The Age of Empathy (11 page)

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. Dancing screams “We’re in synchrony!” which is the way animals have been bonding for millions of years.

When a human experimenter imitates a young child’s movements (such as banging a toy on a table or jumping up and down exactly like the child), he elicits more smiles and attention than if he shows the same infantile behavior independently of the child. In romantic situations, people feel better about dates who lean back when they lean back, cross their legs when they do, pick up their glass when they do, and so on. The attraction to mimicry even translates into money. The Dutch may be notoriously stingy, but tips at restaurants are twice as high for waitresses who repeat their clients’ orders (“You asked for a salad without onions”) rather than just exclaim “My favorite!” or “Coming up!” Humans love the sound of their own echo.

When I see synchrony and mimicry—whether it concerns yawning, laughing, dancing, or aping—I see social connection and bonding. I see an old herd instinct that has been taken up a notch. It goes beyond the tendency of a mass of individuals galloping in the same direction, crossing the river at the same time. The new level requires that one pay better attention to what others do and absorb how they do it. For example, I knew an old monkey matriarch with a curious drinking style. Instead of the typical slurping with her lips from the surface, she’d dip her entire underarm in the water, then lick the hair on her arm. Her children started doing the same, and then her grandchildren. The entire family was easy to recognize.

There is also the case of a male chimpanzee who had injured his fingers in a fight and hobbled around leaning on a bent wrist instead of his knuckles. Soon all of the young chimpanzees in the colony were walking the same way in single file behind the unlucky male. Like chameleons changing their color to match the environment, primates automatically copy their surroundings.

When I was a boy, my friends in the south of the Netherlands always ridiculed me when I came home from vacations in the north, where I played with boys from Amsterdam. They told me that I talked
funny. Unconsciously, I’d return speaking a poor imitation of the harsh northern accent. The way our bodies—including voice, mood, posture, and so on—are influenced by surrounding bodies is one of the mysteries of human existence, but one that provides the glue that holds entire societies together. It’s also one of the most underestimated phenomena, especially in disciplines that view humans as rational decision makers. Instead of each individual independently weighing the pros and cons of his or her own actions, we occupy nodes within a tight network that connects all of us in both body and mind.

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 at once, the inevitable outcome is mood convergence. The entire audience gets uplifted, melancholic, reflective, and so on. Music seems designed for this purpose. I’m not necessarily thinking here of what music has become in Western concert halls with their stuffy, dressed-up audiences who aren’t even tapping their feet lest they be considered undignified. But even these audiences experience mood convergence: Mozart’s
Requiem
obviously affects a crowd differently than does a Strauss waltz. I’m thinking mostly of pop concerts at which thousands sing along with their idol while waving candles or cell phones through the air, or blues festivals, marching bands, gospel choirs, jazz funerals, even families singing “Happy Birthday,” all of which permit a more visceral, bodily reaction to the music. At the end of a Christmas dinner in Atlanta, for instance, our whole table sang along melodramatically to
Elvis’ Christmas Album.
The combination of great food, wine, friendship, and chant was intoxicating in more than one sense: We swung and laughed together, and ended up in the same spirit.

I once played piano in a band. It would be an understatement to say that we had little success, but I did learn that performing together requires role-taking, generosity, and being in tune—literally—to a degree found in few other endeavors. Our favorite song was “House
of the Rising Sun” by The Animals, which we tried to invest with as much drama as we could. We felt the song’s doom and gloom without knowing exactly what kind of house we were singing about, which I figured out only years later. What stuck with me, though, was the unifying effect of playing together.

Animal examples are not hard to come by, and here I don’t just mean a howling pack of wolves, male chimpanzees hooting together to impress their neighbors, or the well-known dawn choruses of howler monkeys—said to be the loudest mammals on earth. I am referring to siamangs, which I heard for the first time in the jungles of Sumatra. Siamangs are large black gibbons who sing high up in the trees when the forest starts to heat up. It’s a happy, melodious sound that touched me at a much deeper level than birdsong, probably because it is produced by a mammal. Siamang song is more full-bodied than that of any bird.

Their song usually starts with a few loud whoops, which gradually build into ever louder and more elaborate sequences amplified by their balloonlike throat sacs. Their sound carries for miles. At some point, the human listener correctly decides that a single animal can’t be producing it. For many animals, it’s the male’s job to keep intruders out, but with siamangs—which live in small family groups—both sexes work toward this end. The female produces high-pitched barks, whereas the male often utters piercing screams that at short range will put every hair on your body on end. Their wild and raucous songs grow in perfect unison into what has been called “the most complicated opus sung by a land vertebrate other than man.” At the same time that the duet communicates “Stay out!” to other members of their species, it also proclaims “We’re one.”

Like cart-pulling horses that work against each other before they work together, it takes time for siamangs to sing in harmony, and harmony may be critical to hold on to a partner or territory. Other siamangs can hear how close a pair is, and will move in if they discern discord. This is why German primatologist Thomas Geissmann noted: “Leaving a partner doesn’t appear to be very attractive because
the duets of fresh couples are noticeably poor.” He found that couples that sang together a lot also spent more time together and synchronized their activities better.

One can literally tell a good siamang marriage by its song.

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:
Einfühlung
(feeling into). Later, Lipps offered
empatheia
as its Greek equivalent, which means experiencing strong affection or passion. British and American psychologists embraced the latter term, which became “empathy.”

We identify with a high-wire artist to the point that we participate in every step he takes.

I prefer the term
Einfühlung
since it conveys the movement of one individual projecting him- or herself into another. Lipps was the first to recognize the special channel we have to others. We can’t feel anything that happens outside ourselves, but by unconsciously merging self and other, the other’s experiences echo within us. We feel them as if they’re our own. 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? Imagine we’re watching the fall of a circus acrobat and are capable only of empathy based on the recall of previous experiences. My guess is that we wouldn’t react until the moment the acrobat lies in a pool of blood on the ground. But of course this is not what happens. The audience’s reaction is absolutely instantaneous: Hundreds of spectators utter “ooh” and “aah” at the
very instant
that the acrobat’s foot slips. Acrobats often perform such slips on purpose, without any intention of falling, precisely because they know how much their audience is with them every step of the way. I sometimes wonder where Cirque du Soleil would be without this instant connection.

Science is coming around to Lipps’s position, but this wasn’t 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 empathic—we simply are. Having pasted small electrodes onto his subjects’ faces so as to register the tiniest muscle movements, he presented them with pictures of angry and happy faces on a computer screen. Humans frown in reaction to angry faces and pull up the corners of their mouths in reaction to happy ones. This by itself was not his most critical finding, however, because such mimicry could be deliberate. The revolutionary part was that he got the same reaction if the pictures flashed on the screen too briefly for conscious perception. Asked what they had seen after such a subliminal presentation, subjects knew nothing about happy or sad faces but had still mimicked them.

Expressions on a screen not only make our face muscles twitch, they also induce emotions. Those who had been exposed to happy faces reported feeling better than those who had been exposed to angry ones, even though neither group had any idea of what they had
seen. This means that we’re dealing with true empathy, albeit a rather primitive kind known as
emotional contagion.

Lipps called empathy an “instinct,” meaning that we’re born with it. He didn’t speculate about its evolution, but it’s now believed that empathy goes back far in evolutionary time, much further than our species. It probably started with the birth of parental care. During 200 million years of mammalian evolution, females sensitive to their offspring outreproduced those who were cold and distant. When pups, cubs, calves, or babies are cold, hungry, or in danger, their mother needs to react instantaneously. There must have been incredible selection pressure on this sensitivity: Females who failed to respond never propagated their genes.

A good illustration is a female chimpanzee, named Krom, whom I knew at a zoo. Krom was fond of infants, and cared well enough for them so long as she could see them. Being deaf, however, she failed to respond to the soft yelps and whimpers of tiny infants in trouble, such as when they can’t reach the nipple, are in danger of losing their grip on Mom’s hair, or feel squeezed. I once saw Krom sit down on her infant and fail to get up when it burst out screaming. She reacted only upon noticing the worried reaction of
other
females. We ended up having another female adopt and raise this infant. Krom’s case taught me how critically important it is for a mammalian female to be in tune with her offspring’s every need.

Having descended from a long line of mothers who nursed, fed, cleaned, carried, comforted, and defended their young, we should not be surprised by gender differences in human empathy. They appear well before socialization: The first sign of emotional contagion—one baby crying when it hears another baby cry—is already more typical of baby girls than baby boys. Later on we see more gender differences. Two-year-old girls witnessing others in distress treat them with more concern than do boys of the same age. And in adulthood, women report stronger empathic reactions than men, which is one reason why women have been attributed a “tending instinct.”

None of this denies male empathy. Indeed, gender differences
usually follow a pattern of overlapping bell curves: Men and women differ on average, but quite a few men are more empathic than the average woman, and quite a few women are less empathic than the average man. With age, the empathy levels of men and women seem to converge. Some investigators even doubt that in adulthood there’s much difference left.