The Age of Empathy (3 page)

What are these social instincts? What is it that makes us care about the behavior of others, or about others, period? Moral judgment
obviously goes further than this, but an interest in others is fundamental. Where would human morality be without it? It’s the bedrock upon which everything else is constructed.

Much occurs on a bodily level that we rarely think about. We listen to someone telling a sad story, and unconsciously we drop our shoulders, tilt our head sideways like the other, copy his or her frown, and so on. These bodily changes in turn create the same dejected state in us as we perceive in the other. Rather than our head getting into the other’s head, it’s our body that maps the other’s. The same applies to happier emotions. I remember one morning walking out of a restaurant and wondering why I was whistling to myself. How did I get into such a good mood? The answer: I had been sitting near two men, obviously old friends, who hadn’t seen each other in a long time. They had been slapping each other’s backs, laughing, relating amusing stories. This must have lifted my spirit even though I didn’t know these men and hadn’t been privy to their conversation.

Mood transfer via facial expressions and body language is so powerful that people doing it on a daily basis literally start to look alike. This has been tested with portraits of longtime couples: One set of pictures was taken on their wedding day and another set twenty-five years later. Presented with separate portraits of these men and women, human subjects were asked to match them on similarity. For the set taken at an older age, they had no trouble deciding who was married to whom. But for the pictures taken at a younger age, subjects flunked the task. Married couples resemble each other, therefore, not because they pick partners who look like them, but because their features converge over the years. The similarity was strongest for couples who reported the greatest happiness. Daily sharing of emotions apparently leads one partner to “internalize” the other, and vice versa, to the point that anyone can see how much they belong together.

I can’t resist throwing in here that dog owners and their pets also sometimes look alike. But this isn’t the same. We can correctly pair photographs of people and their dogs only if the dogs are purebreds. It doesn’t work with mutts. Purebreds, of course, are carefully selected
by their owners, who pay high sums for them. An elegant lady may want to walk a wolfhound, whereas an assertive character may prefer a rottweiler. Since similarity doesn’t increase with the number of years that owners have had their pets, the critical factor is the choice of breed. This is quite different from the emotional convergence between spouses.

Our bodies and minds are made for social life, and we become hopelessly depressed in its absence. This is why next to death, solitary confinement is our worst punishment. Bonding is so good for us that the most reliable way to extend one’s life expectancy is to marry and stay married. The flip side is the risk we run after losing a partner. The death of a spouse often leads to despair and a reduced will to live that explains the car accidents, alcohol abuse, heart disease, and cancers that take the lives of those left behind. Mortality remains elevated for about half a year following a spouse’s death. It is worse for younger than older people, and worse for men than women.

For animals, things are no different. I myself have lost two pets this way. The first was a jackdaw (a crowlike bird) that I had reared by hand. Johan was tame and friendly, but not attached to me. The love of his life was a female of his species, named Rafia. They were together for years, until Rafia one day escaped from the outdoor aviary (I suspect that a neighbor child had gotten curious and unlatched the door). Left behind, Johan spent days calling and scanning the sky. He died within weeks.

And then there was our Siamese cat, Sarah, who had been adopted as a kitten by our big tomcat, Diego, who would lick and clean her, let her knead his tummy as if she were nursing, and sleep with her. For about a decade they were best buddies, until Diego died of old age. Even though Sarah was younger and in perfect health, she stopped eating and died two months after Diego for no reason that the veterinarian could determine.

There exist of course thousands of such stories, including of animals that refuse to let go of loved ones. It is not unusual for primate mothers to carry their dead infants around until there’s nothing left of
them but skin and bones. A baboon female in Kenya who had recently lost her infant got extremely agitated when a week later she recognized the same bush on the savanna where she’d left its body. She climbed a high tree from which to scan while uttering plaintive calls normally used by baboons separated from their troop. Elephants, too, are known to return to the remains of dead companions to solemnly stand over their sun-bleached bones. They may take an hour to gently turn the bones over and over, smelling them. Sometimes they carry off bones, but other elephants have been seen returning them to the “grave” site.

Impressed by animal loyalty, humans have dedicated statues to it. In Edinburgh, Scotland, there’s a little sculpture of “Greyfriars Bobby,” a Skye terrier who refused to leave the grave of his master, buried in 1858. For fourteen whole years, Bobby guarded the grave while being fed by his fans, until he died and was buried not far away. His headstone reads “Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all.” A similar statue exists in Tokyo for an Akita dog named Hachiko, who every day used to come to Shibuya Station to greet his master returning from work. The dog became famous for continuing this habit after his master had died in 1925. For eleven years, Hachiko waited at the appropriate time at the station. Dog lovers still gather once a year at the exit, now named after Hachiko, to pay homage to his faithfulness.

Touching stories, one might say, but what do they have to do with human behavior? The point is that we are mammals, which are animals with obligatory maternal care. Obviously, bonding has incredible survival value for us, the most critical bond being the one between mother and offspring. This bond provides the evolutionary template for all other attachments, including those among adults. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, if humans in love tend to regress to the parent-offspring stage, feeding each other tidbits as if they can’t eat by themselves, and talking nonsense with the same high-pitched voices normally reserved for babies. I myself grew up with the Beatles’ love song lyrics “I wanna hold your hand”—another regression.

One set of animal studies has, in fact, had a huge, concrete influence on how humans treat one another. A century ago, foundling
homes and orphanages followed the advice of a school of psychology that, in my opinion, has wreaked more havoc than any other:
behaviorism.
Its name reflects the belief that behavior is all that science can see and know, and therefore all it should care about. The mind, if such a thing even exists, remains a black box. Emotions are largely irrelevant. This attitude led to a taboo on the inner life of animals: Animals were to be described as machines, and students of animal behavior were to develop a terminology devoid of human connotations. Ironically, this advice backfired with at least one term.
Bonding
was originally coined to avoid anthropomorphic labels for animals, such as
friends
or
buddies.
But the term has since become so popular for human relationships (as in “male bonding,” or “bonding experience”) that now we probably will have to drop it for animals.

That humans are controlled by the same law-of-effect as animals was convincingly demonstrated by the father of behaviorism, John Watson, who inculcated in a human baby a phobia for hairy objects. At first, “Little Albert” happily played with the white rabbit he had been given. But after Watson paired each appearance of the rabbit with the loud clanging of steel objects right behind poor Albert’s head, fear was the inevitable outcome. From then on, Albert placed his hands over his eyes and whimpered each time he saw the rabbit (or the investigator).

Watson was so enamored by the power of conditioning that he became allergic to emotions. He was particularly skeptical of maternal love, which he considered a dangerous instrument. Fussing over their children, mothers were ruining them by instilling weaknesses, fears, and inferiorities. Society needed less warmth and more structure. Watson dreamed of a “baby farm” without parents so that infants could be raised according to scientific principles. For example, a child should be touched only if it has behaved incredibly well, and not with a hug or kiss, but rather with a little pat on the head. Physical rewards that are systematically meted out would do wonders, Watson felt, and were far superior to the mawkish rearing style of the average well-meaning mom.

Unfortunately, environments like the baby farm existed, and all we can say about them is that they were deadly! This became clear when psychologists studied orphans kept in little cribs separated by white sheets, deprived of visual stimulation and body contact. As recommended by scientists, the orphans had never been cooed at, held, or tickled. They looked like zombies, with immobile faces and wide-open, expressionless eyes. Had Watson been right, these children should have been thriving, but they in fact lacked all resistance to disease. At some orphanages, mortality approached 100 percent.

Watson’s crusade against what he called the “over-kissed child,” and the immense respect accorded him in 1920s public opinion, seem incomprehensible today, but explains why another psychologist, Harry Harlow, set out to prove the obvious, which is that maternal love matters … to monkeys. At a primate laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, Harlow demonstrated that monkeys reared in isolation were mentally and socially disturbed. When put in a group they lacked the tendency, let alone the skill, to interact socially. As adults, they couldn’t even copulate or nurse offspring. Whatever we now think of the ethics of Harlow’s research, he proved beyond any doubt that deprivation of body contact is not something that suits mammals.

With time, this kind of research changed the tide and helped improve the fate of human orphans. Except, that is, in Romania, where President Nicolae Ceauşescu created an emotional gulag by raising thousands of newborns in institutions. The world got a reminder of the nightmare of deprivation-rearing when Ceauşescu’s orphanages opened after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The orphans were incapable of laughing or crying, spent the day rocking and clutching themselves in a fetal position (strikingly similar to Harlow’s monkeys), and didn’t even know how to play. New toys were hurled against the wall.

Bonding is essential for our species, and it is what makes us happiest. And here I don’t mean the sort of jumping-for-joy bliss that the French leader General Charles de Gaulle must have had in mind when he allegedly sneered that “happiness is for idiots.” The pursuit of happiness written into the U.S. Declaration of Independence rather refers
to a state of satisfaction with the life one is living. This is a measurable state, and studies show that beyond a certain basic income, material wealth carries remarkably little weight. The standard of living has been rising steadily for decades, but has it changed our happiness quotient? Not at all. Rather than money, success, or fame, time spent with friends and family is what does people the most good.

Romania’s orphans were raised according to “scientific” principles that ignored emotional needs.

We take the importance of social networks for granted to the point that we sometimes overlook them. This happened to my team of primate experts—even though we should have known better—when we built a new climbing structure for our chimpanzees. We focused too much on the physical environment. For more than thirty years, the apes had lived in the same outdoor enclosure, a large open area equipped with metal jungle gyms. We decided to get large telephone poles and bolt them together into something more exciting. During the construction, the chimps were locked up next to the site. At first they were noisy and restless, but upon hearing the huge machine that put in the poles, they turned silent for the rest of the time: They could hear that this was serious business! The poles were connected with ropes; we planted new grass, dug new drains, and eight days later we were ready. The new structure was ten times taller than the one we had before.

At least thirty workers of the field station came to watch the release. We even had a betting pool about which chimp would be the first to touch wood, or climb to the top. These apes had not smelled or touched wood for decades; some of them never had. As one might imagine, the director of the primate center guessed that the highest-ranking male and female would be the first, but we knew that male chimps are no heroes. They are always busy improving their political
position, taking great risks in the process, but they literally get diarrhea of fear as soon as something new comes around the corner.

Standing in the tower overlooking the compound with all cameras running, we released the colony. The first thing that happened was unexpected. We were so enamored with our wonderful construction, which had taken so much sweat to cobble together in the summer heat, that we had forgotten that the apes had been locked up for days in separate cages, even separate buildings. The first minutes following the release were all about social connections. Some chimps literally jumped into each other’s arms, embracing and kissing. Within a minute, the adult males were giving intimidation displays, with all their hair on end, lest anyone might have forgotten who was boss.