The Age of Empathy (29 page)

Again, the grumbling was one-sided: It came from the early hires.
They gave the master the “evil eye,” whereas those who had worked the least didn’t give a peep. The only reason the latter might have been unhappy is that the situation obviously didn’t endear them to the others. They’d be wise not to gloat and celebrate. The potential of green-eyed reactions is the chief reason why we strive for fairness even when we have the advantage. To my own amazement, I find myself siding here with the “Monster of Malmesbury,” as Thomas Hobbes was known, when he stated that we’re interested in justice only for peace’s sake.

Am I uncharacteristically cynical? You’ve heard me explain at length how incredibly empathic, altruistic, and cooperative we are, so why when we get to fairness is self-interest all that I see? The inconsistency isn’t as great as it may seem, because I do believe that all human (or animal) behavior must in the end serve the actors. In the domain of empathy and sympathy, evolution has created a stand-alone mechanism that works whether or not our direct interests are at stake. We are driven to empathize with others in an automated, often unconditional fashion. We genuinely care about others, wanting to see them happy and healthy regardless of what immediate good this may do for us. We evolved to be this way because, on average and in the long run, it served our ancestors. But I fail to see how the same applies to our sense of fairness. Other-orientation seems such a small part of it. The chief emotions are egocentric, preoccupied with what we get compared to others, and how we may come across to others (we do like to be seen as fair-minded). Only secondarily is there an actual concern for others, mostly because we long for a livable, harmonious society. The latter desire is also visible in other primates when they break up disputes in their midst or bring conflicted parties together. We have gone one step further, though, by being sensitive to how resource distribution impacts everybody around us.

The reaction of children to perceived unfairness shows how deeply seated these sentiments are, and the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers suggests its long history. In some cultures, hunters aren’t even allowed to carve up their own kill, so as to prevent them from favoring
their family. The antiquity of fairness is underappreciated by those who regard it as a noble principle of recent origin, formulated by wise men during the French Enlightenment. I seriously doubt that we will ever appreciate the human condition by looking back a couple of centuries rather than millions of years. Do wise men ever formulate anything new, or are they just good at reformulating what everybody knows? They often do so in an admirable fashion, but to credit them with the concepts themselves is a bit like saying that the Greeks invented democracy. The elders of many preliterate tribes listen for hours, sometimes days, to the opinions of all members before making an important decision. Aren’t they democratic? Similarly, the fairness principle has been around since our ancestors first had to divide the spoils of joint action.

Researchers have tested this principle by offering players an opportunity to share money. The players get to do this only once. One player is given the task to split the money into two—one part for himself, the remainder for his partner—and then propose this split to the other. It is known as the “ultimatum game,” because as soon as the offer has been made, the power shifts to the partner. If he turns down the split, the money will be gone and both players will end up empty-handed.

If humans are profit maximizers, they should of course accept
any
offer, even the smallest one. If the first player were to give away, say, $1 while keeping $9 for himself, the second player should simply go along. After all, one dollar is better than nothing. Refusal of the split would be irrational, yet this is the typical reaction to a 9:1 split. A comparison of fifteen small-scale societies by American anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his team found some cultures to be fairer than others. Offers in these faraway places (in local currency, and sometimes using tobacco instead of money) ranged from an average of $8 for the first player and $2 for the second all the way to $4 for the first and $6 for the second. Even the latter, hypergenerous offers were rejected in cultures in which making a large gift is a way of making others feel inferior. For most cultures, however, offers
were close to equal, often with a slight advantage for the first player, such as a $6 versus $4 division. This is also the typical offer in modern societies, such as when university students play the ultimatum game.

Fairness is understood all over the world, including places untouched by the French Enlightenment. Players avoid highly skewed proposals. That they don’t want to appear greedy is understandable: Brain scans of players facing unfair proposals reveal negative emotions, such as scorn and anger. The beauty of the ultimatum game is, of course, that it offers an outlet for these feelings. Those who feel slighted can punish the proposer even though in doing so they also punish themselves.

That we’re willing to do so shows that certain goals take priority over income. We know an unfair distribution when we see one, and try to counteract it. That this is mainly done for the sake of good relations explains why the above multicultural study measured the fairest offers in societies with the highest levels of cooperation. A good example is the Lamalera whale hunters, in Indonesia, who capture whales almost bare-handed. Entire families are tied together around an extremely dangerous activity on the open ocean by a dozen men in a large canoe. Since these men are literally in the same boat, a fair distribution of the food bonanza is very much on their mind. In contrast,
societies with greater self-sufficiency, in which every family takes care of itself, are marked by unfair offers in the ultimatum game. It’s easy to recognize the stag-versus-hare-hunt scenarios here: Human fairness goes hand in hand with communal survival.

Lamalera whale hunting is a dangerous enterprise with huge payoffs—the sort of collective activity that puts a premium on fair distribution.

That this connection may be quite ancient became clear when a student, Sarah Brosnan, and I discovered it in monkeys. While testing capuchin monkeys in pairs, Sarah had noticed how much they disliked seeing their partner get a better reward. At first, this was just an impression based on their refusal to participate in our tests. We weren’t too surprised. But then we realized that economists had given these reactions the fancy label of “inequity aversion,” which they had turned into a topic of serious academic debate. This debate obviously revolved around human behavior, but what if monkeys showed the same aversion?

Testing two monkeys at a time, Sarah would offer a pebble to one and then hold out her hand so that the monkey could give it back in exchange for a cucumber slice. Alternating between them, both monkeys would happily barter twenty-five times in a row. The atmosphere turned sour, however, as soon as we introduced inequity. One monkey would still get cucumber, while its partner now enjoyed grapes, a favorite food. The advantaged monkey obviously had no problem, but the one still working for cucumber would lose interest. Worse, seeing its partner with juicy grapes, this monkey would get agitated, hurl the pebbles out of the test chamber, sometimes even throwing those paltry cucumber slices. A food normally devoured with gusto had become distasteful.

Discarding perfectly fine food simply because someone else is getting something better resembles the way we reject an unfair share of money or grumble about an agreed-upon denarius. Where do these reactions come from? They probably evolved in the service of cooperation. Caring about what others get may seem petty and irrational, but in the long run it keeps one from being taken advantage of. It’s in everyone’s interest to discourage exploitation and free riding, and make sure that one’s interests are taken seriously. Our study
was the first to show that these reactions may have been around for as long as animals have engaged in tit for tat.

Had Sarah and I merely spoken of “resentment” or “envy,” our findings might have gone unnoticed. But because we saw no reason why our monkeys weren’t showing inequity aversion, we drew the keen, somewhat baffled interest of philosophers, anthropologists, and economists, who almost choked on the comparison with monkeys. Indignant commentaries in prestigious journals followed, as well as a sharp jump in speaking invitations. As it happened, our study came out the day Richard Grasso, head of the New York Stock Exchange, was forced to resign because of a public outcry over a pay package of close to $200 million. Commentators couldn’t resist contrasting the unbridled greed in human society with our monkeys, suggesting that we could learn a thing or two from them.

I had to think back to this comparison when, in 2008, the U.S. government proposed a huge bailout of the financial industry. The unimaginable number of tax dollars combined with deep resentment of “fat cat” CEOs who had gambled so much money away led to public fury in the media. As one business magazine put it, “Underlying public distrust of the wealthy and the perception the $700 billion mortgage bailout will help big banks and rich CEOs continues to be the main stumbling block and minefield for passage of a rescue package.” Some saw this bailout as the end of laissez-faire economics, comparing the blow it dealt to capitalism with the way communism had been impacted by the fall of the Berlin Wall. But for me the more interesting part was how people reacted, such as the obvious Schadenfreude about CEOs demoted from their extravagant corner office to a less ostentatious location. When this happened to Richard Fuld, the chief of Lehman Brothers, artist Geoffrey Raymond created
The Annotated Fuld,
a painted portrait on which fired employees could leave farewell scribbles. Needless to say, they didn’t show much love for their multimillion-dollar boss, with comments like “Bloodsucker!,” “Greed!,” and “I hope his villa is safe!”

If possible, the reactions were even worse when it emerged that
some companies had enjoyed luxurious retreats at the same time that they were negotiating for government help. One company had sent its executives to a fancy spa, with massages and all. Another had organized a partridge hunt in England where its employees walked around in tweed knickers, and sipped fine wine at lavish feasts. One executive told an undercover reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011, but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine.” A month later, Detroit’s Big Three automakers arrived in Washington to plead for financial support of their ill-managed industries and faced an outcry when the public learned that each CEO had flown in on his own private jet. Hadn’t they noticed how much the country was fed up with excess at the top? The always subtle columnist Maureen Dowd exclaimed: “Heads must roll.”

Despite the obvious parallels between this outrage and primate behavior, it’s nevertheless useful to point out what our monkeys’ reaction was
not.
We can exclude both the simplest and most complex explanations. At the simple end, one could argue that the sight of grapes lessens the appeal of cucumber the same way that most men won’t touch a glass of water if you put a beer next to it. In other words, it was not so much what their partner was getting that ticked off our monkeys, but that they were simply holding out for something better. To test this, we added a twist to our study. Before each equity test, in which both monkeys ate cucumber, we’d wave grapes around, just to show that we had them. This may seem cruel, but it hardly bothered the monkeys: They still contentedly traded for cucumber. Only if the grapes were actually given to their partner did the one who missed out go into protest mode. It really was the inequity that bothered them.

At the more complex end, our monkeys did not seem to follow a fairness
norm.
A norm applies equally to everyone, which would mean in this case that the monkeys were not only concerned about getting less but also about getting more than others. There was no evidence for the latter, however. The monkey with the advantage, for example, never gave away any of her grapes so as to equalize the distribution. If
we speak of “fairness,” therefore, it should be understood as the most egocentric kind, similar to the treatment that young children spill tears over.

This applies to monkeys. For apes, on the other hand, we cannot rule out a fairness norm. They seem to monitor their interactions more closely and keep better track of each individual’s contributions to common goals. Chimpanzees, for example, regularly break up fights over food without taking any of it. I once saw an adolescent female interrupt a quarrel between two youngsters over a leafy branch. She took the branch away from them, broke it in two, then handed each one a part. Did she just want to stop the fight, or did she understand something about distribution? There’s even one observation of a bonobo worried about getting too much. While being tested in a cognitive laboratory, a female received plenty of milk and raisins but felt the eyes of her friends on her, who were watching from a distance. After a while, she refused all rewards. Looking at the experimenter, she kept gesturing to the others until they too got some of the goodies. Only then did she finish hers.