The Age of Empathy (8 page)

Some biologists call such applications a “mistake,” suggesting that behavior shouldn’t be used for anything it wasn’t intended for. Even if this sounds a bit like the Catholic Church telling us that sex isn’t for fun, I can see their point. Instead of nursing those piggies, the biologically optimal thing for the tigress would have been to use them as protein snacks. But as soon as we move from biology to psychology, the perspective changes. Mammals have been endowed with powerful impulses to take care of vulnerable young, so that the tigress is only doing what comes naturally to her. Psychologically speaking, she isn’t mistaken at all.

Similarly, if a human couple adopts a child from a faraway land, their care and worries are as genuine as those of biological parents. Or if people have sex because they “want to change the conversation” (an actual reason given in the above poll), their arousal and enjoyment are as real as that of any other couple. Evolved tendencies are part and parcel of our psychology, and we’re free to use them any way we like.

Now, let’s apply these insights to kindness. My main point is that even if a trait evolved for reason X, it may very well be used in daily life for reasons X, Y, and Z. Offering assistance to others evolved to serve self-interest, which it does if aimed at close relatives or group mates willing to return the favor. This is the way natural selection operates: It produces behavior that, on average and in the long run, benefits those showing it. But this doesn’t mean that humans or animals only help one another for selfish reasons. The reasons relevant for evolution don’t necessarily restrict the actor. The actor follows an existing tendency, sometimes doing so even if there’s absolutely nothing to be gained: the man who jumps on the train tracks to protect a
stranger, the dog who suffers massive injuries by leaping between a child and a rattlesnake, or the dolphins forming a protective ring around human swimmers in shark-infested water. It’s hard to imagine that these actors are seeking future payoffs. Just as sex doesn’t need to aim at reproduction, and parental care doesn’t need to favor one’s own offspring, assistance given to others doesn’t require the actor to know if, when, and how he’ll get better from it.

This is why the selfish-gene metaphor is so tricky. By injecting psychological terminology into a discussion of gene evolution, the two levels that biologists work so hard to keep apart are slammed together. Clouding of the distinction between genes and motivations has led to an exceptionally cynical view of human and animal behavior. Believe it or not, empathy is commonly presented as an illusion, something that not even humans truly possess. One of the most repeated quips in the sociobiological literature of the past three decades is “Scratch an ‘altruist,’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed.” With great zeal and shock effect, authors depict us as complete Scrooges. In
The Moral Animal,
Robert Wright claims that “the pretense of selflessness is about as much part of human nature as is its frequent absence.” The reigning incredulity concerning human kindness recalls a Monty Python sketch in which a banker is being asked for a small donation for the orphanage. Utterly mystified by the whole concept of a gift, the banker wonders “But what’s my incentive?” He can’t see why anyone would do anything for nothing.

Modern psychology and neuroscience fail to back these bleak views. We’re preprogrammed to reach out. Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control. We can suppress it, mentally block it, or fail to act on it, but except for a tiny percentage of humans—known as psychopaths—no one is emotionally immune to another’s situation. The fundamental yet rarely asked question is: Why did natural selection design our brains so that we’re in tune with our fellow human beings, feeling distress at their distress and pleasure at their pleasure? If exploitation of others were all that mattered, evolution should never have gotten into the empathy business.

At the same time, I should add that I have absolutely no illusions about the nasty side of our species, or that of any other primate, for that matter. I have witnessed more blood and gore among monkeys and apes than most. Too many times, I have watched vicious fights, seen males kill infants, or been left inspecting the wounds on a dead monkey, trying to determine if they were made by the sharp canine teeth of a male (slashes and punctures) or the smaller teeth of females (bruises and ripped skin). Aggression was my first topic of study, and I’m fully aware that there’s no shortage of it in the primates.

It was only later that I became interested in conflict resolution and cooperation. The final push in this direction came from the death of my favorite chimp during the Machiavellian power struggles described in
Chimpanzee Politics.
Right before I emigrated, in 1980, two males at the Dutch zoo where I worked assaulted and castrated a third, named Luit, who later succumbed to his injuries. Similar incidents are now known from the field. I’m not referring here to the well-documented warfare over territory, which is directed against out-group members, but to the fact that wild chimps, too, occasionally kill within their own community.

Until this catastrophe, I had looked at conflict resolution as a mildly interesting phenomenon. I knew that chimpanzee contestants kiss and embrace each other after fights, but the shock of standing next to the veterinarian in a bloody operating room, handing him instruments for the hundreds of stitches he sewed, impressed upon me how critically important this behavior is. It helps apes maintain good relationships despite occasional conflict. Without these mechanisms, things get ugly. The tragic end of Luit opened my eyes to the value of peacemaking and played a major part in my decision to focus on what holds societies together.

The violent nature of chimps is sometimes used as an argument against their having any empathy at all. Since we associate empathy with kindness, a common question is “If chimps hunt and eat monkeys and kill their own kind, how can they possibly possess empathy?” What’s most surprising is how rarely this question is being
asked of our own species. If it were, we would of course be the first to disqualify as an empathic species. There exists in fact no obligatory connection between empathy and kindness, and no animal can afford treating everyone nicely all the time: Every animal faces competition over food, mates, and territory. A society based on empathy is no more free of conflict than a marriage based on love.

Like other primates, humans can be described either as highly cooperative animals that need to work hard to keep selfish and aggressive urges under control or as highly competitive animals that nevertheless have the ability to get along and engage in give-and-take. This is what makes socially positive tendencies so interesting: They play out against a backdrop of competition. I rate humans among the most aggressive of primates but also believe that we’re masters at connecting and that social ties constrain competition. In other words, we are by no means obligatorily aggressive. It’s all a matter of balance: Pure, unconditional trust and cooperation are naïve and detrimental, whereas unconstrained greed can only lead to the sort of dog-eat-dog world that Skilling advocated at Enron until it collapsed under its own mean-spirited weight.

If biology is to inform government and society, the least we should do is get the full picture, drop the cardboard version that is Social Darwinism, and look at what evolution has actually put into place. What kind of animals are we? The traits produced by natural selection are rich and varied and include social tendencies far more conducive to optimism than generally assumed. In fact, I’d argue that biology constitutes our greatest hope. One can only shudder at the thought that the humaneness of our societies would depend on the whims of politics, culture, or religion.

Ideologies come and go, but human nature is here to stay.

Bodies Talking to Bodies

O
ne morning, the principal’s voice sounded over the intercom of my high school with the shocking announcement that a popular teacher of French had just died in front of his class. Everyone fell silent. While the headmaster went on to explain that the teacher had suffered a heart attack, I couldn’t keep myself from having a laughing fit. To this day, I feel embarrassed.

What is it about laughter that makes it unstoppable even if triggered by inappropriate circumstances? Extreme bouts of laughter are worrisome: They involve loss of control, shedding of tears, gasping for air, leaning on others, even the wetting of pants while rolling on the floor! What a weird trick has been played on our linguistic species to express itself with stupid “ha ha ha!” sounds. Why don’t we leave it at a cool “that was funny”?

These are ancient questions. Philosophers have been exasperated by the problem of why one of humanity’s finest achievements, its sense of humor, is expressed with the sort of crude abandonment associated with animals. There can be no doubt that laughter is inborn. The expression is a human universal, one that we share with our closest relatives, the apes. A Dutch primatologist, Jan van Hooff, set out to learn under which circumstances apes utter their hoarse, panting laughs, and concluded that it has to do with a playful attitude. It’s often a reaction to surprise or incongruity—such as when a tiny ape infant chases the group’s top male, who runs away “scared,” laughing all the while. This connection with surprise is still visible in children’s games, such as peekaboo, or jokes marked by unexpected turns, which we save until the very end, appropriately calling them “punch lines.”

Human laughter is a loud display with much teeth baring and exhalation (hence the gasping for air) that often signals mutual liking and well-being. When several people burst out laughing at the same moment, they broadcast solidarity and togetherness. But since such bonding is sometimes directed against outsiders, there is also a hostile element to laughter, as in ethnic jokes, which has led to the speculation that laughter originated from scorn and derision. I find this hard to believe, though, given that the very first chuckles occur between mother and child, where such feelings are the last things on their minds. This holds equally for apes, in which the first “playface” (as the laugh expression is known) occurs when one of the mother’s huge fingers pokes and strokes the belly of her tiny infant.

What intrigues me most about laughter is how it
spreads.
It’s almost impossible
not
to laugh when everybody else is. There have been laughing epidemics, in which no one could stop and some even died in a prolonged fit. There are laughing churches and laugh therapies based on the healing power of laughter. The must-have toy of
1996—Tickle Me Elmo—laughed hysterically after being squeezed three times in a row. All of this because we love to laugh and can’t resist joining laughing around us. This is why comedy shows on television have laugh tracks and why theater audiences are sometimes sprinkled with “laugh plants”: people paid to produce raucous laughing at any joke that comes along.

The infectiousness of laughter even works across species. Below my office window at the Yerkes Primate Center, I often hear my chimps laugh during rough-and-tumble games, and cannot suppress a chuckle myself. It’s such a happy sound. Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance. And when young apes put on their playface, their friends join in with the same expression as rapidly and easily as humans do with laughter.

Shared laughter is just one example of our primate sensitivity to others. Instead of being Robinson Crusoes sitting on separate islands, we’re all interconnected, both bodily and emotionally. This may be an odd thing to say in the West, with its tradition of individual freedom and liberty, but
Homo sapiens
is remarkably easily swayed in one emotional direction or another by its fellows.

This is precisely where empathy and sympathy start—not in the higher regions of imagination, or the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s situation. It began much simpler, with the synchronization of bodies: running when others run, laughing when others laugh, crying when others cry, or yawning when others yawn. Most of us have reached the incredibly advanced stage at which we yawn even at the mere mention of yawning—as you may be doing right now!—but this is only after lots of face-to-face experience.

Yawn contagion, too, works across species. Virtually all animals show the peculiar “paroxystic respiratory cycle characterized by a standard cascade of movements over a five to ten second period” that defines the yawn. I once attended a lecture on involuntary
pandiculation
(the medical term for stretching and yawning) with slides of horses, lions, and monkeys—and soon the entire audience was pandiculating. Since it so easily triggers a chain reaction, the yawn reflex opens a window onto mood transmission, an essential part of empathy. This makes it all the more intriguing that chimpanzees yawn when they see others yawn.