The Age of Empathy

by Frans de Waal

  Men can be quite dismissive of empathy. It’s not particularly manly to admit to it, and one reason why it has taken so long for research in this area to take off is undoubtedly that academics saw empathy as a bleeding-heart topic associated with the weaker sex. That this is a traditional attitude is exemplified by Bernard de Mandeville, a Dutch philosopher and satirist of the eighteenth century who saw “pity” as a character flaw:

  Pity, though it is the most gentle and the least mischievous of all our passions, is yet as much a frailty of our nature, as anger, pride, or fear. The weakest minds have generally the greatest share of it, for which reason none are more compassionate than women and children. It must be owned, that of all our weaknesses it is the most amiable, and bears the greatest resemblance to virtue; nay, without a considerable mixture of it, the society could hardly subsist.

  The tortuous nature of this statement is understandable for a cynic who gave the world its first greed creed. Mandeville didn’t know where to fit the tender emotions, but was at least honest enough to recognize that society would be in trouble without them.

  Despite the association of empathy with women rather than men, some studies paint a more complex picture. They call gender differences in this regard “exaggerated,” even “nonexistent.” These claims are puzzling given the well-documented difference between boys and girls. Are we to believe that the sexes converge with age? My guess is that they don’t, and that the confusion stems from the way men and women have been tested by psychologists. Asked about loved ones, such as their parents, wife, children, and close friends, most men are plenty empathic. The same applies in relation to unfamiliar, neutral parties. Men are perfectly willing to empathize under such circumstances, the way they often can’t keep their eyes dry in romantic or tragic movies. With their portal open, men can be just as empathic as women.

  But things change radically when men enter a competitive mode, such as when they’re advancing their interests or career. Suddenly, there’s little room for softer feelings. Men can be brutal toward potential rivals: Anyone who stands in the way has to be taken down. Sometimes the physicality slips out, such as when Jesse Jackson, the longtime African American alpha male, expressed his feelings about the new kid on the block, Barack Obama, in 2008. In surreptitiously taped comments on a television show, Jackson said about Obama that he’d like to “cut his nuts off.” At other times, things literally get physical, such as the way the head of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, reacted to hearing that a senior engineer of his company was going to work for his competitors at Google. Ballmer was said to have picked up a chair and thrown it forcefully across the room, hitting a table. After this chimpanzee-like display, he launched into a tirade about how he was going to fucking kill those Google boys.

  Many men love action movies, which would be a disastrous experience if they had any sympathy for their hero’s adversaries. The villains are blown to pieces, riddled with bullets, thrown into shark-infested pools, and pushed out of flying airplanes. None of this bothers the audience. On the contrary, they pay to watch the carnage. Sometimes the hero himself gets caught, then is strung up in chains and tormented with burning coals, which makes the audience squirm. But since it’s just a movie, he always gets out and exacts revenge, which is sweeter the nastier it gets.

  Male primates may be similar. Robert Sapolsky, who occasionally tranquilizes wild baboons, learned the hard way how dangerous it is to dart a male in front of his rivals. As soon as the darted male’s walk becomes unsteady, others close in, seeing a perfect opportunity to get him. There is no problem with the females, but male baboons are always ready to take advantage of another’s weakness. This is why vulnerabilities are hidden. I have known male chimps who went into unusually vigorous intimidation displays during times that they were sick or injured. They’d be licking their wounds one minute, looking miserable, but then their main rival would show up and suddenly they’d be full of muscle power, at least for the few minutes that mattered. In the same way, I imagine a group of human ancestors in which men camouflaged for as long as possible any limp, reduced eyesight, or loss of stamina so as not to give the others any ideas. This is why the Kremlin used to prop up its ailing leaders, and why enterprises sometimes hesitate to disclose the health problems of their CEOs, as Apple did with Steve Jobs. In modern society, it’s often said that men don’t go to the doctor as easily as women because they have been socialized to act tough, but what if there’s a much deeper reason? Perhaps males always feel surrounded by others hoping for them to stumble.

  The opposite occurs when men are in the company of trusted parties. Often this will be a wife or girlfriend, but it extends to their best male buddies. Men value nothing more than loyalty, and in these situations they do show vulnerability, which elicits sympathy. There’s plenty of this among men on the same team, such as in sports or the military, and I once saw an interesting sign of it among chimpanzees. An old male had partnered with a younger one, who was more muscular and energetic. The old male had helped his friend reach the top, but one day this new leader nevertheless bit his partner in a conflict over a female. This was not very smart, because his position depended on the old male’s support. Naturally, the young male did a lot of grooming to smooth things over, but the old fox—perhaps the most cunning chimp I’ve ever known—couldn’t resist rubbing in how much he had been hurt. For days, he limped pitifully each time he was in view of the young leader, whereas away from him he walked normally. Now, why put up an act like this, if sympathy plays no role in male relations?

  It’s possible, then, that male sensitivity to others is conditional, aroused mostly by family and friends. For those who don’t belong to the inner circle, and especially those who act like rivals, the portal remains closed and the empathy switch turned off. Neuroscience supports this idea for humans. A German investigator, Tania Singer, tested men and women in a brain scanner while they could see another in pain. Both sexes commiserated with the other: The pain areas in their own brains lit up when they saw the other’s hand getting mildly shocked. It was as if they felt the sting themselves. But this happened only if the partner was someone likable and with whom they had played a friendly game. Things changed drastically if the partner had played unfairly in the previous game. Now the subjects felt cheated, and seeing the other in pain had less of an effect. Women still showed some empathy, but the men had nothing left. On the contrary, if men saw the unfair player getting shocked, their brain’s pleasure centers lit up. They had moved from empathy to justice, and seemed to enjoy the other’s punishment. Perhaps there exists a Tertullian heaven after all, at least for men, where they watch their enemies roast in flames.

  Nevertheless, men seem unable to turn their empathy switch completely down to zero. One of the most illuminating books I have read in recent years is On Killing, by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, who served in the U.S. Army. Grossman follows in the footsteps of Leo Tolstoy, who gave us War and Peace and said that he was more interested in how and why soldiers kill, and what they feel while doing so, than in how generals arrange their armies on the battlefield. To actually kill someone is, of course, quite different from watching a movie about it, and in this regard the data tell us something few would have suspected: Most men lack a killer instinct.

  It is a curious fact that the majority of soldiers, although well armed, never kill. During World War II, only one out of every five U.S. soldiers actually fired at the enemy. The other four were plenty courageous, braving grave danger, landing on the beaches, rescuing comrades under fire, fetching ammunition for others, and so on, yet they failed to fire their weapons. One officer reported that “squad leaders and platoon sergeants had to move up and down the firing line kicking men to get them to fire. We felt like we were doing good to get two or three men out of a squad to fire.” Similarly, it has been calculated that during the Vietnam War, U.S. soldiers fired more than fifty thousand bullets for every enemy soldier killed. Most bullets must have been fired into the air.

&nb
sp; This recalls the famous Stanley Milgram experiment in which human subjects were asked to deliver high-voltage shocks to others. They obeyed the experimenter to a surprising degree, but began to cheat as soon as he was called away. Subjects still acted as if they were giving shocks, but were now feigning punishment by administering much milder ones. Grossman himself draws a comparison with New Guinean tribes where the men are excellent shots with bow and arrow during the hunt, but when they go to war they remove the feathers from their arrows, thus rendering them useless. They prefer to fight with inaccurate weapons, knowing that their enemies will have taken the same step.

  Killing or hurting others is something we find so horrendous that wars are often a collective conspiracy to miss, an artifice of incompetence, a game of posturing rather than an actual hostile confrontation. Nowadays, this is not always realized, given that wars can be fought at a distance almost like a computer game, which eliminates most of these natural inhibitions. But actual killing at close range has no glory, no pleasure, and is something the typical soldier tries to avoid at all cost. Only a small percentage of men—perhaps 1 or 2 percent—does the vast majority of killing during a war. This may be the same category of humans discussed before, the one immune to the suffering of others. Most soldiers report a deep revulsion: They vomit at the sight of dead enemies, and end up with haunting memories. Lifelong combat trauma was already known to the ancient Greeks, as reflected in Sophocles’ plays about the “divine madness” that we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Decades after a war, veterans still can’t hold back tears when asked about the killings they have witnessed. The sorrow and repulsion associated with these images is triggered by our species’ natural body language, similar to the scream that Rowling couldn’t get out of her head. This is also what makes it so hard to apply lethal force at close range: “The average soldier has an intense resistance to bayoneting his fellow man, and this act is surpassed only by the resistance to being bayoneted.”

  So, anyone who would like to use war atrocities as an argument against human empathy needs to think twice. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and it’s important to consider how hard most men find it to pull the trigger. Why would this be, if not for empathy with their fellow human beings? Warfare is psychologically complex, and seems more a product of hierarchy and following orders than of aggression and lack of mercy. We are definitely capable of it, and do kill for our country, but the activity conflicts at the deepest level with our humanity. Even “scorched earth” Union General William Sherman had nothing good to say about it:

  I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

  The Invisible Helping Hand

  One of the first debates about the role of empathy in human life reached us more than two millennia ago from a Chinese sage, Mencius, a follower of Confucius. Mencius saw empathy as part of human nature, famously stating that everyone is born with a mind that cannot bear to see the suffering of others.

  In one of Mencius’s stories, the king watches an ox being led past his palace. The king wants to know what’s going on, and is told that the ox is on its way to being slaughtered so that its blood may be used for a ceremony. The king can’t stand the ox’s frightened appearance, however, which to him suggests that it realizes what is about to happen. He orders that the ox be saved. But not wanting to cancel the ceremony, he proposes to sacrifice a sheep instead.

  Mencius is unimpressed by the king’s pity for the ox, telling him that he seems as much concerned with his own tender feelings as the animal’s fate:

  You saw the ox, and had not seen the sheep. So is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die; having heard their dying cries, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. Therefore he keeps away from his slaughter-house and cook-room.

  We care more about what we see firsthand than about what remains out of sight. We’re certainly capable of feeling for others based on hearing, reading, or thinking about them, but concern based purely on the imagination lacks strength and urgency. Hearing the news that a good friend has fallen ill and is suffering in a hospital, we’ll sympathize. But our worries intensify tenfold when we actually stand at his bedside and notice how pale he looks, or how much trouble he has breathing.

  Mencius made us reflect on the origin of empathy, and how much it owes to bodily connections. These connections also explain the trouble we have empathizing with outsiders. Empathy builds on proximity, similarity, and familiarity, which is entirely logical given that it evolved to promote in-group cooperation. Combined with our interest in social harmony, which requires a fair distribution of resources, empathy put the human species on a path toward small-scale societies that stress equality and solidarity. Nowadays, most of us live in much larger societies, where this emphasis is harder to maintain, but we still have a psychology that feels most comfortable with these outcomes.

  A society based purely on selfish motives and market forces may produce wealth, yet it can’t produce the unity and mutual trust that make life worthwhile. This is why surveys measure the greatest happiness not in the wealthiest nations but rather in those with the highest levels of trust among citizens. Conversely, the trust-starved climate of modern business spells trouble and has recently made many people deeply unhappy by wiping out their savings. In 2008, the world’s financial system collapsed under the weight of predatory lending, reporting of nonexisting profits, pyramid schemes, and reckless betting with other people’s money. One of the system’s architects, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, said that he had no idea this might happen. In response to a grilling by a U.S. House committee, he acknowledged that his vision had been flawed: “That is precisely the reason I was shocked because I’d been going for forty years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

  The mistake of Greenspan and other supply-side economists was to assume that, even though the free market by itself is no moral enterprise, it would steer society toward a state in which everyone’s interests were optimally served. Hadn’t their demigod, Milton Friedman, declared that social responsibility conflicts with freedom? And hadn’t an even higher authority, Adam Smith, given them the metaphor of the “invisible hand,” according to which even the most selfish motives will automatically advance the greater good? The free market knows what is best for us. The baker needs income, his clients need bread, and voilà, both parties stand to gain from their transaction. Morality has nothing to do with it.

  Unfortunately, these references to Smith are selective. They leave out an essential part of his thinking, which is far more congenial to the position I have taken throughout this book; namely, that reliance on greed as the driving force of society is bound to undermine its very fabric. Smith saw society as a huge machine, the wheels of which are polished by virtue, whereas vice causes them to grate. The machine just won’t run smoothly without a strong community sense in every citizen. Smith frequently mentioned honesty, morality, sympathy, and justice, seeing them as essential companions to the invisible hand of the market.

  In effect, society depends on a second invisible hand, one that reaches out to others. The feeling that one human being cannot be indifferent to another if we wish to build a community true to the meaning of the word is the other force that underlies our dealings with one another. The evolutionary antiquity of this force makes it all the more surprising just how often it is being ignored. Do business schools teach ethics and obligations to the community in any context other than how it may advance business? Do they pay equal attention to stakeholders and shareholders? And why does the “dismal science” attract so few female students, and has never produced a female Nobelist? Could it be that women feel no connection to the caricature of a rational being whose only goal in life is to maximize profit? Where are human relations in all of
this?

  It’s not as if we’re asking our species to do anything foreign to it by building on the old herd instinct that has kept animal societies together for millions of years. And here I don’t mean that we should blindly follow one another, but that we have to stick together: We can’t just scatter in all directions. Every individual is connected to something larger than itself. Those who like to depict this connection as contrived, as not part of human biology, don’t have the latest behavioral and neurological data on their side. The connection is deeply felt and, as Mandeville had to admit, no society can do without it.

  First of all, there are the occasions where others need aid and we have a chance to offer it in the form of food banks, disaster relief, elderly care, summer camps for poor children, and so on. Measured by volunteer community services, Western societies seem to be in great shape indeed, and have plenty of compassion to go around. But the second area where solidarity counts is the common good, which includes health care, education, infrastructure, transportation, national defense, protection against nature, and so on. Here the role of empathy is more indirect, because no one would want to see such vital pillars of society depend purely on the warm glow of kindness.

  The firmest support for the common good comes from enlightened self-interest: the realization that we’re all better off if we work together. If we don’t benefit from our contributions now, then at least potentially we will in the future, and if not personally, then at least via improved conditions around us. Since empathy binds individuals together and gives each a stake in the welfare of others, it bridges the world of direct “what’s in it for me?” benefits and collective benefits, which take a bit more reflection to grasp. Empathy has the power to open our eyes to the latter by attaching emotional value to them. Let me give two concrete examples.