The Age of Empathy (26 page)

The first team was hunting stag, the second hare.

What is a company retreat nowadays without a trust-boosting game? One man stands on a table with his back toward his colleagues, who are ready to catch him when he drops backward into their arms. Or one woman verbally guides a blindfolded co-worker through an open area with scattered objects that represent a minefield. Trust-building breaks down barriers between individuals, instilling faith in one another, which in turn prepares them for joint enterprises. Everyone learns to help everyone else.

These games are nothing, however, compared to those of capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica. In fact, humans would never be allowed to play the monkeys’ games; any lawyer would counsel against them. What these little monkeys do high up in the trees is so absurd that I couldn’t believe it until I saw the videos that Susan Perry, an American primatologist, shows nervously empathetic audiences. Two typical games are “hand-sniffing” and “eyeball poking.”

In the first, two monkeys sit opposite each other on a branch, both inserting a finger ever deeper into the other’s nostril until the finger vanishes up to the first knuckle. Swaying gently, they sit like this with expressions on their faces described as “trancelike.” The monkeys are normally hyperactive and sociable, but hand-sniffers sit apart from the group, concentrating on each other for up to half an hour.

Even more curious is the second game, in which one monkey inserts almost a whole finger between the other’s eyelid and eyeball. Monkey fingers are tiny, but relative to their eyes and noses they aren’t any smaller than ours. Also, their fingers have nails, which obviously aren’t particularly clean, so this behavior potentially scratches the cornea or causes infections. Now, the monkeys really need to sit still; otherwise someone may lose an eye. These games are most painful to watch! The pair keeps its posture for minutes, while the one whose eye is being poked may stick a finger into the other’s nostril.

What purpose these weird games serve is unclear, but one idea is that the monkeys are testing their bonds. This explanation has also
been offered with respect to human rituals in which we make ourselves vulnerable. Tongue-kissing, for example, carries the risk of disease transmission. Intimate kissing is either pleasurable or totally disgusting depending on the partner: Engaging in it thus says a lot about how we perceive the relationship. In couples, kissing is thought to test the love, enthusiasm, even faithfulness of the partner. Perhaps capuchin monkeys, too, are trying to find out how much they really like each other, which may then help them decide who can be trusted to support them during confrontations within the group. A second explanation is that these games help the monkeys reduce stress, of which they have no shortage. Their group life is full of drama. During eye-poking or hand-sniffing, they seem to enter an unusually calm, dreamy state. Are they exploring the borderline between pain and pleasure, perhaps releasing endorphins in the process?

I speak of “trust games” because at the very least a high level of trust is needed before you’d let anyone poke your eye. Exposing yourself to risk on the assumption that others won’t take advantage is the deepest trust there is. What these monkeys seem to be telling each other—similar to humans when they drop backward into the arms of others—is that based on what they know about each other, they have faith that all will end well. This is obviously a wonderful feeling, one we mostly appreciate with friends and family.

Animals develop such relationships quite readily, also between species. As pets, they do so with us, so that we can hold them upside down or stuff them under our sweater—scary moves that they won’t accept from strangers. Or, conversely, we stick an arm into the mouth of a large dog—a carnivore designed to take a chunk out of it. But animals also learn to trust one another. In an old-fashioned zoo, a monkey kept in the same enclosure as a hippopotamus acted as dental cleaner. After the hippo had eaten its fill of cucumbers and heads of salad, the little monkey would approach and tap the hippo’s mouth, which would open wide. It was obvious that they had done this before. Like a mechanic under the hood of a car, the monkey would lean in and systematically pull food remains from between the hippo’s
teeth, consuming whatever he pulled out. The hippo seemed to enjoy the service, because he’d keep his mouth open as long as the monkey was busy.

The risk the monkey took wasn’t as great as it might seem. A hippo may have a huge mouth with dangerous teeth, but it’s hardly a carnivore. It’s much trickier to perform such a job on an actual predator, but this too happens. Cleaner wrasses are small marine fish that feed on the ectoparasites of much larger fish. Each cleaner owns a “station” on a reef with a clientele, which come to spread their pectoral fins and adopt postures that offer the cleaner a chance to perform its trade. Sometimes cleaners are so busy that clients wait in line. It’s a perfect mutualism. The cleaner nibbles the parasites off the client’s body surface, gills, and even the inside of its mouth.

In a sign of mutual trust, a monkey at a zoo cleans a hippo’s mouth.

The cleaner fish trusts that it will be allowed to nibble parasites and that the big fish won’t cut his career short. But the big fish needs trust, too, because not all cleaners do an honest job. They sometimes take a quick bite out of the client, feeding on healthy skin. This causes the large fish to jolt or swim away. According to Swiss biologist Redouan Bshary, who has followed these interactions in the Red Sea, cleaners hurry to repair damaged relationships and lure back their clients. They offer a “tactile massage” by moving around the big fish, tickling its belly with their dorsal fins. The other likes this so much that he becomes paralyzed: He starts drifting around motionlessly, bumping into the reef. The massage seems to restore trust, because the big fish usually stays around for further cleaning.

The only fish that cleaners never cheat are the large predators. With them, they wisely adopt what Bshary calls an “unconditionally
cooperative strategy.” How do those little fish know which clients might eat them? They are unlikely to know this from firsthand experience, which by definition is terminal. Is it because they have seen those fish eat others, or—like Little Red Riding Hood—have they noticed what big teeth they have? We usually don’t assume much knowledge in fish, but this is only because we underestimate them, as we do most animals.

Trust is defined as reliance on the other’s truthfulness or cooperation, or at least the expectation that the other won’t dupe you. This seems a perfectly fine characterization of how cleaner fish must relate to their hosts when they enter their gills or mouth, or the basis on which capuchin monkeys decide with whom to play their eye-poking games. 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.

In one experiment, two persons each received a small amount of money. If one gave up its amount, the other’s money would be doubled. The partner was in the same situation. So the best would be for both to give up their money, because then both would gain. These people didn’t know each other, however, and weren’t allowed to talk. Moreover, the game was played only once. Under these circumstances, it seems smarter to just keep what you have, because you can’t count on the other. Yet some people gave up their money anyway, and if both members of a pair did so they obviously had a better income than the rest. 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 patients 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. Ask a teen with autism or Down syndrome “What if you were a bird?” and you may not get much of an answer, but the Williams child will say, “Good question! I’d fly through the air being free. If I saw a boy I’d land on his head and chirp.”

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 deficit tells us that the normal tendency to be circumspect is inborn. Our species carefully chooses between trust and distrust, as do many other species.

A chimpanzee child, for example, learns to trust its mother. Sitting in a tree, the mother holds it by a hand or foot, dangling it high above the ground. If she’d let go, her child would fall to its death, but no mother would ever do such a thing. During travel, the child clings to her belly, or when it’s older, sits on her back. Given a young chimpanzee’s dependence of around six years, they in fact
live
on mom’s back. I once walked behind a party of chimpanzees in the jungle when a juvenile began standing up and turning somersaults on her mother’s back. She got corrected by a brief touch and look-around by
her mother, not unlike the way we check rambunctious children in the car’s backseat.

Chimpanzee children also learn distrust, for example, when they play with a peer. Both youngsters will make laughing sounds, running around. They seem to enjoy themselves, but there’s also a competitive element of who can push whom under and who can hit or be hit without whimpering in pain. Young males, especially, love rough games. But then the big brother of one of them comes around the corner and the whole dynamic changes. The peer whose brother is standing there all of a sudden takes courage, hits harder, or even bites his pal. Both know who will be backed up if it comes to blows. The play has turned into an unfriendly affair. This is nothing unusual: Chimpanzees learn from a very young age that fun lasts only so long as it lasts. No playmate can ever be trusted to the same degree as their mother.

We value trust to an extreme degree. In a group of Bushmen every man may own poison arrows, but they put them point down in a quiver and hang the quiver high up in a tree, out of reach of small children. These arrows are treated the way we would treat live hand grenades. Where would group life be if men were constantly threatening to use them? In our own culture, too, high levels of trust can be found in close-knit communities. Small-town America enjoys so much mutual support and social monitoring that people leave their doors open and cars unlocked. What crimes ever took place in Mayberry?

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 this mother merely did what Danes are used to. Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is
frisk luft,
or fresh air. The mother counted on safety and good air, whereas New York offered neither. The charges against her were eventually dropped.

When I recently visited Denmark and asked colleagues if they’d
leave a child unattended outside, all of them nodded that, yes, this is what everybody does. Not because they don’t like to have their babies near them, but because it’s so good for them to be out in the open. No one considers the risk of abduction. My hosts were positively puzzled that anyone could consider such a wicked act, and wondered where one would go with an abducted child. If one were to return with it to one’s own neighborhood, they surmised, wouldn’t everyone ask where that child came from? And wouldn’t the connection be quickly made if newspapers were reporting a missing baby?

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.