that not everyone knows what they know. In one experiment, they watch a character, Maxi, hide chocolate in a drawer and then go away. But Maxi’s mother accidentally moves the chocolate to another place. Where will Maxi be looking when he returns? Will it be where the children know the chocolate to be (where the mother put it) or where Maxi last saw it (in the drawer)? Most four-year-olds give the right answer, thus taking Maxi’s perspective even though they know it to be wrong.

  Indah, a female orangutan at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., developed the habit of guiding people to food outside her cage. She’d stop a passing caretaker, grasp her, and turn her around so that she’d be facing the dropped food. Then Indah would gently shove her in the food’s direction so that the caretaker would pick it up and hand it to her. But what would Indah do with someone unable to see? Let’s say, someone with a bucket over her head? Given a choice, Indah would prefer to recruit a seeing experimenter, but working with one with a covered head, she’d first lift the bucket off her head before pushing her toward the food. She developed this clever technique on her own, which was tested further by using a transparent bucket. Since Indah would leave the transparent bucket alone, she seemed to understand that others need sight to be of any assistance.

  Ravens have large brains and are among the smartest birds. Thomas Bugnyar has seen in these birds deceptive tactics reminiscent of Menzel’s apes. A low-ranking male was an expert at opening containers but often lost the goodies found inside to a dominant male, who’d steal them from him. The low-ranking male learned to distract his competitor, however, by enthusiastically opening empty containers and acting as if he were eating from them. When the dominant bird found out, “he got very angry, and started throwing things around.” Bugnyar further documented that when ravens approach hidden food, they take into account which other ravens may have seen the food being hidden. If their competitor has the same knowledge as they do, a raven will hurry to get there first. With competitors who lack such knowledge, they take their time.

  It’s not hard to see how much these ingenious experiments owe to Menzel’s original study: Treats are being hidden, then being found, and the trick is to know what others know (or, more precisely, what others may have seen). It’s ironic that this kind of research grew out of work on primates even though for a while it became fashionable to doubt that nonhuman animals are able to grasp the mental states of others. This doubt has now largely evaporated. Given the latest studies, the line between children and apes has become blurred, as has the line between apes, monkeys, and other animals. Only the most advanced forms of knowing what others know may be limited to our own species.

  Yet all the ink spent on this topic can’t obscure the fact that we’re dealing with a limited phenomenon. I like to call it “cold” perspective-taking, because it focuses entirely on how one individual perceives what another sees or knows. It doesn’t concern itself much with what the other wants, needs, or feels. Cold perspective-taking is a great capacity to have, but empathy rests on a different kind, geared more toward the other’s situation and emotions. Long ago, Adam Smith aptly described the latter as “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.”

  We hear the screams of children in the window of a burning house, which alerts us to them and pulls at our heartstrings. But then we look around and evaluate our options. Can they jump? Are we ready to catch? Did someone call the firefighters? Is there a way out of the house, or a way in? It is this combination of emotional arousal, which makes us care, and a cognitive approach, which helps us appraise the situation, that marks empathic perspective-taking. These two sides need to be in balance. If emotions run too high, the perspective-taking may be lost in the process, such as tragically happened at the Singapore Zoo. When a juvenile orangutan got her neck caught in a rope, her mother kept tugging at her to free her. Zoo keepers who tried to interfere were pushed aside by the mother, whose rescue attempt became so frantic that she ended up dislocating her daughter’s neck, thus killing her.

  Contrast this with a similar situation at a Swedish zoo. A four-year-old juvenile chimpanzee was close to choking, hanging in a climbing rope, with the rope wrapped twice around his neck. He struggled silently, his feet dangling. The oldest, most dominant male of the group went over to him, picked up the victim with one arm, thus relieving the tension on the rope, and unwrapped the rope with his free hand. He then carried the juvenile to the ground and gently put him down. It was all over in seconds, with just a few quick hand movements. The only sound came from a screaming caretaker.

  Perhaps the orangutan mother’s urge to save her daughter had been too intense for her to think clearly. Or perhaps she lacked experience with ropes. The male chimpanzee, in contrast, stayed calm and did the right thing. It takes great intelligence to inhibit the most natural impulse, which is pulling, and replace it with a more effective course of action. Such cases illustrate the two-tiered process underlying helping: emotion and understanding. Only when both processes are combined can an organism move from preconcern to actual concern, including the targeted helping typical of our close relatives.

  Jumping into Water

  Atlanta is the Mecca of primatology. Menzel’s son, Charles, who followed in his father’s footsteps studying chimpanzees, lives just a few blocks from my home in Stone Mountain. One day, when grandpa had come to see his grandchildren, I snared Emil for an interview in my kitchen over a cup of soup. He was in his early seventies.

  Although born and raised in India, Emil is a typical southern gentleman: mild-mannered, courteous, and with a great sense of humor. He is still very much committed to his pioneering ideas, which concur with mine, in that he has a high opinion of ape intelligence and thinks that the main factor limiting scientific discovery is human imagination and creativity, not the ability or inability of apes to meet expectations.

  He told me about the publication of his hide-and-seek study, and how he wanted to move on to other questions but k
ept being invited to lecture on this particular experiment. It obviously had struck a chord. One of the invitations was to an East Coast college at which an eminent behaviorist chaired the session and annoyed Menzel. First of all, he didn’t give the audience any chance to speak, and second, he lectured the speaker, saying that, since chimps are hard to deal with, it would be far more practical to work with pigeons. This related to the curious opinion at the time that it doesn’t matter which animal one studies: Since all animals rely on stimulus-response learning, a chimpanzee really isn’t doing anything different from a pigeon.

  The professor, however, walked into a trap of sorts, because Menzel had decided to show a spectacular escape that he had filmed a few years before. His chimps had put a long pole against the wall of their enclosure, with some individuals holding the pole steady while others scaled it to get out. Not the sort of thing pigeons do every day. Menzel had decided to accompany his movie with as neutral a narrative as possible, avoiding reference to complex mental operations. He’d just say matter-of-factly, “See how Rock grabs the pole while glancing at the others,” or “Here a chimpanzee swings over the wall.”

  After Menzel’s talk, the eminent professor stood up to accuse him of being unscientific and anthropomorphic, of attributing plans and intentions to animals that obviously didn’t have either. To a roar of approval, Menzel countered that he had not attributed anything, that if this professor had seen plans and intentions he must have seen them with his own eyes, because Menzel himself had refrained from alluding to any such things.