The Age of Empathy (30 page)

This bonobo was doing the smart thing. Apes think ahead, and had she eaten her fill right in front of the rest, there might have been repercussions when she rejoined them later in the day. Privileges are always enjoyed under a cloud. Human history is filled with “let them eat cake” moments that create resentment, sometimes boiling over into bloody revolt. I cannot help but look through the same lens at a gruesome chimpanzee attack on a human, which curiously revolved around cake as well. The central figure was Moe, well-known to the media for a string of incidents in his long career as pet chimpanzee. The last time he was in the news concerned his escape, in 2008, from a California sanctuary surrounded by mountains covered with thick brush. Except for one unconfirmed “monkey” sighting at a nearby nudist camp, and massive efforts with helicopters, bloodhounds, and surveillance cameras, Moe was never seen again.

Moe had been brought from Africa as a baby and lovingly reared by an American couple who treated him as their child for as long as
they could. But apes are too strong and wily to make good pets. The couple was forced to move Moe to a sanctuary after he attacked a woman and a police officer. They regularly visited “their boy” at the sanctuary. A few years before his final escape, on Moe’s thirty-ninth birthday, they brought him a load of sweets to celebrate. Moe received a magnificent raspberry cake, drinks, and new toys, which would all have been fine if there had been no other chimps around. But this was not the case: The sanctuary had taken in other chimps from abusive homes and Hollywood trainers. While Moe was feasting on his cake under the eyes of his foster parents, two male chimps in another enclosure managed to break out. They went straight for the husband. My guess is that they would have attacked Moe if he hadn’t been behind bars. Even though this incident has gone down as one of the most horrific animal assaults ever on a human, it is in line with how male chimps attack members of their own species. The two chimps chewed off most of the man’s nose, face, and buttocks, tore off his foot, and bit off both testicles. He was lucky to survive, which only happened because his attackers were shot.

It is unclear if the motive for the assault was territorial (chimps don’t take kindly to strangers) or rather had to do with all of the attention and goodies lavished upon Moe. The inequity of this unintended experiment exceeded anything ever introduced in our studies. If monkeys get upset by having to make do with cucumbers while others eat grapes, you can imagine how chimps react to seeing one of them own the candy store. Moe’s owners probably hadn’t realized how sensitive chimps are to unequal treatment, especially if the advantaged one isn’t even a friend.

The main reason humans seek fairness, I believe, is to prevent such negative reactions. Even the Monster of Malmesbury thought so, as did the “Sage of Baltimore,” H. L. Mencken, who said, “If you want peace, work for justice.” This is not to deny a role for other-regarding feelings. The golden rule is universally appreciated, and most of us reach a point at which we genuinely feel that others deserve the same treatment that we like for ourselves. We easily produce this rationalization
for fairness, which definitely adds power to it, but deep down we also realize what’s at stake. Whatever noble reasons we give for fairness and justice, they have the firm backing of our vested interest in a harmonious and productive social environment.

Other primates seem to adopt a narrower view, focused on immediate benefits, yet it’s too early to conclude that they don’t have a fairness norm. Studies on inequity aversion in animals have only just begun. When Sarah and I tested chimps on grape-versus-cucumber deals, we found reactions similar to those of the capuchin monkeys. But we also explored another well-known human tendency, which is that we relax the rules in close relations. Between family, friends, and spouses we don’t keep as careful track of favors and inequities as we do with acquaintances, neighbors, and colleagues. The chimp data confirmed this difference. Individuals who had spent little time together (similar to Moe and the other sanctuary chimps) showed by far the strongest reaction to getting the short end of the stick, whereas the members of a colony established thirty years ago hardly blinked. Having played together while young and having grown up together, these chimps were virtually immune to inequity. Social closeness apparently makes apes, like humans, less touchy about this issue.

Inequity aversion will no doubt prove a rich area of research, all the more so since there is no reason to think it’s limited to primates. I expect it in all social animals. A most entertaining account concerns Irene Pepperberg’s typical dinner conversation with two squabbling African gray parrots, the late Alex and his junior colleague, Griffin:

Another species in which to expect such reactions is the domestic dog, which descends from cooperative hunters used to dividing prey. At the Clever Dog Lab at the University of Vienna, Friederike Range found that dogs refuse to lift their paw for a “shake” with a human if they get nothing for it while their companion is rewarded. Disobedient dogs show signs of tension, such as scratching and looking away. The reward itself isn’t the issue, because the same dogs are perfectly willing to obey if
neither
one receives food. So dogs too may be sensitive to injustice.

In the 1930s, when the Yerkes National Primate Research Center was still located in Orange Park, Florida, scientists decided to introduce apes to the wonders of money. They rewarded them with poker chips to be used in a “chimpomat”: a vending machine that delivered food upon insertion of a token. The chimps first needed to understand that the chips were promissory notes to be accumulated and converted. After they had learned this, the scientists introduced chips of different value, such as a white chip worth one grape and a blue one worth two grapes. The chimps quickly learned to prefer the highest-value chips.

Our capuchin monkeys, too, have learned to use tokens in exchange for goodies. In one study, Sarah even got them to learn from one another. One monkey bartered with two kinds of tokens, getting bell pepper pieces for one kind and Froot Loops sweet cereal for the other. Bell peppers rank near the bottom of the preference scale, whereas Froot Loops rank near the top. Just from watching the proceedings, a monkey sitting next to the exchanger would develop a preference for tokens that offered the best deal.

We exploited these monetary skills in the experiment described a few chapters back, in which one capuchin chose between a “selfish” token that rewarded only itself and a “prosocial” token that rewarded both itself and a partner. Our monkeys overwhelmingly preferred the prosocial option, thus demonstrating that they care for one another.
This is also well-known for chimps, both in the way they help one another defeat rivals, console distressed parties, defend one another against leopards, and show targeted helping in experiments. Prosociality has a long evolutionary history.

One capuchin monkey reaches through an arm hole to choose between differently marked pieces of pipe while another looks on. The pipe pieces can be exchanged for food. One token feeds both monkeys; the other feeds only the chooser. Capuchins typically prefer the “prosocial” token.

Nevertheless, egoism always lurks around the corner. While testing capuchins with selfish versus prosocial options, we found three ways in which we could kill their tendency to be nice. The first is to pair them with a stranger: They are in a much more selfish mood with partners that they’ve never met before. This fits the idea of the in-group as the cradle of cooperation.

The second, even more effective way to reduce prosociality is to put the other out of sight by sliding a solid panel between both monkeys. Even if the monkey making the choice knows the one on the other side well, and has seen the other through a small peephole, it still refuses to be prosocial. It acts as if the other isn’t there, and turns completely selfish. Apparently, in order to share they need to see their partner. Humans report feeling good while doing good, and brain scans show that our reward centers light up when we give to others. Monkeys may get the same satisfaction from generosity, but only if they can see the outcome, which recalls one of the oldest definitions of human sympathy, according to which we derive pleasure from seeing another’s fortune.

Humans have great imagination. We can visualize a poor family wearing the clothes we sent them or children sitting in the school that we helped build at the other end of the globe. Just thinking of these situations makes us feel good. Monkeys probably can’t project the effects of their actions across time and space, and so the “warm glow”
of giving reaches them only if the beneficiary is in plain view. The emotions involved may not be that different between humans and monkeys, but monkeys express them only under a narrow set of circumstances.

The third way to eliminate acts of kindness is perhaps the most intriguing, since it relates to inequity. If their partner gets a superior reward, our monkeys become reluctant to pick the prosocial option. They are perfectly willing to share, but only if their partner is visible and gets what they get themselves. As soon as their partner is better off, competition kicks in and interferes with generosity.

The same competition can be recruited to squeeze more out of primates in the same way that our economies use it to squeeze more out of people. If you want to keep up with the Joneses, you’ll just need to work a bit harder. Pepperberg exploited the competitiveness of her parrots, and we have noticed that our chimps perform better if we give their rewards to others. When a chimp selects images on a touchscreen, for example, he may do so a hundred times in a row. But inevitably his attention wanders, and errors result in less fruit. If, instead of just withholding these rewards, we actually give them to a nearby companion, our subjects suddenly become very keen on the task. They stay with their eyes glued to the screen and apply themselves so as to prevent their goodies from going to the other. We call this the “competitive reward” paradigm.

Given our interest in such competition, you can imagine how puzzled we were by an out-of-the-blue e-mail telling us that we must be “communists,” because who else would see fairness as part of human nature? Mind you, we get the strangest e-mails (a recent example: a picture of an abundantly hairy chest sent by a man who felt he had ape ancestry, which we of course couldn’t deny), but this particular message sounded rather angry, accusing us of legitimizing social tendencies that our correspondent clearly didn’t approve of even in humans. Fairness and justice, what romantic drivel! The funny thing is that the impression we have of our monkeys is the exact opposite. We look at them as little capitalists with prehensile tails, who pay for one another’s
labor, engage in tit for tat, understand the value of money, and feel offended by unequal treatment. They seem to know the price of everything.

What confuses some is that fairness has two faces. Income equality is one, but the connection between effort and reward is another. Our monkeys are sensitive to both, as are we. Let me explain the difference by contrasting Europe and the United States, which traditionally emphasize different sides of the same fairness coin.

When I first arrived in the United States, I had a mixed impression: On the one hand I felt that the United States was less fair than what I was used to, but on the other hand it was more fair. I saw people living in the kind of poverty that I knew only from the third world. How could the richest nation in the world permit this? It became worse for me when I discovered that poor kids go to poor schools and rich kids to rich schools. Since public schools are financed primarily through state and local taxes, there are huge differences from state to state, city to city, and neighborhood to neighborhood. This contrasts with my own experience, in which all children shared the same school regardless of their background. How can a society claim equal opportunity if the location of one’s birth determines the quality of one’s education?

But I also noticed that someone who applies him- or herself, as I surely intended to do, can go very far. Nothing stands in their way. Envy is far from absent, and is in fact somewhat of a joke in academia (“Why do academics fight so much? Because there’s so little at stake!”), but generally speaking, people are happy for you if you succeed, congratulate you, give you awards, and raise your salary. Success is something to be proud of. What a relief compared to cultures in which the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, or my own country, with its fine Dutch expression, “Act normally, which is crazy enough!”

Holding people back from achievement by hanging the weight of conformity around their necks disrupts the connection between effort and reward. Is it fair for two people to earn the same if their efforts, initiatives, creativity, and talents differ? Doesn’t a harder worker
deserve to make more? This libertarian fairness ideal is quintessentially American, and feeds the hopes and dreams of every immigrant.