The Age of Empathy (15 page)

Let me illustrate the distinction between sympathy and empathy by revealing something about myself: I have more empathy than sympathy.
I’m not sure that this is a generalizable gender difference, but my wife seems to have equal amounts of both.

My profession depends on being in tune with animals. It would be terribly boring to watch them for hours without any identification, any intuition about what is going on, any ups and downs related to their ups and downs. Empathy is my bread and butter, and I have made many a discovery by closely following the lives of animals and trying to understand why they act the way they do. This requires that I get under their skin. I have no trouble doing so, love and respect animals, and do believe that this makes me a better student of their behavior.

But this is not sympathy. I have plenty of this as well, but it is less spontaneous, more subject to calculation, sometimes quite selfish. I am no Abraham Lincoln, who apparently interrupted a journey to pull a squealing pig from the mud. I don’t necessarily stop for a lost dog or cat, whereas my wife, Catherine, picks up any stray she sees and works hard to locate its owner. If I know that one of my primates is gravely injured or ill—and under veterinary care—I am able to put it out of my head if I’m busy with something else. My mind is compartmentalized. Catherine worries without interruption about anyone who has fallen ill, whether human or animal, and will do anything within her power to take care of them. She’s far more generous than I am. Perhaps I am more Kantian: thinking what’s the right thing to do, weighing the pros and cons. Instead of flowing straight from my empathy, my sympathy takes a detour through a rational filter.

I recognize myself in a famous experiment, mischievously carried out on (male) seminary students. The students were ordered to walk to another building to lecture on the Good Samaritan, a religious outcast in a biblical parable who assists a man left for dead by the side of the road. On their way to the lecture hall, the students would pass a slumped person planted in an alleyway. The groaning “victim” would sit still with eyes closed and head down. Only 40 percent of the budding theologists asked what was wrong and offered assistance. Students who had been urged to make haste helped less than students
with more time. Indeed, some students hurrying to explain the quintessential helping story of our civilization literally stepped over the stranger in need.

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. When, in the 1970s, I first saw chimpanzees behave as solicitously as Yoni—albeit not to humans, but to one another—I labeled their behavior “consolation.” You’d think that this was when my interest in empathy started, but instead of studying consolation in detail, I moved on. I was too fascinated by the way chimps make peace after fights with a kiss and embrace to pay attention to these other friendly contacts. It took me two decades to return to consolation, which happened when I realized how perfectly it fits the definitions of what psychologists call “sympathetic concern.”

I have seen literally thousands of consolations—that’s how common the behavior is. We have a massive computer database, compiled over many years, to tell us what happens after spontaneous fights among chimpanzees. Consolation is the most typical outcome. A victim of aggression, who not long ago had to run for her life, or scream to recruit support, now sits alone, pouting, licking an injury, or looking dejected. She perks up when a bystander comes over to give her a hug, groom her, or carefully inspect her injury. Consolations can be quite emotional, with both chimps literally screaming in each other’s arms. Combing through the data to determine who shows consolation to whom, we found that it’s mostly done by friends and relatives of the harmed party. Like Yoni, our chimps are sensitive to the plight of others, and go out of their way to alleviate suffering.

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. I had to think of this when seeing the picture of Yerkes chatting with Kohts, because those two were soul mates when it came to animal emotions. In one of his books, Yerkes complained how sympathy was the one topic he wasn’t allowed to talk about despite his conviction that apes possessed it. He had often seen apes provide solace, even very young ones: “Impressive indeed is the thoughtfulness of the ordinarily carefree and irresponsible little chimpanzee for ill or injured companions.” Yerkes rightly feared that he might be accused of idealizing animals if he told too many of these stories, especially about his favorite bonobo, Prince Chim. Of all the great apes, bonobos seem to have the highest level of empathy. In the 1920s, the species distinction between bonobos and chimpanzees was yet to be made, however, which is why Yerkes thought Prince Chim was just a special chimpanzee.

Of the many instances of bonobo sympathy known to me, perhaps the most remarkable one concerns a reaction to a bird. I’ve described this event before and normally would not repeat it here but there was an intriguing follow-up. The event concerns Kuni, who had found a stunned bird that had hit the glass wall of her zoo enclosure. Kuni took the bird up to the highest point of a tree to set it free. She spread its wings as if it were a little airplane, and sent it out into the air, thus showing a helping action geared to the needs of a bird. Obviously, such helping would not have worked for another bonobo, but for a bird it seemed perfectly appropriate. Kuni’s reaction was probably based on what she knew about birds, seeing them fly by every day.

The parallel story that I recently heard concerned a bird, too. It happened at my old stomping ground, the Arnhem Zoo, where chimpanzees live on an island surrounded by a moat. The moat is full of life, such as fish, frogs, turtles, and ducks. One day, a couple of juvenile chimps had picked up a little duckling and were swinging it
around, being far too rough with it, competing over who could play with it. When they tried to grab one of the other ducklings, which were wisely hurrying back to the water, an adult male ran over in an intimidating manner and scattered the young apes. Before leaving the scene, he walked over to the last duckling still on land. With a quick hand movement, like that of a child playing marbles, he flicked it into the moat.

In this case, too, it was as if the ape imagined what might be best for a different organism, obviously having learned to associate ducks with water. I call this
targeted helping,
which is assistance geared toward another’s specific situation or need. I believe that apes are masters at this kind of insightful help. Yoni’s behavior toward Kohts was anything but exceptional: It is part of the strong sympathetic tendencies of apes recognized by those who work with them. We also don’t need to rely on anecdotes, such as Yoni’s or Kuni’s, since consolation and helping are so common that one can actually measure how apes act around distressed individuals and demonstrate that it’s quite different from their usual behavior. By now, consolation is a well-studied phenomenon, as solidly established as aggression or play.

It is unclear how widespread this phenomenon is in other animals, but man’s best friend, the dog, may need to be included. There are obviously many anecdotes of people who have received comfort from their dog in times of distress. Take Marley, the Labrador in John Grogan’s
Marley & Me,
who was notoriously destructive and boisterous, yet stood perfectly still and silently pressed his head against the belly of Grogan’s weeping wife, Jenny, after she had learned about her miscarriage. Charles Darwin relates how a particular dog would never walk by a basket where a sick friend, a cat, lay without giving her a few licks with his tongue. Darwin saw this as a sure sign of the dog’s kind feelings.

In the case of canines, too, we don’t necessarily need to rely on stories, since there are serious studies. The first one occurred unintentionally, when American psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler sought to determine at what age children begin to comfort family members
instructed to sob or cry “Ouch.” It turns out that children do so already at one year of age, long before language plays much of a role in their reactions. In the same study, the investigators accidentally discovered that household pets react similarly. Appearing as upset as the children by the distress-faking family members, the pets hovered over them, putting their heads in their laps with what looked like great concern.

But perhaps pets only act like this around humans—who feed and command them—but not with one another? This question was answered by a study modeled after those done on primates, which measured the aftermath of dog fights. Belgian biologists watched close to two thousand spontaneous fights among dogs released every day onto a meadow at a pet food company. After aggressive outbursts, nearby dogs would approach the contestants—most often the losers—to lick, nuzzle, sit together, or play with them. Doing so seemed to settle the group, which quickly resumed its usual activities.

The ancestor of the dog, the wolf, probably behaves the same way. If “man is wolf to man,” as Thomas Hobbes liked to say, we should therefore take this in the best possible way, including a tendency to comfort the whimpering victims of aggression.

In
Jarhead,
Anthony Swofford describes his time as a U.S. Marine in the Persian Gulf War. The day before they were going to fight an enemy believed to have chemical weapons, one of his buddies, Welty, organized a hugging session:

Comforting body contact is part of our mammalian biology, going back to maternal nursing, holding, and carrying, which is why we both seek and give it under stressful circumstances. People touch and hug at funerals, in hospitals around sick or injured loved ones, during wars and earthquakes, and following defeat in sports. One of the most famous images of a comforting hug is a grainy black-and-white photograph in which an American soldier tenderly holds the head of another against his chest. The latter’s friend had just been killed in action during the Korean War.

Consolation is a common response to distress, despair, or grief, such as between soldiers in the midst of war.

For his book
Two in Bed,
sociologist Paul Rosenblatt interviewed couples who had gone through the nightmare of losing a child, noting how they “quite often would tell me that they dealt with their grief by holding each other and talking together in bed at night.” Given what contact comfort does for our psychological well-being, one can only wonder at the “no-hug policy” of a middle school in Virginia. Students could be sent to the principal’s office for hugging, holding hands, or even high-fiving. Trying to stop inappropriate behavior, the school had come up with a rule that banned the most elementary expressions of affection.

When we comfort others—or for that matter when dogs or chimps do—what’s the motivation behind it? Some of it may be done to comfort ourselves. Seeing someone cry, we get upset, so by consoling the other, we also reassure ourselves. I am quite familiar with such behavior in young rhesus monkeys. Once, when an infant was bitten because it had accidentally landed on a dominant female, it screamed so incessantly that it was soon surrounded by other infants. I counted eight of them climbing on top of the poor victim, pushing, pulling, and shoving one another as well as the first infant. That obviously did
little to alleviate its fright. The monkeys’ response seemed automatic, as if they were as distraught as the victim and sought to comfort themselves as much as the other.

This can’t be the whole story, though. If these monkeys were just trying to calm themselves, why did they approach the victim? Why didn’t they run to their mothers? Why seek out the actual source of distress and not a guaranteed source of comfort? Surely, there was more going on than emotional contagion. The latter can explain a need for comfort, but not the magnetic pull toward a crying peer.

In fact, animals as well as young children often seek out distressed parties without any indication that they know what’s going on. They seem blindly attracted, like a moth to a flame. Even though we like to read concern about the other into their behavior, the required understanding may not be there. I will call this blind attraction
preconcern.
It is as if nature has endowed the organism with a simple behavioral rule: “If you feel another’s pain, get over there and make contact.”