91 a little duckling: Peter Bos (personal communication).
92 man’s best friend: The Belgian study was conducted by Anemieke Cools and co-workers (2008).
93 The ancestor of the dog: For wolves we do not as yet have the same evidence on consolation (i.e., reassurance of a distressed party by a bystander), but there are observations of wolf reconciliation (i.e., a reunion between former opponents) by Giada Cordoni and Elisabetta Palagi (2008).
93 “We are about to die”: Anthony Swofford (2003, p. 303).
94 famous images: A 1950 photograph by Al Chang, which inspired my drawing.
94 nightmare of losing a child: Interview with Paul Rosenblatt by Kate Murphy (New York Times, September 19, 2006).
94 “no-hug policy”: “School Enforces Strict No-Touching Rule” (Associated Press, June 18, 2007).
94 young rhesus monkeys: For a decade, I studied two large troops of rhesus macaques at the Vilas Park Zoo in Madison, Wisconsin. Rhesus are seasonal breeders. Every spring, about twenty-five infants were born at about the same time. This created a mass of same-age peers, which were very much in tune with one another in playfulness, sleepiness, and distress (de Waal, 1989).
96 It develops out of a primitive urge: Nature is full of inborn tendencies that help members of a species acquire critical skills. For example, capuchin monkeys are born with an insuppressible tendency to bang small objects that they can’t open, which they’ll do with gusto for hours. Cats have been endowed with an insuppressible tendency to lock their eyes onto any moving object small enough to pounce on. Combined with experience and learning, such tendencies are gradually incorporated into skills such as nut cracking with stones, which capuchins do in the wild (Ottoni and Mannu, 2001), or stalking and hunting, which all cats do. Preconcern is another inborn tendency that promotes further learning.
96 Most mammals show some: Empathy is like a multilayered Russian doll with the ancient perception-action mechanism and emotional contagion at its core, around which ever greater complexities have been constructed (de Waal, 2003; chapter 7).
97 “If Rock was not present”: Emil Menzel (1974, pp. 134—135).
97 theory of mind… : Emil Menzel’s work (e.g., Menzel, 1974; Menzel and Johnson, 1976) combined with Nicholas Humphrey’s (1978) notion of animals as “natural psychologists” (i.e., modeling the other’s mind) preceded or coincided with David Premack and Guy Woodruff’s (1978) influential “theory of mind” concept, published a few years after Menzel started working with Premack at the University of Pennsylvania. Theory of mind refers to the ability to recognize the mental states of others.
98 champion mind readers: Since Maxi’s belief is incorrect, this is known as the “false belief” task. This task relies so heavily on language, though, that language skills affect its outcome. If the role of language is reduced, children of a younger age show evidence of understanding beliefs, suggesting simpler processes than hitherto assumed (Perner and Ruffman, 2005).
99 Ravens have large brains: From an interview with Thomas Bugnyar in The Economist (May 13, 2004). See Bugnyar and Bernd Heinrich (2005). Further evidence for perspective-taking in birds was provided by Joanna Dally and co-workers (2006).
100 mental states of others: The first experimental dent in claims that only humans possess theory-of-mind came from a study with our chimps at the Yerkes Primate Center by Brian Hare and co-workers (2001). They showed that low-ranking apes take the knowledge of a dominant competitor into account before approaching food. Further successful ape studies have been reviewed by Michael Tomasello and Josep Call (2006), but note also evidence for perspective taking in birds (above), dogs (Virányi et al., 2005), and monkeys, (Kuroshima et al., 2003; Flombaum and Santos, 2005).
100 “changing places in fancy”: Adam Smith’s (1759, p. 10) classical description referred to sympathy. Cold perspective-taking, on the other hand, may be closer to what is commonly known as theory-of-mind, even though the word “theory” falsely implies abstract thinking and extrapolation from self to other by means of reasoning, for which there is no evidence (de Gelder, 1987; Hobson, 1991). More likely, perspective-taking develops out of the sort of unconscious bodily connections discussed in chapter 3.
100 When a juvenile orangutan: Reported in The Sydney Morning Herald (February 14, 2008).
100 Swedish zoo: The chimp -and-rope incident occurred at Furuvik Park, in Gavle, and was described to me by the primate curator, Ing-Marie Persson.
101 I snared Emil for an interview: Emil was born in 1929. The interview took place in 2000. A few years later, one of his former students wrote me: “I am presently a professor of developmental psychology. Once, on my way to the greenhouse where we kept our marmoset colony, I had to walk through a hallway where Emil’s chimps had been let out, and were roaming around. I was somewhat fearful of walking past them, and the young one, Kenton, walked up to me and gently took my hand, leading me through the hallway past the other chimps. I observed chimps’ capacity for empathy firsthand!” (Alison Nash, personal communication).
102 Since all animals rely: The lecture took place at Wesleyan College, and the overbearing chairman was Richard Herrnstein (1930—94), one of the foremost Skinnerians at the time. Herrnstein felt that pigeons could easily take the place of chimpanzees, similar to B. F. Skinner’s opinion: “Pigeon, rat, monkey, which is which? It doesn’t matter” (Bailey, 1986).
102 a spectacular escape: The chimpanzee escape was published as “Spontaneous Invention of Ladders in a Group of Young Chimpanzees” by Menzel (1972). In Chimpanzee Politics, I describe a very similar cooperative escape (de Waal, 1982).
104 “Mother Number One”: “Officer Breast-Feeds Quake Orphans” (CNN International, May 22, 2008).
104 hominid was recently found in the Caucasus: A 1.8-million-year-old fossil discovered by David Lordkipanidze and colleagues (2007).
104 Madame Bee: Jane Goodall (1986, p. 357).
105 handful of stories: The best-known anecdote, captured on video, is the rescue of a human child at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. On August 16, 1996, Binti Jua, an eight-year-old gorilla, saved a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit. The gorilla sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a gentle back-pat before she continued on her way. This act of sympathy touched many hearts, making Binti a celebrity overnight (Time elected her one of the “Best People” of 1996). The number of similar anecdotes keeps growing. I have been trying not to repeat stories used before, such as in Good Natured (1996) and Bonobo (1997). A systematic overview has been put together by Sanjida O’Connell (1995).
105 Chimp Haven: The relation between chimpanzees Sheila and Sara was described to me by Amy Fultz, who works at Chimp Haven, located near Shreveport, Louisiana. Amy also described one chimp going out of her way to bring food to another who was incapacitated by kidney disease. For more on Chimp Haven (with which I am involved) and how to support it, see www.chimphaven.org.
106 apes on islands: The suggestion that animals never take serious risks on behalf of one another was made by Jeremy Kagan (2000). Examples of apes jumping into water to save another come from Jane Goodall (1990, p. 213) and Roger Fouts (1997, p. 180), including a rescue by Washoe of another female that she had known for only a few hours. The mother-son drowning occurred at the Dublin Zoo (Belfast News Letter, October 31, 2000).
100 hydrophobia cannot be overcome: Helping behavior may have evolved in the context of kinship and reciprocity, but there is little evidence that chimpanzees actually count on return favors (chapter 6). Even for humans, who are capable of such anticipation, it is questionable that anyone would run into a burning building or jump into water with return favors in mind. The impulse is likely emotional. Again, the actor’s reasons for a behavior do not need to overlap with the reasons for its evolution, which may indeed be self-interested (chapter 2).
107 leopard attack: Christophe Boesch (personal communication) has documented regular predation on chimpanzees i
n Ivory Coast. Chimps help one another against leopard attacks, thus taking grave risks on behalf of one another.
108 Children read “hearts”: Children pass the traditional theory-of-mind tasks, which focus on beliefs, around the age of four. But they appreciate the feelings, needs, and desires of others much earlier, usually at the age of two or three (Wellman et al., 2000). The trouble older children have with the Little Red Riding Hood story seems due to emotional identification, which interferes with the attribution of beliefs (Bradmetz and Schneider, 1999).
110 Social scratching: Primate customs and traditions, also known as “cultural primatology,” are the subject of The Ape and the Sushi Master (de Waal, 2001). For details on the social scratch of the Mahale chimpanzees, see Michio Nakamura and co-workers (2000).
112 understand when one among them is hungry: There is little evidence that monkeys appreciate the knowledge or beliefs of others, but this doesn’t keep them from appreciating another’s attention, intentions, or needs. Conducted by Yuko Hattori, our food-sharing experiment tested responses to partners who had just eaten, or not, and included a control condition in which the partner had been behind an opaque panel, so that subjects could not know about its previous food consumption.
113 monkeys favor sharing: The prosocial choices in capuchins disappeared if the partner was either a stranger or out of sight (de Waal et al., 2008; chapter 6). Similar prosocial preferences have been demonstrated in monkeys by Judith Burkart and co-workers (2007) and Venkat Lakshminarayanan and Laurie Santos (2008).
113 “Chimpanzees Are Indifferent”: This is the actual title of a scientific article by Joan Silk and co-workers (2005). A similar outcome was reported by Keith Jensen and co-workers (2006). It is almost impossible to interpret negative findings, however (de Waal, 2009). A common problem is that animals may fail to fully understand the task. If they develop a blind routine, for example, or are too far apart to notice what happens to their partner, their choices may appear socially indifferent yet are in fact better described as statistically random. 115 rewards made no difference: Felix Warneken and co-workers (2007) included conditions with and without rewards. Since these conditions had no effect, the chimps’ helping behavior did not seem to be driven by expected payoffs.
115 “His euphoria produced”: Quoted from Dolf Zillmann and Joanne Cantor (1977, p. 161). See also Lanzetta and Englis (1989).
116 how altruistic is altruism: This has been explored empirically in Daniel Batson’s (1991, 1997) admirable work on the self- versus other-orientation behind human altruism. The debate about this issue is never-ending, though, because of the impossibility to extract the self from its relations with others, especially with regard to empathy (e.g. Hornstein, 1991; Krebs, 1991, Cialdini et al., 1997).
CHAPTER 5: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
118 “Seeing himself in the mirror”: Ladygina-Kohts (1935, p. 160).
119 Pliny the Elder: From his Natural History (vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library, 1940).
121 predicted decades ago: In 1970, Gordon Gallup, Jr., published his first study of mirror self-recognition (MSR), followed by speculations a decade later on how MSR correlates with other so-called “markers of mind,” including attribution and empathy. Gallup (1983) explicitly speculated that cetaceans and elephants show enough insightful social behavior that they probably also possess MSR.
122 arrive in drag: As an undergraduate student, I worked with two young male chimpanzees. A male fellow student and myself wanted to know why these apes were sexually aroused by every woman in sight (e.g., secretaries, students), and especially how they told the human genders apart. So, we dressed up in drag and changed the pitch of our voices. But the chimps were not confused, least of all sexually.
123 co-emergence hypothesis: This hypothesis has its origin in the separate perspectives of Gordon Gallup on phylogeny and Doris Bischof-Köhler on human ontogeny, both of which link mirror responses to social cognition. My own contribution is to combine these two perspectives into a single hypothesis.
123 When the same children: Co-emergence in development of personal pronoun use, pretend play, and mirror self-recognition (MSR) was demonstrated by Michael Lewis and Douglas Ramsay (2004). Doris Bischof-Köhler has conducted the most detailed studies of the coemergence of MSR and empathy in children, suggesting an absolute link; that is, “empathizers” pass the rouge test in front of the mirror, whereas “non-empathizers” fail this test. This connection persists after correction for age (Bischof-Köhler, 1988, 1991) and has also been reported by Johnson (1992) and Zahn-Waxler et al. (1992).
124 neuroscience will one day resolve: Neuroimaging studies on the role of the self in empathy are under way, following the ideas of Jean Decety (Decety and Chaminade, 2003). Advanced empathy is likely based on the perception-action mechanism combined with an increasing self-other distinction (Preston and de Waal, 2002; de Waal, 2008). In humans, the right inferior parietal cortex, at the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), helps distinguish self- from other-produced actions (Decety and Grèzes, 2006).
124 “Self-absorption kills empathy”: Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence (2006, p. 54).
125 ontogeny and phylogeny: Even though modern biology rejects Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, it remains true that if an anatomical feature evolved before another, it generally also develops earlier in the embryo, and that shared ancestry among species is often reflected in the early stages of embryonic development. The coemergence hypothesis of mirror self-recognition and social cognition draws a parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny without implying an obligatory connection between the two. See also Gerhard Medicus (1992).
126 Even a goldfish will jump: In an interview, Paul Manger claimed: “You put an animal in a box, even a lab rat or gerbil, and the first thing it wants to do is climb out of it. If you don’t put a lid on top of the bowl of a goldfish it will eventually jump out to enlarge the environment it is living in. But a dolphin will never do that. In the marine parks the dividers to keep the dolphins apart are only a foot or two above the water” (Reuters, August 18, 2006). Manger did not speculate that it may actually be smart for an animal to stay in a known environment rather than jump to an unknown one.
126 126 preen themselves before a mirror: Mirror self-recognition is not a trained pet trick but rather a spontaneous capacity that some animals possess and others don’t. Training the criterion behavior (cf. Epstein et al., 1981) defeats the purpose of the rouge test and can only produce the sort of “trivial passing” that machines are also capable of. Moreover, when another research team tried to replicate the pigeon study, they failed miserably, resulting in a paper with the word “Pinocchio” in its title (Thompson and Contie, 1994).
127 Dolphins possess large brains: The human brain weighs approximately 1.3 kilograms, the bottlenose dolphin’s 1.8, the chimpanzee’s 0.4, and the Asian elephant’s 5. If brain size is corrected for body size, the human brain is larger than that of any other animal, and cetacean brains are larger than those of nonhuman primates (Marino, 1998). Some analyses stress different parts of the brain, but in this regard human uniqueness is less striking. Contrary to general belief, the human frontal cortex is no larger than that of the great apes relative to the rest of the brain (Semendeferi et al., 2002).
127 rightly upset dolphin experts: Manger’s (2006) article provoked a collective rebuttal by many of the world’s dolphin experts in an article titled “Cetaceans Have Complex Brains for Complex Cognition” by Lori Marino et al. (2007).
128 a stick of dynamite: Drawing based on J. B. Siebenaler and David Caldwell (1956).
128 Reports of leviathan care: Further examples have been provided by Melba Caldwell and David Caldwell (1966) and Richard Connor and Kenneth Norris (1982).
129 nudged to shore by a seal: “Seal Saves Drowning Dog” (BBC News, June 19, 2002).
129 a female humpback whale … : Incident reported by Peter Fimrite in The San Francisco Chronicle (December 14, 2005). Even though the report adds a condesce
nding disclaimer (“Whale experts say it’s nice to think that the whale was thanking its rescuers, but nobody really knows what was on its mind”) it should be noted that for species with complex reciprocity, gratitude is an expected emotion (Trivers, 1971; Bonnie and de Waal, 2004).
130 website for a conference: “What Makes Us Human,” held in April 2008 in Los Angeles.
130 “I always smile when I hear Garrison Keillor”: From Michael Gazzaniga, “Are Human Brains Unique?” (Edge, April 10, 2007). The author answers his own question as follows: “Something like a phase shift has occurred in becoming human. There simply is no one thing that will ever account for our spectacular abilities.” The vagueness of this answer amounts to an admission that the human brain is in fact not that unique. 132 six blind men from Indostan: From the poem “Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe, published in 1873.
132 “Eleanor was found with a swollen trunk”: The incident occurred on October 10, 2003, and was recorded and photographed by Iain Douglas-Hamilton and co-workers (2006).
133 a poacher’s bullet: Example from Cynthia Moss’s (1988, p. 73) Elephant Memories. The bull spraying another with water is described in African Elephants, A Celebration of Majesty by Daryl and Sharna Balfour (1998), and the mud-hole scene was shown on National Geographic’s show Reflections on Elephants (1994). For a review of empathy-related behavior in African elephants, see Lucy Bates and co-workers (2008).
135 bigger than an earlier study: A drawing illustrates the setup of Daniel Povinelli’s (1989) elephant experiment.
138 absent in all other primates: Esther Nimchinsky and co-workers (1999) compared the brains of twenty-eight primate species, finding VEN cells only in the four great apes and humans. Only one bonobo specimen was available; its brain showed the most humanlike density and distribution of VEN cells, which is intriguing in relation to this species’ hypothetical status as the most empathic ape (de Waal, 1997).
The Age of Empathy Page 27