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# 2019-12-13 - The Age of Empathy by Frans De Waal
I found this book in a free pile and am glad i picked it up. I found
it quite informative about empathy and mind-expanding in general.
Quite fitting that i should read this after reading Ishmael. In a
nutshell, the book contests the idea that we are naturally bad and
selfish to the core. It also provides a more nuanced view of how
empathy works and how it is organized within an individual. My notes
follow below.
# Chapter 1, Biology Left and Right
How people organize their societies may not seem the sort of topic a
biologist should worry about. I should be concerned with the
ivory-billed woodpecker [thought to be extinct], the role of primates
in the spread of AIDS or Ebola [we're primates too, right?], the
disappearance of tropical rain forests, or whether we evolved from
the apes. ... Every debate about society and government makes huge
assumptions about human nature, which are presented as if they come
straight out of biology. But they almost never do.
There is exciting new research about the origins of altruism and
fairness in both ourselves and other animals. For example, if one
gives two monkeys hugely different rewards for the same task, the one
who gets the short end of the stick simply refuses to perform. ... By
protesting against unfairness, their behavior supports both the claim
that incentives matter and that there is a natural dislike of
injustice.
[The author gives an example of feeding a group of chimpanzees in a
primate research center.]
My point is that there is both ownership and sharing. In the end,
usually within twenty minutes, all of the chimpanzees in the group
will have some food. ... It is a relatively peaceful scene even
though there is also quite a bit of jostling for position.
So don't believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a
struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals
survive by cooperating and sharing.
Too many economists and politicians model human society on the
perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere
projection. ... Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but
humans can't live by competition alone.
We live in a society that celebrates the cerebral and looks down upon
emotions as mushy and messy. [Never mind that emotions are just as
cerebral as intellect.] Worse, emotions are hard to control, and
isn't self-control what makes us human? [Never mind that thoughts
are just as hard to control as emotions. It's a rare bird who can
turn them off like the flip of a light switch. Or who can abruptly
choose to believe something completely different.]
Clearly, we often make snap moral decisions that come from the "gut."
Our emotions [or subconscious] decide, after which our reasoning
power tries to catch up as spin doctor, concocting plausible
justifications. With this dent in the primacy of human logic,
pre-Kantian approaches to morality are making a comeback. They
anchor morality in the so-called sentiments, a view that fits well
with evolutionary theory, modern neuroscience, and the behavior of
our primate relatives.
... interest in others is fundamental. Where would human morality be
without it? It's the bedrock upon which everything else is
constructed.
[Long-term spouses can have emotional convergence.] Daily sharing of
emotions apparently leads one partner to "internalize" the other, and
vice versa...
Our bodies and minds are made for social life, and we become
hopelessly depressed in its absence. This is why next to death,
solitary confinement is our worst punishment. Bonding is so good for
us that the most reliable way to extend one's life expectancy is to
marry and stay married. The flip side is the risk we run after
losing a partner.
Behaviorism is the belief that behavior is all that science can see
and know, and therefore is all it should care about. The mind, if
such a thing even exists, remains a black box. Emotions are largely
irrelevant.
John Watson was the founding father of behaviorism. He was so
enamored by the power of conditioning that he became allergic to
emotion. He was particularly skeptical of maternal love, which he
considered a dangerous instrument. Fussing over the children,
mothers were ruining them by instilling weaknesses, fears, and
inferiorities. Society needed less warmth and more structure.
Watson dreamed of a "baby farm" without parents so that infants could
be raised according to scientific principles. For example, a child
should be touched only if it has behaved incredibly well, and not
with a hug or kiss, but rather with a little pat on the head.
Physical rewards that are systematically meted out would do wonders,
Watson felt, and were far superior to the mawkish rearing style of
the average well-meaning mom.
Unfortunately, environments like the baby farm existed, and all we
can say about them is that they were deadly! This became clear when
psychologists studied orphans kept in little cribs separated by white
sheets, deprived of visual stimulation and body contact. As
recommended by scientists, the orphans had never been cooed at, held,
or tickled. They looked like zombies, with immobile faces and
wide-open expressionless eyes. Had Watson been right, these children
should have been thriving, but they in fact lacked all resistance to
disease. At some orphanages, mortality approached 100 percent.
Watson's crusade against what he called the "over-kissed child," and
the immense respect accorded him in the 1920s public opinion, seem
incomprehensible today...
Bonding is essential for our species, and it is what makes us
happiest. ... The pursuit of happiness written into the U.S.
Declaration of Independence rather refers to a state of satisfaction
with the life one is living. This is a measurable state, and studies
show that beyond a certain basic income, material wealth carries
remarkably little weight. ... time spent with friends and family is
what does people the most good.
Instead of fixating on the peaks of civilization, we need to pay more
attention to the foothills. The peaks glimmer in the sun, but it is
in the foothills that we find most of what drives us, including those
messy emotions that make us spoil our children.
Security is the first and foremost reason for social life. This
brings me to the second false origin myth: that human society is the
voluntary creation of autonomous people. The illusion here is that
our ancestors had no need for anybody else. They led uncommitted
lives. Their only problem was that they were so competitive that the
cost of strife became unbearable. Being intelligent animals, they
decided to give up a few liberties in return for community life.
Granted, it can be instructive to look at human relations as if they
resulted from an agreement among equal parties. It helps us think
about how we treat, or ought to treat, one another. It's good to
realize though, that this way of framing the issue is leftover from
pre-Darwinian days, based on a totally erroneous image of our
species. ... We descended from a long line of group-living primates
with a high degree of interdependence.
Here we arrive at the third false origin myth, which is that our
species has been waging war for as long as it has been around.
Although archaeological signs of individual murder go back hundreds
of thousands of years, we lack similar evidence for warfare from
before the agricultural revolution.
Present-day hunter-gatherers alternate long stretches of peace and
harmony with brief interludes of violent confrontation.
Chimpanzees engage in violent battles over territory. Genetically
speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another
ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be
unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has
begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both
males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war
at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a sort of picnic. It
ends with adults from different groups grooming each other while
their children play. Thus far, lethal aggression among bonobos is
unheard of.
The only certainty is that our species has a potential for warfare,
which under certain circumstances will rear its ugly head.
Because of interdependencies between groups with scarce resources,
our ancestors probably never waged war on a grand scale until they
settled down and began to accumulate wealth by means of agriculture.
This made attacks on other groups more profitable. Instead of being
the product of an aggressive drive, it seems that war is more about
power and profit. This also implies, of course, that it's hardly
inevitable.
[Western origin stories are not] in keeping with the old way, which
is one of reliance on one another, of connection, of suppressing both
internal and external disputes, because the hold on subsistence is so
tenuous that food and safety are top priorities.
We can't return to this preindustrial way of life. We live in
societies of mind-boggling scale and complexity that demand quite a
different organization than humans ever enjoyed in their state of
nature. Yet ... we remain essentially the same animals with the same
psychological needs and wants.
False origin myths in the West: 1) Cut-throat competition is our
natural biological state. 2) Human society is the voluntary creation
of autonomous people. 3) Our species has been waging war for as long
as it has been around.
# Chapter 2, The Other Darwinism
Long ago, American society embraced competition as its chief
organizing principle even though everywhere one looks--at work, in
the street, in people's homes--one finds the same appreciation of
family, companionship, collegiality, and civic responsibility as
everywhere else in the world. This tension between economic freedom
and community values is fascinating to watch, which I do both as an
outsider and an insider, being a European who has lived and worked in
the United States for more than twenty-five years. The pendulum
swings that occur at regular intervals between the main political
parties of this nation show that the tension is alive and well, and
that a hands-down winner shouldn't be expected anytime soon.
This bipolar state of American society isn't hard to understand.
It's not that different from the situation in Europe... What makes
American politics baffling is the way it draws upon biology and
religion.
Evolutionary theory is remarkably popular among those on the
conservative end of the spectrum, but not in the way biologists would
like it to be. The theory figures like a secret mistress.
Passionately embraced in its obscure persona of "Social Darwinism,"
it is rejected as soon as the daylight shines on real Darwinism.
Social Darwinism depicts life as a struggle in which those who make
it shouldn't let themselves be dragged down by those who don't. This
ideology was unleashed by British political philosopher Herbert
Spencer, who in the nineteenth century translated the laws of nature
into business language, coining the phrase "survival of the fittest"
(often incorrectly attributed to Darwin). ... In dense tomes that
sold hundreds of thousands of copies, he said of the poor that "the
whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of
them, and make room for better."
John D. Rockefeller even married it with religion, concluding that
the growth of a large business "is merely the working out of a law of
nature and a law of God." This religious angle--still visible in the
so-called Christian Right--forms the second great paradox. Where as
the book found in most American homes and every hotel room [the
Bible] urges us on almost every page to show compassion, Social
Darwinists scoff at such feelings, which only keep nature from
running its course. Poverty is dismissed as proof of laziness, and
social justice as a weakness. Why not simply let the poor perish? I
find it hard to see how Christians can embrace such harsh ideology
without a massive case of cognitive dissonance, but many seem to do
so.
The final paradox is that the emphasis on economic freedom triggers
both the best and worst in people. The worst is the aforementioned
deficit in compassion, but there is also an excellent side to the
American character--which is a merit-based society. Americans admire
success stories, and will never hold honest success against anyone.
This is truly liberating for those who are up to the challenge.
And so my [personal] political philosophy sits somewhere in the
middle of the Atlantic [between American and European values]--not
too comfortable a place.
The problem is that one can't derive the goals of society from the
goals of nature. Trying to do so is known as the naturalistic
fallacy, which is the impossibility of moving from how things are to
how things ought to be. Thus, if animals were to kill one another on
a large scale, this wouldn't mean we have to do so, too, any more
than we would have an obligation to live in perfect harmony if
animals were to do so. All that nature can offer is information and
inspiration, not prescription.
Information is critical, though. A view of human nature as "red in
tooth and claw" obviously sets different boundaries to society than a
view that includes cooperation and solidarity as part of our
background. Darwin himself felt uncomfortable about the "right of
the strongest" lessons that others, such as Spencer, tried to extract
from his theory. That is why I'm tired, as a biologist, to hear
evolutionary theory being trotted out as a prescription for society
by those who aren't truly interested in the theory itself and all
that it has to offer.
[Spencer] applied the naturalistic fallacy to a T. Why did Spencer's
ideas fall on such receptive ears? It seems to me that he was
offering a way out of a moral dilemma that people were only just
getting used to. In earlier times, the rich didn't need any
justification to ignore the poor. With their blue blood, the
nobility considered itself a different BREED. Not that they felt
absolutely no sense of obligation toward those underneath them, but
they had no qualms about living in opulence, feasting on meat,
slurping fine wine, and driving around in gilded carriages, while the
masses were close to starving.
All of this changed with the Industrial Revolution, which created a
new upper crust, one that couldn't overlook the plight of others so
easily. Many of them had belonged to the lower class only a few
generations before: They were evidently of the same blood. So,
shouldn't they share their wealth? They were reluctant to do so,
though, and were thrilled to hear that there was nothing wrong with
ignoring those who worked for them, it was perfectly honorable to
climb the ladder of success without looking back. This is how nature
works, Spencer assured them, thus removing any pangs of conscience
the rich might feel.
Since the goal of every immigrant is to build a better life, the
inevitable outcome is a culture revolving around individual
achievement. No wonder Spencer's message about success as its own
justification was well received.
Insofar as such arguments are based on what is supposedly natural,
however, they are fundamentally flawed. In Spencer's days, this was
exposed by the unlikely character of a Russian prince, Petr
Kropotkin. Though a bearded anarchist, Kropotkin was also a
naturalist of great distinction. In his 1902 book, Mutual Aid, he
argued that the struggles for existence is not so much of each
against all, but of masses of organisms against a hostile environment.
Kropotkin was inspired by a setting quite unlike the one that had
inspired Darwin. Darwin visited tropical regions with abundant
wildlife, whereas Kropotkin explored Siberia. The ideas of both men
reflect the difference between a rich environment, resulting in the
sort of population density and competition envisioned by Malthus, and
an environment that is frozen and unfriendly most of the time. ...
Instead of animals duking it out, and the victors running off with
the prize, he saw a communal principle at work. In subzero cold, you
either huddle together or die.
[Both Darwin and Kropotkin] believed that cooperative groups of
animals (or humans) would outperform less cooperative ones. In other
words, the ability to function in a group an build a support network
is a crucial survival skill.
In chimpanzees, both males and females actively broker community
relations. Males who act as arbitrator usually don't take sides and
can be remarkably effective at keeping the peace. In all of these
cases, primates show community concern. They try to ameliorate the
state of affairs in the group as a whole. [Thus showing that
conflict resolution is natural and requires no speech.]
Every society needs to strike a balance between selfish and social
motives to ensure that its economy serves society rather than the
other way around. All too often [the primacy of money] leads to
exploitation, injustice, and rampant dishonesty. In the past decade,
every advanced nation has had major business scandals, and in every
case executives have managed to shake the foundation of their society
precisely by following Friedman's advice [of profit first].
The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what
they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed.
It's good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop talking
of competition, this doesn't mean they advocate it, and if they call
genes selfish, this doesn't mean that genes actually are. Genes
can't be any more "selfish" than a river can be "angry," or sun rays
"loving." At most, [little chunks of DNA] are "self-promoting,"
because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of
themselves.
The animal kingdom is full of traits that evolved for one reason but
are also used for others. When it comes to behavior, too, the
original function doesn't always tell us how and why a behavior will
be used in daily life. Behavior enjoys motivational autonomy.
My main point is that even if a trait evolved for reason X, it may
very well be used in daily life for reasons X, Y, and Z. Offering
assistance to others evolved to serve self-interest, which it does if
aimed at close relatives or group mates willing to return the favor.
This is the way natural selection operates: It produces behavior
that, on average and in the long run, benefits those showing it. But
this doesn't mean that humans or animals only help one another for
selfish reasons. The reasons relevant for evolution don't
necessarily restrict the actor.
This is why the selfish-gene metaphor is so tricky. By injecting
psychological terminology into a discussion of gene evolution, the
two levels that biologists work so hard to keep apart are slammed
together. Clouding the distinction between genes and motivations has
led to an exceptionally cynical view of human and animal behavior.
Believe it or not, empathy is commonly presented as an illusion,
something that not even humans truly possess.
Modern psychology and neuroscience fail to back these bleak views.
We're preprogrammed to reach out. Empathy is an automated response
over which we have limited control. We can suppress it, mentally
block it, or fail to act on it, but except for a tiny percentage of
humans--known as psychopaths--no one is emotionally immune to
another's situation. The fundamental yet rarely asked question is:
Why did natural selection design our brains so that we're in tune
with our fellow human beings, feeling distress at their distress and
pleasure at their pleasure?
Aggression was my first topic of study, and I'm fully aware that
there's no shortage of it in the primates. It was only later that I
became interested in conflict resolution and cooperation.
Pure, unconditional trust and cooperation are naive and detrimental,
whereas unconstrained greed can only lead to the sort of dog-eat-dog
world that Skilling advocated at Enron until it collapsed under its
own mean-spirited weight.
If biology is to inform government and society, the least we should
do is get the full picture, drop the cardboard version that is Social
Darwinism, and look at what evolution has actually put into place.
Ideologies come and go, but human nature is here to stay.
Three paradoxes in American politics:
* Accepting Social Darwinism while rejecting biological Darwinism.
* Accepting Social Darwinism in spite of professed Christian values.
* The emphasis on economic freedom triggers both the best and worst
in people.
# Chapter 3, Bodies Talking to Bodies
[Laughter and yawning are infectious even across species.] Yawn
contagion reflects the power of unconscious synchrony, which is as
deeply ingrained in us as in many other animals.
This is precisely where empathy and sympathy start--not in the higher
regions of imagination, or the ability to consciously reconstruct how
we would feel if we were in someone else's situation. It began much
simpler, with the synchronization of bodies...
Some of these examples are more complex than mere coordination: They
involve assuming the perspective of someone else. Or, as in
Goodall's and my family's account, alerting another to the situation
of a third. The one thread that runs through all of these examples,
however, is coordination. All animals that live together face this
task, and synchrony is the key. It is the oldest form of adjustment
to others. Synchrony, in turn, builds upon the ability to map one's
own body onto that of another, and make the other's movement one's
own, which is exactly why someone else's laugh or yawn makes us laugh
or yawn. Yawn contagion thus offers a hint at how we relate to
others. Remarkably, children with autism are immune to the yawns of
others, thus highlighting the social disconnect that defines their
condition.
Imitation is an anthropoid forte, as reflected in the verb "to ape."
Spontaneous imitation: imitating another without gains in mind.
[Experiments show that ape imitation happens via identifying with one
another and absorbing body movements, not via knowledge (technical
know-how).]
In order to learn from others, apes need to see actual fellow apes.
Imitation requires identification with a body of flesh and blood.
We're beginning to realize how much human and animal cognition runs
via the body. Instead of our brain being like a little computer that
orders the body around, the body-brain relation is a two-way street.
The body produces internal sensations and communicates with other
bodies, out of which we construct social connections and an
appreciation of the surrounding reality. Bodies insert themselves
into everything we perceive or think.
The field of "embodied" cognition is still very much in its infancy,
but has profound implications for how we look at human relations.
Body-mapping is mostly hidden and unconscious...
Identification is even more striking at moments of high emotion.
Not only do we mimic those with whom we identify, but mimicry in turn
strengthens the bond. Human mothers and children play games of
clapping hands either against each other or together in the same
rhythm. These are games of synchronization. And what do lovers do
when they first meet? They stroll long distances side by side, eat
together, laugh together, dance together. Being in sync has a
bonding effect. Think about dancing. Partners complement each
other's moves, anticipate them, or guide each other through their own
movements.
This connectedness is no secret. We explicitly emphasize it in an
art form that is literally universal. Just as there are no human
cultures without language, there are none that lack music. Music
engulfs us and affects our mood so that, if listened to by many
people a once, the inevitable outcome is mood convergence. The
entire audience gets uplifted, melancholic, reflective, and so on.
Music seems designed for this purpose. [There are always outliers,
such as deaf people or neuro-diverse people who perceive audio
differently than others. For these people, the mood may be quite
different.]
When Katy Payne offered us the image of a human mother resonating
with her acrobat child, she unwittingly used the same example as the
German psychologist responsible for the modern concept of empathy.
We're in suspense watching a high-wire artist, said Theodor Lipps
(1851-1914), because we vicariously enter his body and thus share his
experience. We're on the rope with him. The German language
elegantly captures this process in a single noun: Einfuehlung
(feeling into). Later, Lipps offered empatheia as its Greek
equivalent, which means experiencing strong affection or passion.
British and American psychologists embraced the later term, which
became "empathy."
Such identification, argued Lipps, cannot be reduced to any other
capacities, such as learning, association, or reasoning. Empathy
offers direct access to "the foreign self." How strange that we need
to go back one century to learn about the nature of empathy in the
writings of a long-forgotten psychologist. Lipps offered a bottom-up
account, that is, one that starts from the basics, rather than the
top-down explanations often favored by psychologists and
philosophers. The latter tend to view empathy as a cognitive affair
based on our estimation of how others might feel given how we would
feel under similar circumstances. But can this explain the immediacy
of our reactions?
Science is coming around to Lipp's position, but this was not the
case yet when Swedish psychologist Ulf Dimberg began publishing on
involuntary empathy in the early 1990s. He ran into stiff resistance
from proponents of the more cognitive view. Dimberg demonstrated
that we don't decide to be empathetic--we simply are.
Lipps called empathy an "instinct," meaning that we're born with it.
Gender differences usually follow a pattern of overlapping bell
curves. Men and women differ on average, but quite a few men are
more empathetic than the average women, and quite a few women are
less empathetic than the average man. With age, the empathy levels
of men and women seem to converge.
The evolution of attachment came with something the planet had never
seen before: a feeling brain. The limbic system was added to the
brain, allowing emotions, such as affection and pleasure. This paved
the way for family life, friendships, and other caring relationships.
The central importance of social bonding is hard to deny. We have a
tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a
quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life
sciences hold a more mundane view: It's all about security, social
companionships, and a full belly. ... Our nobler strivings come into
play only once the baser ones have been fulfilled. If attachment and
empathy are as fundamental as proposed, we had better pay close
attention to them in any discussion of human nature.
Before going any further, I must warn that reading up on the science
of animal empathy can be a challenge for animal lovers. To see how
animals react to the pain of others, investigators have often
produced the pain themselves. I don't necessarily approve of these
practices, and don't apply them myself, but it would be foolish to
ignore the discoveries they've produced. The good news is that most
of this research was carried out decades ago, and is unlikely to be
repeated today.
Oscar the Cat stares at us from a photograph of the prestigious New
England Journal of Medicine along with an admiring description by a
fellow expert. The author relates how Oscar makes his daily rounds
at a geriatric clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, for patients with
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other illnesses. The two-year-old cat
carefully sniffs and observes each patient, strolling from room to
room. When he decides that someone is about to die, he curls up
beside them, purring and gently nuzzling them. He leaves the room
only after the patient has taken her or his last breath.
Oscar's predictions have been so dependable that the hospital staff
counts on them. If he enters a room and leaves again, they know the
patient's time isn't up yet. But as soon as Oscar starts one of his
vigils, a nurse will pick up the phone to call family members, who
then hurry to the hospital to be present while their loved one passes
away. The cat has predicted the deaths of more than twenty-five
patients with greater accuracy than any human expert. The tribute to
the tomcat states: "No one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays
a visit and stays awhile."
(TXT) Oscar therapy cat @Wikipedia
The sight of another person's state awakens within us hidden memories
of similar states that we've experienced. I don't mean our conscious
memories, but an automatic reactivation of neural circuits. Seeing
someone in pain activates pain circuits to the point that we clench
our jaws, close our eyes, and even yell "Aw!" if we see a child
scrape its knee. Our behavior fits another's situation, because it
has become ours.
The discovery of mirror neurons boosts this whole argument at the
cellular level.
The automaticity of empathy has become a point of debate, though.
For the same reason that Dimberg ran into resistance showing
unconscious facial mimicry, some scientists profoundly dislike any
talk of automaticity, which they equate with "beyond control." We
can't afford automatic reactions, they say. If we were to empathize
with everybody in sight, we'd be in constant emotional turmoil. I'd
be the last to disagree, but is this really what "automaticity"
means? It refers to the speed and subconscious nature of a process,
not the inability to override it. My breathing, for instance, is
fully automated, yet I remain in charge. This very minute, I can
decide to stop breathing until I see purple. [This is a profound
point that relates focus on the breath to a path toward
self-realization.]
The ability to control and inhibit responses is not our only weapon
against rampant empathy. We also regulate it at its very source by
means of selective attention and identification. If you don't want
to be aroused by an image, just don't look at it. And even though we
identify easily with others, we don't do so automatically. For
example, we have a hard time identifying with people whom we see as
different or belonging to another group. ... Identification is such a
basic precondition for empathy that even mice shown pain contagion
only with their cage mates.
If identification with others opens the door for empathy, the absence
of identification closes that door.
Empathy can also be nipped in the bud. People who are perfectly
attached and sensitive in one context may act like monsters in
another.
But even if empathy is hardly inevitable, it is automatically aroused
with those who have been "preapproved" based on similarity or
closeness. With them, we can't help resonating.
... the face remains the emotion highway: It offers the quickest
connection to the other. Our dependence on this highway may explain
why people with immobile or paralyzed faces feel deeply alone, and
tend to become depressive, sometimes to the point of suicide.
# Chapter 4, Someone else's shoes
American Psychologist Lauren Wispe 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.
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.
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.
targeted helping: assistance geared toward another's specific
situation or need. [Basically the platinum rule: Do unto others as
they would have done unto them.] I believe that apes are masters at
this kind of insightful help.
Preconcern is an attraction toward anyone whose agony affects you.
It doesn't require imagining yourself in another's situation, and
indeed the capacity to do so may be wholly absent...
With preconcern in place, learning and intelligence can begin to add
layers of complexity, making the response even more discerning until
full-blown sympathy emerges. Sympathy implies actual concern for the
other and an attempt to understand what happened. 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.
... 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.
I like to call it [sympathy] "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.
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. Only when both processes are
combined can an organism move from preconcern to actual concern,
including the targeted helping typical of our close relatives [other
primates].
There is in fact so much evidence for altruism in apes that i will
pick just a handful of stories to drive my point home.
Commitment to others, emotional sensitivity to their situation, and
understanding what kind of help might be effective is such a human
combination that we often refer to it as being humane. I do believe
that our species is special in the degree to which it puts itself
into another's shoes. We grasp how others feel and what they might
need more fully than any other animal. Yet our species is not the
first or only one to help others insightfully. Behaviorally
speaking, the difference between a human and ape jumping into water
to save another isn't that great. Motivationally speaking, the
difference can't be that great, either.
Psychologists may want a rational evaluation, but children have a
hard time extracting themselves from a confrontation with a
salivating predator. Only by age of seven or eight do they manage
such distance... Instead of staying neutral, children tend toward
empathy. This primal connection takes over if anyone they feel close
to gets in trouble... Children read "hearts" well before they read
minds.
low-cost altruism is when one isn't going much out of the way for
someone else but still offers substantial help. Under hardship, the
cost of civility goes up.
Perhaps it is time to abandon the idea that individuals faced with
others in need decide whether to help, or not, by mentally tallying
up costs and benefits. These calculations have likely been made for
them by natural selection. Weight the consequences of behavior over
evolutionary time, it has endowed primates with empathy, which
ensures that they help others under the right circumstances. The
fact that empathy is most easily aroused by familiar partners
guarantees that assistance flows chiefly toward those close to the
actor. Occasionally, it may be applied outside this inner circle,
such as when apes help ducklings or humans, but generally primate
psychology has been designed to care about the welfare of family,
friends, and partners.
Humans are empathic with partners in a cooperative setting, but
"counterempathic" with competitors. Treated with hostility, we show
the opposite of empathy. Instead of smiling when the other smiles,
we grimace as if the other's pleasure disturbs us. When the other
shows signs of distress, on the other hand, we smile, as if we enjoy
their pain. ... So human empathy can be turned into something rather
unattractive if the other's welfare is NOT in our interest.
If helping is based on what we feel, or how we connect with the
victim, doesn't it boil down to helping ourselves? If we feel a
"warm glow," a pleasurable feeling at improving the plight of others,
doesn't this in fact make our assistance selfish? The problem is
that if we call this "selfish," then literally everything becomes
selfish and the word loses its meaning. Yes, we derive pleasure from
helping others, but since this pleasure reaches us VIA the other and
ONLY via the other, it is genuinely other-oriented.
# Chapter 5, The elephant in the room
With an anatomy so different from ours, the ease with which elephants
arouse human sympathy poses yet another version of the correspondence
problem. How do we map their bodies onto ours?
Advanced empathy is unthinkable without a sense of self, which is
what mirror tests get at. Human babies don't recognize themselves in
a mirror right away. A one-year-old is as confused as many animals
about the "other" in the mirror, often smiling at, patting, even
kissing their reflection. They usually pass the so-called rouge test
in front of the mirror by age two, rubbing off a dab of makeup that
has been put on their face. They don't know about the dab until they
look into the mirror, so when they touch it, we can be sure they
connect their reflection with themselves.
Around the same time children pass the rouge test, they become
sensitive to how others look at them, show embarrassment, use
personal pronouns, and develop pretend play in which they act out
little scenarios with toys and dolls. These developments are linked.
Children passing the rouge test use more "I" and "me" and show more
pretend play than children failing this test.
Since all of these abilities emerge at the same time as mirror
self-recognition, I'll speak of the co-emergence hypothesis.
Advanced empathy belongs to the same package. Why should caring for
others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague
ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day
resolve.
Like apes, [the elephants] used the mirror to inspect parts of their
bodies that they normally never see. They opened their mouths wide
in front of the mirror, feeling into them with their trunks. The
great thing, compared with dolphins, is that the elephant is an
animal that can touch itself. [An elephant named Happy passed the
test. Two more elephants failed the test.] This is less surprising
than it may seem because for even the most intensely tested primate,
the chimpanzee, the proportion of individuals passing the rouge test
is far from 100 percent, and in some studies it is less than half.
But the funniest opening line came from a widely carried Associated
Press piece: "If you're Happy and you know it, pat your head."
... as it turns out, all mammals with mirror self-recognition possess
a rare type of brain cell.
A decade ago, a team of neuroscientists showed that so-called Ven
Economo neurons, or VEN cells, are limited to the hominoid (human and
ape) brain. VEN cells differ from regular neurons in that they are
long and spindle-like. They reach further and deeper into the brain,
making them ideal to connect distant layers. ... In the dissection of
the brains of many species, these cells were found only in humans and
their immediate relatives, but were absent in all other primates,
such as monkeys. The cells are particularly large and abundant in
our own species, and are found in a part of the brain critical for
traits that we consider "humane." Damage to this particular part
results in a special kind of dementia marked by the loss of
perspective-taking, empathy, embarrassment, humor, and
future-orientation. Most important, these patients also lack
self-awareness.
In other words, when humans lose their VEN cells, they lose about
every capacity that's part of the co-emergence hypothesis. It's
unclear if these particular cells themselves are responsible, but it
is thought that they underpin the required brain circuitry.
... the latest discovery by Allman's team is that VEN cells are not
limited to humans and apes. These neurons have made their
independent appearance in only two other branches of the mammalian
tree, which happen to be the cetaceans (dolphins and whales) and
elephants.
[The author studied consolation in monkeys.] But to our surprise, we
found nothing! Whereas reconciliation, in which former opponents
come together, occurs in all monkeys studied, consolation is totally
absent.
There are other indicators of a lack of empathy in monkeys, such as
the "exasperating" stories of baboon watchers in the Okavango Delta
of Botswana about adults ignoring the fear of youngsters facing a
water crossing. Standing panicky at the water's edge, young baboons
risk getting killed by predators, yet their mothers rarely return to
retrieve them. They just keep traveling. It's not that a baboon
mother is entirely indifferent:
"She appears genuinely concerned by its agitated screams. But seems
to fail to understand the cause of this agitation. She behaves as if
she assumes if she can make the water crossing, everyone can make the
water crossing. Other perspectives cannot be entertained."
All of this suggests intact emotional contagion but an inability to
adopt another's point of view. This is a familiar deficit in many
animals as well as young children.
The limited sensitivity of monkeys to others seems due more to
cognitive than emotional factors. Monkeys do feel the distress of
others but have no good grasp of what's going on with them. They
can't step back from the situation to figure out the other's needs.
Every monkey lives in its own little bubble.
Monkeys are able to use a mirror to locate food. Many a dog can do
the same... It is specifically the relation with their own body,
their own self, that they fail to grasp.
On the other hand, the standard claim that monkeys see a stranger in
the mirror is questionable. They treated their mirror image quite
differently from real monkeys [behind plexiglass] and did so within
seconds. They didn't need any time to notice the difference.
Apparently, there are many levels of mirror understanding, and our
[possessive] monkeys never confused their reflection with another
monkey's. ... For me, the most telling finding of the whole study was
that when there was a stranger on the other side, mothers held their
infants tight, not letting them wander around. During mirror tests,
on the other hand, they let their kids roam freely. Given how
conservative mother monkeys are when it comes to danger, this
convinced me more than anything that their reflection was no stranger
to them.
... a recent study has shown mirror recognition in magpies.
Follow-up research with Nathan Emery at Cambridge University led to
the intriguing claim that "it takes a thief to know a thief." Jays
apparently extrapolate from their own experiences to the intentions
of others, so that those who in the past have misappropriated the
caches of others are especially keen on keeping the same thing from
happening to themselves. Perhaps this process, too, requires the
ability to parse the self from the other. As the ultimate bird
thief, the magpie may have an even greater need to guess the
intentions of others. Curiously, their self-recognition may
therefore relate to a life of crime.
What makes information-sharing interesting is that it relies on the
same comparison of one's own perspective with that of someone
else--detecting something that others need to know about--which also
underlies advanced empathy.
If i point out an animal in the distance and say "zebra," and you
disagree, saying "lion," we have a problem that, at other times, may
get us into deep trouble. It's a uniquely human problem, but so
important to us that the diectic gestures and language evolution are
closely inter-twined.
# Chapter 6, Fair is fair
We walk on two legs, a social and a selfish one. We tolerate
differences in status and income only up to a degree, and begin to
root for the underdog as soon as this boundary is overstepped. We
have a deeply ingrained sense of fairness, which derives from our
long history as egalitarians.
[Unlike other apes,] Our species has a distinctly subversive streak
that ensures that, however much we look up to those in power, we're
always happy to bring them down a peg.
Even Sigmund Freud recognized this unconscious desire, speculating
that human history began when frustrated sons banded together to
eliminate their imperious father, who kept all women away from them.
The sexual connotations of Freud's origin story may serve as a
metaphor for all our political and economic dealings, a connection
confirmed by brain research. Wanting to see how humans make
financial decisions, economists found that while weighing monetary
risks, the same areas in men's brains light up as when they're
watching titillating sexual images. In fact, after having seen such
images, men throw all caution overboard and gamble more money than
they normally would. In the words of one neuroscientist, "The link
between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to
men's evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract
women."
Frank believes that a purely selfish outlook is, ironically, not in
our own best interest. It narrows our view to the point that we're
reluctant to engage in the long-term emotional commitments that have
served our lineage so well for millions of years. If we truly were
the cunning schemers that economists say we are, we'd forever be
hunting hare, whereas our prey would be stag.
It's the choice between the small rewards of individualism and the
large rewards of collective action. Productive partnerships require
a history of give-and-take and proven loyalty. Only then do we
accomplish goals larger than ourselves.
The difference is dramatic. In 1953, eight mountaineers got into
trouble on K2, one of the highest and most dangerous peaks in the
world. In -40 degrees Celsius temperatures, one member of the team
developed a blood clot in his leg. Even though it was
life-threatening for the others to descend with an incapacitated
comrade, no one considered leaving him behind. The solidarity of
this group has gone down in history as legendary. Contrast this with
the recent drama, in 2008, in which eleven mountaineers perished on
K2 after having abandoned their common cause. One survivor lamented
the drive for self-preservation: "Everybody was fighting for himself,
and I still don't understand why everybody were [sic] leaving each
other."
The first team was hunting stag, the second hare.
Trust is defined as reliance on the other's truthfulness or
cooperation, or at least the expectation that the other won't dupe
you. Trust is the lubricant that makes a society run smoothly. If
we had to test everyone all the time before doing something together,
we'd never achieve anything. We use past experiences to decide whom
to trust, and sometimes rely on generalized experience with members
of our society.
The main message of this study, and many others, is that our species
is more trusting than predicted by rational-choice theory.
Confidence in others may be fine in a one-shot game with little
money, but in the long run we need to be more careful. The problem
with any cooperative system is that there are those who try to get
more out of it than they put in. The whole system will collapse if
we don't put a halt to freeloading, which is why humans are naturally
cautious when they deal with others.
Strange things happen if this caution is lacking. A tiny proportion
of humans is born with a genetic defect that makes them open and
trusting to anyone. These are patient with Williams syndrome, a
condition caused by the nonexpression of a relatively small number of
genes on the seventh chromosome. Williams syndrome patients are
infectiously friendly, highly gregarious, and incredibly verbose.
Even though it is hard to resist these charming children, they lack
friends. The reason is that they trust everyone indiscriminately and
love the whole world equally. We withdraw from such people since
we don't know whether we can count on them. Will they be grateful
for received favors, will they support us if we get into a fight,
will they help us achieve our goals? Probably none of the above,
which means that they don't have anything that we're looking for in a
friend. They also lack the basic social skill of detecting the
intentions of others. They never assume wrong intentions.
Williams syndrome is an unfortunate experiment of nature that shows
that just being friendly and trusting, which is what these patients
excel at, is not sufficient for lasting ties: We expect people to be
discriminating. That a small number of genes can cause such a defect
tells us that the normal tendency to be circumspect is inborn. Our
species carefully chooses between trust and distrust, as do many
other species.
Large cities are obviously a different story. Think back to 1997,
when a Danish mother left her fourteenth-month-old girl in a stroller
outside a Manhattan restaurant. Her child was taken into custody and
placed in foster care, while the mother ended up in jail. For most
Americans, she was either crazy or criminally negligent, but in fact
the mother merely did what Danes are used to. Denmark has incredibly
low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is
fresh air. The mother counted on safety and good air, whereas New
York offered neither. The charges against her were eventually
dropped.
The faith that Danes unthinkingly place in one another is known as
"social capital," which may well be the most precious capital there
is. In survey after survey, Danes have the world's highest happiness
score.
But an even simpler solution is to avoid those who are short on
gratitude. If one can choose between multiple partners, why not just
go with the good ones, who can be trusted to respect past exchanges
rather than those lousy freeloaders whom we can all do without? We
are like the clientele of a market where we pick and choose our
partnerships, squeezing and smelling them the way the French do with
cantaloupes. We want the best ones.
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?
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 again. 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.
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.
Fairness is viewed differently by the haves and have-nots. 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.
The potential for green-eyed reactions is the chief reason why we
strive for fairness even when we have the advantage.
Privileges are always enjoyed under a cloud. Human history is filled
with "let them eat cake" moments that create resentment, sometimes
boiling over into bloody revolt. The main reason humans seek
fairness, I believe, is to prevent such negative reactions.
> If you want peace, work for justice. --H.L. Mencken, Sage of
> Baltimore.
What confuses some is that fairness has two faces. Income equality
is one, but the connection between effort and reward is another. Our
[possessive] monkeys are sensitive to both, as are we.
Richard Wilkinson, the British epidemiologist and health expert who
first gathered these statistics, has summarized them in two words:
"inequality kills." He believes that the income gaps produce social
gaps. They tear societies apart by reducing mutual trust, increasing
violence, and inducing anxieties that compromise the immune systems
of both the rich and the poor. Negative effects permeate the entire
society...
The context of an industrialized multilayered society is new but the
emotional undercurrent of these encounters is a primate universal.
Modern society taps into a long history of hierarchy formation in
which those lower on the scale not only fear the higher-ups but also
resent them.
Robin Hood had it right. Humanity's deepest wish is to spread the
wealth.
# Chapter 7, Crooked timber
Asked by a religious magazine what I would change about the human
species "if I were God," I had to think hard. Every biologist knows
the law of unintended consequences, a close cousin of Murphy's law.
Any time we fiddle with an ecosystem by introducing new species, we
create a mess.
We have seen in Romanian orphanages what happens when children are
subjected to the baby-factory ideas of behaviorist psychology. I
remain deeply skeptical of any "restructuring" of human nature even
though the idea has enjoyed great appeal over the ages.
Humans are bipolar apes. We have something of the gentle, sexy
bonobo, which we may like to emulate, but not too much; otherwise the
world might turn into one giant hippie fest of flower power and free
love. Happy we might be, but productive perhaps not. [Sounds OK to
me!] And our species also has something of the brutal, domineering
chimpanzee, a side we may wish to suppress, but not completely,
because how else would we conquer new frontiers and defend our
borders?
So strange as it may sound, I'd be reluctant to radically change the
human condition. But if I could change one thing, it would be to
expand the range of fellow feeling. The greatest problem today, with
so many different groups rubbing shoulders on a crowded planet, is
excessive loyalty to one's own nation, group, or religion. Humans
are capable of deep disdain for anyone who looks different or thinks
another way, even between neighboring groups with almost identical
DNA, such as the Israelis and Palestinians.
Asked why he never talked about the number of civilians killed in the
Iraq War, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld answered: "Well, we
don't do body counts on other people."
Empathy for "other people" is the one commodity the world is lacking
more than oil. It would be great if we could create at least a
modicum of it. ... If I were God, I'd work on the reach of empathy.
Empathy is multilayered like a Russian doll, with at its core the
ancient tendency to match another's emotional state (emotional
contagion). Around this core, evolution has built ever more
sophisticated capacities... Concern for others (consolation).
Perspective-Taking (targeted helping).
I derive great optimism from empathy's evolutionary antiquity. It
makes it a robust trait that will develop in virtually every human
being so that society can count on it and try to foster and grow it.
It is a human universal. In this regard, it's like our tendency to
form social hierarchies, which we share with so many animals, and
which we don't need to teach or explain to children: They arrange
themselves spontaneously into pecking orders before we know it.
Have you heard of an organization that appeals to empathy in order to
fight the lack of it? That the world needs such an organization,
known as Amnesty International, says a lot about the dark side of our
species.
In and of itself, taking another's perspective is a neutral capacity:
It can serve both constructive and destructive ends. Crimes against
humanity often rely on precisely this capacity.
Torture requires an appreciation of what others think or feel.
[Examples of torture techniques, they all rest] on our ability to
assume their [the victim's] viewpoint and realize what will hurt or
aggravate them the most. Cruelty, too, rests on perspective-taking.
The comparison with snakes is apt, since psychopaths seem to lack the
Russian doll's old mammalian core. They do possess all of its
cognitive outer layers, allowing them to understand what others want
and need as well as what their weaknesses are, but they couldn't care
less about how their behavior impacts them.
A lot of trouble in the world can be traced to people whose Russian
doll is an empty shell. Like aliens from another planet, they are
intellectually capable of adopting another's viewpoint without any of
the accompanying feelings. They successfully fake empathy.
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. 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 tried 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.
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.
Mencius, a follower of Confucius, 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. We care more about what
we see firsthand than about what remains out of sight. 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.
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.
One of the most potent weapons of the abolitionist movement were
drawings of slave ships and their human cargo, which were
disseminated to generate sympathy and moral outrage. The role of
compassion in society is therefore not just one of sacrificing time
and money to relieve the plight of others, but also of pushing a
political agenda that recognizes everyone's dignity. Such an agenda
helps not merely those who need it most, but also the larger whole.
One can't expect high levels of trust in a society with huge income
disparities, huge insecurities, and a disenfranchised underclass.
And remember, trust is what citizens value most in their society.
author: Waal, F. B. M. de (Frans B. M.), 1948-
(HTM) detail: http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/empathy/
LOC: BF575.E55 W3
tags: book,inspiration,non-fiction
title: The Age of Empathy
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) inspiration
(DIR) non-fiction