The Age of Empathy (40 page)

185
French Enlightenment
: Elisabetta Visalberghi and James Anderson (2008, p. 283): “Valuing fairness to others is a rather recent human moral principle, at least in Western cultures, grounded in the theoretical stance—expressed by French Enlightenment philosophers—that people are equal.”

186
Brain scans of players
: Invented by Werner Güth, the ultimatum game was used in an influential study by Daniel Kahneman and co-workers (1986). Alan Sanfey and co-workers (2003) scanned the brains of players facing low offers, and found activation of areas associated with negative emotions.

186
Lamalera whale hunters
: The hunters collect a small number of whales per year for their own subsistence. They row towards the whale, then the harpoonist jumps on its back to thrust its weapon into it. They follow the whale for hours, often losing it, or killing it through blood loss and exhaustion (Alvard, 2004).

187
“inequity aversion”
: Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt (1999).

188
Richard Grasso
: James Surowiecki’s “The Coup de Grasso,”
New Yorker,
October 5, 2003.

188
“Underlying public distrust”
: The quote comes from Mike Sunnucks in the
Phoenix Business Journal
(September 30, 2008). In an interview by Nathan Gardels on The Huffington Post (September 16, 2008), Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, claimed: “The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Communism—it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable.”

189
“Heads must roll”
: Maureen Dowd, “After W., Le Deluge,”
New York Times,
October 19, 2008.

189
It really was the inequity
: The original capuchin study by Sarah Brosnan and myself was published in 2003, followed by one with more monkeys and stricter controls by Megan van Wolkenten and co-workers (2007). Partially supportive replications were conducted by Grace Fletcher (2008) and Julie Neiworth and co-workers (2009). Brosnan (2008) offers an evolutionary account of primate inequity responses.

190
observation of a bonobo
: Incident related in
Bonobo
(de Waal, 1997, p. 41) by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who believes that bonobos are happiest when everyone gets the same. This species may indeed be more inequity averse than the other apes (Bräuer et al., 2009).

191
Moe’s thirty-ninth birthday
: Described in “The Animal Within,” by Amy Argetsinger,
Washington Post,
May 24, 2005. Castration of victims is not unusual among wild male chimps, similar to observation at the Arnhem Zoo mentioned in chapter 2.

191
“If you want peace”
: This quote is being attributed to both American essayist H. L. Mencken (1880—1956) and Pope Paul VI (1897—1978).

192
fairness norm
: A version of the ultimatum game was tried on chimpanzees by Keith Jensen and co-workers (2007), but since the apes accepted all (including zero) offers, they probably never grasped the game’s contingencies (Brosnan, 2008).

192
“I then had dinner”
: From Irene Pepperberg’s
Alex & Me
(2008, p. 153).

193
dogs too may be sensitive to injustice
: Study by Friederike Range et al., (2009). Vilmos Csányi (2005, p. 69) describes the need for dogs to be treated equally: “Dogs keep track of every morsel and every caress and want to have a part in everything. If the master ignores this, they become seriously depressed or aggressive towards the favored individual.”

193
used in a “chimpomat”
: Token-exchange studies by John Wolfe (1936).

194
seeing another’s fortune
: This refers to the Adam Smith quote at the start of chapter 1. The study on selfish versus prosocial choices in capuchins was conducted by de Waal et al. (2008). William Harbaugh and co-workers (2007) showed that charity activates reward centers in the human brain.

196
contrasting Europe and the United States
: Joel Handler (2004). The loss of entrepeneurs was described by Peter Gumbel in “The French Exodus,”
Time,
April 5, 2007.

197
Gini index
: The Gini coefficient measures income distribution from 0 percent (greatest equality) to 100 percent (maximum inequality). With a Gini index of 45 percent, the United States ranks between Uruguay and Cameroon according to the
CIA World Factbook
(2008). Even India (37 percent) and Indonesia (36 percent) have a more equal income distribution, whereas the index is between 25 percent and 35 percent for most European nations. How income inequality harms the economy has been documented by Larry Bartels (2008).

197
Less egalitarian states
: Utah and New Hampshire (with the most equal income distributions) are healthier than Louisiana and Mississippi (with the most unequal distributions). S. V. Subramanian and Ichiro Kawachi (2003) explored if this effect could be explained away by the racial composition of states, but found the relation to persist if race is taken into account.

197
Richard Wilkinson
: Quoted from Wilkinson (2006, p. 712). Perhaps the underlying emotions are more basic than suggested, however, because an experiment by Fatemeh Heidary and co-workers (2008) found similar negative health effects in rabbits. For eight weeks, animals were subjected to either food deprivation in isolation (one-third of their normal diet), or the same food deprivation while they could see, hear, and smell well-fed rabbits. The second group showed significantly more signs of stress-related cardiac atrophy.

199
watched a female baboon assist a male
: Benjamin Beck (1973).

201
“Out of the crooked timber”
: Translation of Kant’s 1784 statement in German: “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden.” This “crooked timber” phrase figures in the title of a book by Isaiah Berlin as well as the name of a popular blogsite (
Crookedtimber.org
).

201
“We have always known”
: A reference to the Great Depression in FDR’s Second Inaugural Address (January 20, 1937).

201
kudzu
: Considered the scourge of the South, because it suffocates anything it overgrows, kudzu is a Japanese vine introduced for erosion control in the 1930s. It can grow one foot per day, and is now beyond control.

202
glorious New Man
: Quote from Leon Trotsky (1922). See also Steven Pinker (2002) for the communist belief in a flexible human nature.

202
raised as a girl
: John Colapinto,
As Nature Made Him
(2000), offers the real story of a boy who suffered a botched circumcision, thus becoming a test case for a sexologist who thought that gender is environmentally constructed. The boy’s testicles were surgically removed, he received injections of female hormones, and was told he was a girl. This could not undo the prenatal effects of hormones on his brain, however. The child walked like a boy and objected violently to girl clothes and toys. He committed suicide at the age of thirty-eight. Gender identity is now widely recognized as biologically determined.

203
the gentle, sexy bonobo
:
Our Inner Ape
(de Waal, 2005) discusses human similarities to both of our closest primate relatives: the bonobo and the chimpanzee.

204
“we don’t do body counts”
: The destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, in 2001, was celebrated across the Muslim world, and the bombing of Baghdad received much flag-waving support in the United States, and was even compared to a symphony by retired Major General Donald Shepperd: “I don’t mean to be glib about it, but it really is a symphony that has to be orchestrated by a conductor” (CNN News, March 21, 2003). Rumsfeld’s statement on Iraqi dead was given on Fox News (November 2, 2003).

204
Yosef Lapid
: The justice minister said that the images of Israeli destruction in Gaza reminded him of his family’s situation in World War II. Lapid had lost family members in the Holocaust (“Gaza Political Storm Hits Israel,” BBC News, May 23, 2004).

205
“nature is filled with competition”
: David Brooks, “Human Nature Redux,”
New York Times,
February 17, 2007.

205
Martin Hoffman
: Hoffman (1981, p. 79).

205
“mentalize” automatically
: The intentional mental states (e.g., desires, needs, feelings, beliefs, goals, reasons) of others are unobservable constructs deduced from observed behavior. Mentalization helps us make sense of the behavior around us (Allen et al., 2008).

206
applies equally well to a dog
: Patricia McConnell (2005) interprets canine behavior in emotional terms.

207
Queen Victoria
: Matt Ridley (2001) describes the first displays of apes at the London Zoo.

207
Toward the end of a long career
: David Premack (2007) and Jeremy Kagan (2004).

210
“As long as I live”
: J. K. Rowling (2008).

snakes in suits
: Title of a book on psychopathy in business by Paul Babiak and Robert Hare (2006).

212
a developmental disorder
: James Blair (1995).

212
polar bear plays with a husky
: Many animals “self-handicap” while playing with younger or weaker partners. A gorilla male, who could kill a juvenile by just leaning a hand on its chest, controls his incredible strength in wrestling and tickling games. Rare play between a polar bear and a tethered sled dog was documented in Canada’s Hudson Bay by German photographer Norbert Rosing.

213
Germany in the previous century
: Robert Waite,
The Psychopathic God: Adolph Hitler
(1977). Hitler has also been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic (Coolidge et al., 2007).

213
“In those days”
: Mark Rowlands (2008, p. 181). A character study of Tertullian concluded that the church father was indeed close to being a psychopath (Nisters, 1950).

214
open or close the portal
: This is known as the “appraisal” mechanism, that is, the question which cues modulate the empathic response. Major cues for empathy are familiarity and similarity between subject and object (Preston and de Waal, 2002). Further see Frederique de Vignemont and Tania Singer (2006).

214
the fifth horseman
: Ashley Montagu and Floyd Matson (1983).

214
hardwired for empathy
: British autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen (2003) claims that the female brain is specialized in empathizing and the male brain in systematizing. See Carolyne Zahn-Waxler et al. (1992, 2006) for sex differences in childhood and Alan Feingold (1994) for cross-cultural evidence that women are more “tender-minded” and nurturing than men.

215
“Pity, though it is”
: From Bernard de Mandeville’s “An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue”
(Fable of the Bees,
2nd edition). Mandeville (1670—733) represents perhaps the closest historical parallel to Ayn Rand’s attempt to celebrate egoism as a moral good. The subtitle of Mandeville’s satirical fable says it all: “Private Vices, Publick Benefits.” Claiming that rapaciousness feeds prosperity, he elevated selfish motives and their economic outcome above other human values.

215
a more complex picture
: Nancy Eisenberg (2000) and Sara Jaffee and Janet Shibley Hyde (2000) doubt pronounced gender differences in empathy.

216
Steve Ballmer
: “Ballmer ‘vowed to kill Google,’” Ina Fried (CNET News, September 5, 2005).

219
ancient Greeks
: Ajax, the great warrior, went into a suicidal depression after the Trojan War. Sophocles noted about his insanity: “Now he suffers lonely thoughts….” The U.S. military uses Greek plays as PTSD counseling tools (
MSNBC.com
, August 14, 2008).

220
“I am sick and tired of war”
: Sherman’s and other quotes on killing and warfare come from Dave Grossman’s (1995)
On Killing.

220
“You saw the ox”
: From
The Works of Mencius
(Book I, Part I, Chapter VII).

221
measure the greatest happiness
: Paul Zak (2005) shows that self-reported happiness correlates positively with generalized trust across nations.

221
Alan Greenspan
: Quoted by Jim Puzzanghera,
Los Angeles Times,
October 24, 2008.

222
Smith saw society
: Jonathan Wight (2003).

223
“dismal science”
: About women in economics, see John Kay, “A Little Empathy Would Be Good for Economics,”
Financial Times,
June 12, 2003. The term
stakeholder
(which covers the employees, clients, bankers, suppliers, and local community of a business) is increasingly used as counterpoint to
shareholder
or
stockholder,
such as in Edward Freeman’s (1984) stakeholder theory.

224
“We are more compassionate”
: From Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado (August 28, 2008).

224
Abraham Lincoln
: In a letter to Joshua Speed (August 24, 1855).