The Age of Empathy

by Frans de Waal

  But, like us, some animals follow a more complex scheme, storing favors in long-term memory. In our food-for-grooming experiment, chimps did so for at least a couple of hours, but I have known apes who’ve been grateful for years. One was a female whom I had patiently taught to bottle-feed an adopted infant. Previously, she had lost several offspring due to insufficient lactation. Chimps being tool users, she had no trouble handling a nursing bottle. In the ensuing years, this female raised her own infants this way as well. Decades later, she was still thrilled if I stopped by the zoo where she lived. She’d groom me with enthusiastic tooth-clacking, showing that I was a hero to her. Animal keepers, most of whom were unaware of our history, couldn’t believe the fuss she was making over me. I’m convinced it had to do with me having helped her overcome a problem that had given her unimaginable grief.

  If chimps look back further than monkeys, remembering previous events more clearly, this makes their reciprocity more deliberate and calculated. If a wild chimp, for example, removes a poacher’s snare that has tightened around the wrist of another—having caused the other to scream in excruciating pain—it’s safe to assume that his assistance will be remembered. It’s even possible that chimps not only look back, but also forward, treating others nicely so as to curry favors. I can’t say that this has been proven, but evidence is mounting. For example, when male chimps vie for high status, they try to make friends with as many potential backers as possible. They do the rounds with females, grooming them and tickling their offspring. Normally, male chimps are not particularly interested in the young, but when they need group support they can’t stay away from them. Do they know that all female eyes rest on them to see how they treat the most vulnerable?

  The tactic is eerily humanlike. I regularly download pictures of American politicians holding up babies under the eyes of their parents, who look on with a mixture of delight and apprehension. Have you ever noticed how often politicians lift infants above the crowd? It’s an odd way of handling them, not always enjoyed by the object of attention itself. But what good is a display that stays unnoticed?

  Political candidates love to hold babies up in the air.

  And then there are the occasions when a political contender, such as a rising young chimpanzee male, becomes extraordinarily generous with females around the time that he begins to challenge the leader. In a process that may take months, the contender irritates the established alpha multiple times a day to see what kind of reaction he gets. At the same time, he shares food specifically with those who might assist him in his quest. At the Arnhem Zoo, I saw rising males go out of their way to secure goodies: braving electric wire around live trees, jumping over it, to climb up to the foliage and break off branches for the mass gathered below. Such behavior seemed to boost their popularity.

  In the wild, high-ranking male chimps are said to bribe others, sharing meat selectively with potential allies and withholding it from their rivals. And at Bossou, in Guinea, male chimps customarily raid surrounding papaya plantations—a perilous undertaking—and bring the delicious fruits back to buy sex with: They specifically share with fertile females. According to British scientist Kimberley Hockings, “Such daring behavior certainly seems to be an attractive trait and possessing a sought-after food item, such as papaya, appears to draw positive attention from the females.”

  It isn’t exactly the bone-trading among dogs envisioned by Smith, but we’re getting close. Chimps may have foresight along the lines of “If I do this for him or her, I may get that in return.” Such calculations would explain observations at Chester Zoo in the United Kingdom. During fights in its large chimpanzee colony, individuals enjoyed support from parties whom they had groomed the day before. Not only this, but they seemed to plan whom they’d pick a fight with, grooming potential supporters days in advance so that the outcome might turn in their favor.

  Given the elaborate exchanges among our close relatives, perhaps even including planning and foresight, one wonders why some students of human reciprocity define their field in opposition to animal behavior. They call human cooperation a “huge anomaly” in the natural world. It’s not that the followers of this school are anti-evolutionary—on the contrary, they are self-proclaimed Darwinists—but they are eager to keep hairy creatures on the sidelines. I have only half-jokingly called their approach “evolution sans animals.” They have been quick to write off chimpanzee cooperation as a product of genetic kinship, thus putting it in the same category as the communal life of ants and bees. Only humans, they say, engage in large-scale cooperation with nonrelatives.

  When zoo studies made clear that kinship is not required for chimps to work closely together, this was dismissed as not representing the natural condition. And when wild apes, too, were shown to regularly cooperate with unrelated individuals, this was questioned, because isn’t it hard to know exactly who’s related to whom? Can we really exclude the possibility that males who have formed a coalition are brothers or cousins? Nothing could convince the skeptics. Eventually, this fruitless debate was settled by new technology. It’s not unusual nowadays for primatologists to return from the field with a load of carefully labeled fecal samples. DNA extraction from these samples offers a more accurate picture of genetic relations than ever before, telling us which individuals are related to the nth degree, which male fathered which offspring, who immigrated into the community from the outside, and so on.

  One of the most complex field projects was set up in Kibale National Park in Uganda, which combined years of data on chimpanzee social behavior with excrement picked up from the forest floor. It’s hard to imagine how much sweaty, smelly work goes into a genotyping project like this, but the results were more than worth it. First of all, the German-American team demonstrated that kinship matters: Brothers spend more time together, support one another more, and share more food than unrelated males. This is of course exactly what one would expect, not only in chimpanzees but also in any small-scale human society. But the study also demonstrated widespread cooperation among nonrelatives. In fact, the majority of close partnerships in the Kibale community were between males lacking family ties.

  This suggests mutualism and reciprocity as the basis of cooperation, thus placing chimps much closer to humans than to the social insects. Nothing surprising there, but it also means that to understand the psychology of human reciprocity, apes offer a perfect comparison. That is not to deny a few differences with human cooperation, one of which may be a more developed tendency in our species to penalize those who fall short. But even this difference may be less absolute than it sounds. We know that chimps get even with those who have turned against them. Hours after an incident in which others banded together against him, a high-ranking male may seek out his tormentors individually, while they are sitting somewhere alone, and teach them a lesson they won’t forget. Chimps settle scores just as easily as they return favors, so I wouldn’t put it past them to impose sanctions on others.

  My guess is that humans show all of these tendencies to a greater extent, and thus are capable of more complex, larger-scale cooperation. If hundreds of workers build a jet airliner, all relying on one another, or if many different levels of employees make up a company, this is possible only because of our advanced abilities of organization, task division, storing of past interactions, connecting effort with reward, building trust, and discouraging freeloading. Human psychology evolved to permit ever larger and more complex stag hunts, going well beyond anything in the animal kingdom. While the actual hunting of large prey may have driven this evolution, our ancestors engaged in other cooperative ventures, such as communal care for the young, warfare, the building of bridges, and protection against predators. They benefited from cooperation in myriad ways.

  One school of thought proposes that our ancestors became such great team players because of their dealings with strangers. This forced them to develop reward and punishment schemes that worked even with outsiders whom they had never met and would never see aga
in. It is well known that human strangers brought together in the laboratory adopt strict rules of cooperation and turn against anyone who fails to comply. This is known as strong reciprocity. We just get very upset if we put in a lot of effort and then get shortchanged by someone who acts as if he’s playing along but in fact takes advantage of us. We have all kinds of ways to exclude or punish such people. But while no one doubts that we disapprove of cheaters, the evolutionary origin of these feelings is a point of debate. The fact that we apply norms to strangers doesn’t necessarily mean that these norms evolved specifically for this purpose. Were strangers really that important in human evolution? Robert Trivers, the originator of the theory of reciprocal altruism, doubts it:

  If humans show strong dispositions towards fairness in one-shot, anonymous encounters, this hardly means that these dispositions evolved to function in one-shot, anonymous encounters any more than we would argue that children’s strong emotional reactions to cartoons show that such reactions evolved in the context of cartoons.

  Remember our discussion of “motivational autonomy,” of how a behavior may have evolved for reason X, yet in reality be used for reasons X, Y, and Z? The example I gave was parental care, which evolved for the benefit of offspring yet is often applied to adopted children, even household pets. In the same way, Trivers believes that norms of exchange began between individuals who knew one another and lived together, after which they were extended to strangers. We shouldn’t focus too much on anonymous encounters, therefore, because the true cradle of cooperation is the community. This is of course also the context in which apes engage in social exchange, so that the difference with humans is probably less dramatic than originally thought.

  In fact, evolution never produces “huge anomalies.” Even the neck of the giraffe is still a neck. Nature knows only variations on themes. The same applies to cooperation. Trying to set human cooperation apart from the larger natural scheme including apes, monkeys, vampire bats, and cleaner fish hardly qualifies as an evolutionary approach.

  The Last Shall Be First

  How often have you seen rich people march in the street shouting that they’re earning too much? Or stockbrokers complaining about the “Onus of the Bonus!”? The well-to-do rather follow Bob Dylan’s observation that “man is opposed to fair play, he wants it all and he wants it his way.” Instead, protesters typically are blue-collar workers yelling that the minimum wage has to go up, or that their jobs shouldn’t go overseas. A more exotic example was the 2008 march by hundreds of women through the capital of Swaziland. Given their destitute economy, they felt that the king’s wives had overstepped their privileges by chartering an airplane for a shopping spree in Europe.

  Fairness is viewed differently by the haves and have-nots. The reason for stating the obvious is the common claim that our sense of fairness transcends self-interest, that it’s concerned with something larger than ourselves. True, most of us subscribe to this ideal, as do many of our institutions. Yet it’s also clear that this is not how fairness started. The underlying emotions and desires aren’t half as lofty as the ideal itself. The most recognizable emotion is resentment. Look at how children react to the slightest discrepancy in the size of their pizza slice compared with their sibling’s. They shout “That’s not fair!” but never in a way transcending their own desires. As a matter of fact, in my younger years I’ve had fights like this with my wife until we hit on the brilliant solution that one of us would do the dividing and the other the choosing. It’s amazing how quickly one develops perfect cutting skills.

  We’re all for fair play so long as it helps us. There’s even a biblical parable about this, in which the owner of a vineyard rounds up laborers at different times of the day. Early in the morning, he goes out to find men, offering each one a denarius for their labor. He goes again in the middle of the day, offering the same. At the “eleventh hour” he hires a few more with the same deal. By the end of the day, he pays all of them, starting with the last ones hired. Each one gets a denarius. Watching this, the other workers expect to get more since they had worked through the heat of the day. Yet they get paid one denarius as well. The owner doesn’t feel he owes them any more than what he had promised. The passage famously concludes with “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

  Again, the grumbling was one-sided: It came from the early hires. They gave the master the “evil eye,” whereas those who had worked the least didn’t give a peep. The only reason the latter might have been unhappy is that the situation obviously didn’t endear them to the others. They’d be wise not to gloat and celebrate. The potential of green-eyed reactions is the chief reason why we strive for fairness even when we have the advantage. To my own amazement, I find myself siding here with the “Monster of Malmesbury,” as Thomas Hobbes was known, when he stated that we’re interested in justice only for peace’s sake.

  Am I uncharacteristically cynical? You’ve heard me explain at length how incredibly empathic, altruistic, and cooperative we are, so why when we get to fairness is self-interest all that I see? The inconsistency isn’t as great as it may seem, because I do believe that all human (or animal) behavior must in the end serve the actors. In the domain of empathy and sympathy, evolution has created a stand-alone mechanism that works whether or not our direct interests are at stake. We are driven to empathize with others in an automated, often unconditional fashion. We genuinely care about others, wanting to see them happy and healthy regardless of what immediate good this may do for us. We evolved to be this way because, on average and in the long run, it served our ancestors. But I fail to see how the same applies to our sense of fairness. Other-orientation seems such a small part of it. The chief emotions are egocentric, preoccupied with what we get compared to others, and how we may come across to others (we do like to be seen as fair-minded). Only secondarily is there an actual concern for others, mostly because we long for a livable, harmonious society. The latter desire is also visible in other primates when they break up disputes in their midst or bring conflicted parties together. We have gone one step further, though, by being sensitive to how resource distribution impacts everybody around us.

  The reaction of children to perceived unfairness shows how deeply seated these sentiments are, and the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers suggests its long history. In some cultures, hunters aren’t even allowed to carve up their own kill, so as to prevent them from favoring their family. The antiquity of fairness is underappreciated by those who regard it as a noble principle of recent origin, formulated by wise men during the French Enlightenment. I seriously doubt that we will ever appreciate the human condition by looking back a couple of centuries rather than millions of years. Do wise men ever formulate anything new, or are they just good at reformulating what everybody knows? They often do so in an admirable fashion, but to credit them with the concepts themselves is a bit like saying that the Greeks invented democracy. The elders of many preliterate tribes listen for hours, sometimes days, to the opinions of all members before making an important decision. Aren’t they democratic? Similarly, the fairness principle has been around since our ancestors first had to divide the spoils of joint action.

  Researchers have tested this principle by offering players an opportunity to share money. The players get to do this only once. One player is given the task to split the money into two—one part for himself, the remainder for his partner—and then propose this split to the other. It is known as the “ultimatum game,” because as soon as the offer has been made, the power shifts to the partner. If he turns down the split, the money will be gone and both players will end up empty-handed.

  If humans are profit maximizers, they should of course accept any offer, even the smallest one. If the first player were to give away, say, $1 while keeping $9 for himself, the second player should simply go along. After all, one dollar is better than nothing. Refusal of the split would be irrational, yet this is the typical reaction to a 9:1 split. A comparison of fifteen small-scale soc
ieties by American anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his team found some cultures to be fairer than others. Offers in these faraway places (in local currency, and sometimes using tobacco instead of money) ranged from an average of $8 for the first player and $2 for the second all the way to $4 for the first and $6 for the second. Even the latter, hypergenerous offers were rejected in cultures in which making a large gift is a way of making others feel inferior. For most cultures, however, offers were close to equal, often with a slight advantage for the first player, such as a $6 versus $4 division. This is also the typical offer in modern societies, such as when university students play the ultimatum game.

  Fairness is understood all over the world, including places untouched by the French Enlightenment. Players avoid highly skewed proposals. That they don’t want to appear greedy is understandable: Brain scans of players facing unfair proposals reveal negative emotions, such as scorn and anger. The beauty of the ultimatum game is, of course, that it offers an outlet for these feelings. Those who feel slighted can punish the proposer even though in doing so they also punish themselves.

  That we’re willing to do so shows that certain goals take priority over income. We know an unfair distribution when we see one, and try to counteract it. That this is mainly done for the sake of good relations explains why the above multicultural study measured the fairest offers in societies with the highest levels of cooperation. A good example is the Lamalera whale hunters, in Indonesia, who capture whales almost bare-handed. Entire families are tied together around an extremely dangerous activity on the open ocean by a dozen men in a large canoe. Since these men are literally in the same boat, a fair distribution of the food bonanza is very much on their mind. In contrast, societies with greater self-sufficiency, in which every family takes care of itself, are marked by unfair offers in the ultimatum game. It’s easy to recognize the stag-versus-hare-hunt scenarios here: Human fairness goes hand in hand with communal survival.