The Age of Empathy (19 page)

What these apes did was far more complex than the choice between tokens faced by our monkeys. They needed to understand the other’s intentions and decide on the best solution for what the other
wanted. They showed targeted helping, just as apes do in everyday life. The basic motivation behind their assistance, however, was probably not so different from that of the monkeys: Both care about the well-being of those around them. Traditional views based on payoffs for the actor just can’t explain these results: For the monkeys prosocial choices didn’t yield any more rewards than selfish ones, and for the chimps, too, rewards made no difference.

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. Weighing 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. One study described reactions to a hostile experimenter as follows: “His euphoria produced dysphoria and his dysphoria produced euphoria.”

So, human empathy can be turned into something rather unattractive if the other’s welfare is
not
in our interest. Our reactions are far from indiscriminate, exactly as one would expect if our psychology evolved to promote within-group cooperation. We are biased toward those with whom we have, or expect to have, a positive
partnership. This unconscious bias replaces the calculations often assumed behind helping behavior. It’s not that we are incapable of calculations—we do sometimes help others based purely on expected returns, such as in business dealings—but most of the time human altruism, just like primate altruism, is emotionally driven.

When a tsunami hits people a world away, what makes us decide to send money, food, or clothes? A simple newspaper headline “Tsunami in Thailand Kills Thousands” won’t do the trick. No, we respond to the televised images of dead bodies on the beach, of lost children, of interviews with tearful victims who never found their loved ones. Our charity is a product of emotional identification rather than rational choice. Why did Sweden, for example, offer such massive support to the affected region, making a substantially larger contribution than other nations? More than five hundred Swedish tourists lost their lives in the 2004 disaster, a fact that aroused great solidarity in Sweden with the affected people in Southeast Asia.

But is this altruism? 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. A truly selfish individual would have no trouble walking away from another in need. If someone is drowning: Let him drown. If someone is crying: Let her cry. If someone drops his boarding pass: Look away. These are what I’d call selfish reactions, which are quite the opposite of empathic engagement. Empathy hooks us into the other’s situation. 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.

At the same time, there is no good answer to the eternal question of how altruistic is altruism if mirror neurons erase the distinction between self and other, and if empathy dissolves the boundaries between people. If part of the other resides within us, if we feel one with
the other, then improving their life automatically resonates within us. And this may not be true only for us. It’s hard to see why a monkey would systematically prefer prosocial over selfish outcomes if there weren’t something intrinsically rewarding about the former.

Perhaps they too feel good doing good.

The Elephant in the Room

Y
ou’d think you’d hear an elephant approach. But you can stand sweating in the sun in a forest clearing in Thailand while one of them comes up from behind, and you won’t feel any vibrations, won’t hear a thing, because elephants are perfectly elastic, walking on velvet cushions while carefully avoiding branches or leaves that might snap under their feet. They’re in fact remarkably elegant animals.

They’re also dangerous. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics rates elephant keeper as the single most dangerous profession. In Thailand alone, more than fifty mahouts (caretakers/trainers) are killed every year. One problem is the unexpected speed of these animals. Another is their cuddly “jumbo” image, which pulls us toward them and makes us lower our guard. The appeal that elephants hold for humans is nothing less than astonishing, and was already witnessed in ancient Rome, not
a place known for squeamishness. Pliny the Elder describes the way the crowd reacted to twenty elephants being savaged in an arena:

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? We recognize their hostile trunk movements, which are stiff and agitated, but also their gentle rubbing against one another, with trunks feeling into the others’ mouths—a most vulnerable place for this organ to visit. Most of all, we recognize their fun when, for example, they jostle in a water hole, completely covered with mud, pushing one another aside until they slide and splash with their eyes turned outward so that we see a lot of white, which gives the impression that they’re going crazy. They seem to have a sense of humor.

I had come to North Thailand to visit a student, Joshua Plotnik, who’s studying social behavior at the Elephant Nature Park, near Chiang Mai, as well as the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, near Lampang. I had seen African elephants on the savanna, but the big difference with these Asian elephants was that I was
not
sitting in a Jeep: I stood there right next to these mighty beasts with their shrill trumpeting sounds and deep, drawn-out rumbles, and sensed right away how tiny and vulnerable the human race is.

Elephants are magnificent. But the elephant situation in Thailand is also a sad one of changing habits. Thousands of elephants used to be employed for timber harvesting, but a devastating flood blamed on deforestation led to a nationwide logging ban in 1989. This created an urgent need to care for the animals, for which the owners
lacked income. On top of this, there are the three-legged land mine victims from the Thai-Burma border, and other animals in urgent need of care. Today many elephants serve to educate the public, each one controlled day and night by a personal mahout. That is the only way to take care of these animals short of releasing them. The latter may seem preferable, but in a populated nation such as Thailand, and given the danger elephants pose, “liberation” would mean almost certain death.

It’s a bit as if you have a tractor in your garage, which can start its engine on its own anytime and drive out on the road while leveling small dwellings, crushing people, and uprooting leafy vegetation. No one would like to have such a liability, and an elephant in an urban setting would barely be any different. So, under control they are and need to be. I was thoroughly impressed by the commitment of those who maintain them in the parks. The elephants either move together under semifree conditions or conduct shows and trainings, including “orchestral” performances on xylophones and reenactments of their species’ historic employment in the timber industry. These performances ensure their upkeep in parks and sanctuaries, some of which let ecotourists pay for the privilege of shoveling dung.

Now, what other animal could generate such devotion?

Two tall adolescent bulls at the Elephant Conservation Center effortlessly pick up a long, heavy log with their tusks, each standing on one end, draping their trunks over the log to keep it from rolling off. Then they walk in perfect unison with the log between them, while the two mahouts on their heads sit chatting and laughing and looking around, and are certainly not directing every move. Training is obviously part of this picture, but one cannot train any animal to be so coordinated. One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same. For the same reason, one can train
two elephants to pick up a log and carry it together to another place, walking in the same rhythm, and lowering the log together to set it down on a pile without a sound, because elephants are extraordinarily well coordinated in the wild. They’re obviously not picking up logs, but they perform concerted actions to support a wounded companion or calf in need.

I ran into a different kind of cooperation in the Elephant Nature Park, where a blind elephant walked around with her seeing friend. The two females were unrelated yet seemed to be joined at the hip. The blind one was clearly dependent on the other, who seemed to understand this. As soon as the latter moved away, one could hear deep sounds coming from both of them, sometimes even trumpeting, which indicated the other’s whereabouts to the blind elephant. This noisy spectacle would continue until they were reunited again. An intensive greeting followed, with lots of ear-flapping, touching, and mutual smelling.

The whole world assumes that these animals are highly intelligent, but in fact there is little official proof. The sort of experiments conducted with monkeys and apes, which reveal what these animals understand, are rarely done with elephants, for the simple reason that they’re not easy to work with. Which university is ever going to set up an elephant lab? Anyone who wishes to test elephants will need to either work in countries with a history of controlling them, such as Thailand or India, or in zoo settings. Before he went to Thailand, Joshua worked at the Bronx Zoo, in New York, where he was involved in our first elephant experiment involving a huge mirror.

This experiment sprang from our interest in empathy. Advanced empathy is unthinkable without a sense of self, which is what mirror tests get at. Of all animals, elephants are perhaps the most empathic, so we were curious to see if they had enough self-identity to recognize their reflection. This capacity was predicted decades ago by Gordon Gallup, the psychologist who first showed that apes (but not monkeys) recognize themselves in a mirror.

If I walk up to my capuchin monkeys while wearing sunglasses,
some will threaten me as if they don’t recognize me, but soon they’ll switch to curiosity. They never use their reflection in my glasses to inspect their own bodies, however. They simply don’t “get” what they are looking at. How different from the apes, which as soon as they spot my sunglasses begin to make weird grimaces while staring into them. They’re never confused about who I am (I could literally arrive in drag, and they’d still know whom they’re dealing with), but impatiently jerk their heads at me until I take off the glasses and hold them closer to them as little mirrors. Females then turn around to look at their behinds—a critical part of their anatomy that they never get to see—and open their mouth to inspect the inside, picking at their teeth. Anyone who has seen an ape do so realizes that the animal is not accidentally opening its mouth or turning around: Its eyes monitor its every move in the mirror.

Any large-brained animal with well-developed empathy should be able to do the same, Gallup believed. But why bring up empathy? What, if anything, do mirrors tell us about social skills? Part of the answer can be found in child development. 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 small 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.