The Age of Empathy (28 page)

It’s unknown how long monkeys keep favors in mind. Their reciprocity may be merely “attitudinal” in that they mirror immediate attitudes. If others are hostile, they’ll be hostile back. If others are nice, they’ll be nice back. Consequently, if another monkey helps them pull a heavy tray, they’ll share in return.

Hare Krishna followers bet on this principle when they hand out flowers to pedestrians. As soon as a flower is accepted, they ask for money. Instead of simply begging for a handout, they count on the fact that we mirror their behavior. We apply it every day in fleeting contacts, such as with people whom we meet on the train, at parties, at sports games, and so on. Since attitudinal reciprocity doesn’t require record keeping, it isn’t mentally taxing.

But, like us, some animals follow a more complex scheme, storing favors in long-term memory. In our food-for-grooming experiment, chimps did so for at least a couple of hours, but I have known apes who’ve been grateful for years. One was a female whom I had patiently taught to bottle-feed an adopted infant. Previously, she had lost several offspring due to insufficient lactation. Chimps being tool users, she had no trouble handling a nursing bottle. In the ensuing years, this female raised her own infants this way as well. Decades later, she was still thrilled if I stopped by the zoo where she lived. She’d groom me with enthusiastic tooth-clacking, showing that I was a hero to her. Animal keepers, most of whom were unaware of our history,
couldn’t believe the fuss she was making over me. I’m convinced it had to do with me having helped her overcome a problem that had given her unimaginable grief.

If chimps look back further than monkeys, remembering previous events more clearly, this makes their reciprocity more deliberate and calculated. If a wild chimp, for example, removes a poacher’s snare that has tightened around the wrist of another—having caused the other to scream in excruciating pain—it’s safe to assume that his assistance will be remembered. It’s even possible that chimps not only look back, but also forward, treating others nicely so as to curry favors. I can’t say that this has been proven, but evidence is mounting. For example, when male chimps vie for high status, they try to make friends with as many potential backers as possible. They do the rounds with females, grooming them and tickling their offspring. Normally, male chimps are not particularly interested in the young, but when they need group support they can’t stay away from them. Do they know that all female eyes rest on them to see how they treat the most vulnerable?

The tactic is eerily humanlike. I regularly download pictures of American politicians holding up babies under the eyes of their parents, who look on with a mixture of delight and apprehension. Have you ever noticed how often politicians lift infants above the crowd? It’s an odd way of handling them, not always enjoyed by the object of attention itself. But what good is a display that stays unnoticed?

Political candidates love to hold babies up in the air.

And then there are the occasions when a political contender, such as a rising young chimpanzee male, becomes extraordinarily generous with females around the time that he begins to challenge the leader. In a process that may take months, the contender irritates the established alpha multiple
times a day to see what kind of reaction he gets. At the same time, he shares food specifically with those who might assist him in his quest. At the Arnhem Zoo, I saw rising males go out of their way to secure goodies: braving electric wire around live trees, jumping over it, to climb up to the foliage and break off branches for the mass gathered below. Such behavior seemed to boost their popularity.

In the wild, high-ranking male chimps are said to bribe others, sharing meat selectively with potential allies and withholding it from their rivals. And at Bossou, in Guinea, male chimps customarily raid surrounding papaya plantations—a perilous undertaking—and bring the delicious fruits back to buy sex with: They specifically share with fertile females. According to British scientist Kimberley Hockings, “Such daring behavior certainly seems to be an attractive trait and possessing a sought-after food item, such as papaya, appears to draw positive attention from the females.”

It isn’t exactly the bone-trading among dogs envisioned by Smith, but we’re getting close. Chimps may have foresight along the lines of “If I do this for him or her, I may get that in return.” Such calculations would explain observations at Chester Zoo in the United Kingdom. During fights in its large chimpanzee colony, individuals enjoyed support from parties whom they had groomed the day before. Not only this, but they seemed to plan whom they’d pick a fight with, grooming potential supporters days in advance so that the outcome might turn in their favor.

Given the elaborate exchanges among our close relatives, perhaps even including planning and foresight, one wonders why some students of human reciprocity define their field in opposition to animal behavior. They call human cooperation a “huge anomaly” in the natural world. It’s not that the followers of this school are anti-evolutionary—on the contrary, they are self-proclaimed Darwinists—but they are eager to keep hairy creatures on the sidelines. I have only half-jokingly called their approach “evolution sans animals.” They have been quick to write off chimpanzee cooperation as a product of genetic kinship, thus putting it in the same category as the communal
life of ants and bees. Only humans, they say, engage in large-scale cooperation with nonrelatives.

When zoo studies made clear that kinship is not required for chimps to work closely together, this was dismissed as not representing the natural condition. And when wild apes, too, were shown to regularly cooperate with unrelated individuals, this was questioned, because isn’t it hard to know exactly who’s related to whom? Can we really exclude the possibility that males who have formed a coalition are brothers or cousins? Nothing could convince the skeptics. Eventually, this fruitless debate was settled by new technology. It’s not unusual nowadays for primatologists to return from the field with a load of carefully labeled fecal samples. DNA extraction from these samples offers a more accurate picture of genetic relations than ever before, telling us which individuals are related to the nth degree, which male fathered which offspring, who immigrated into the community from the outside, and so on.

One of the most complex field projects was set up in Kibale National Park in Uganda, which combined years of data on chimpanzee social behavior with excrement picked up from the forest floor. It’s hard to imagine how much sweaty, smelly work goes into a genotyping project like this, but the results were more than worth it. First of all, the German-American team demonstrated that kinship matters: Brothers spend more time together, support one another more, and share more food than unrelated males. This is of course exactly what one would expect, not only in chimpanzees but also in any small-scale human society. But the study also demonstrated widespread cooperation among nonrelatives. In fact, the majority of close partnerships in the Kibale community were between males lacking family ties.

This suggests mutualism and reciprocity as the basis of cooperation, thus placing chimps much closer to humans than to the social insects. Nothing surprising there, but it also means that to understand the psychology of human reciprocity, apes offer a perfect comparison. That is not to deny a few differences with human cooperation, one of which may be a more developed tendency in our species to penalize
those who fall short. But even this difference may be less absolute than it sounds. We know that chimps get even with those who have turned against them. Hours after an incident in which others banded together against him, a high-ranking male may seek out his tormentors individually, while they are sitting somewhere alone, and teach them a lesson they won’t forget. Chimps settle scores just as easily as they return favors, so I wouldn’t put it past them to impose sanctions on others.

My guess is that humans show all of these tendencies to a greater extent, and thus are capable of more complex, larger-scale cooperation. If hundreds of workers build a jet airliner, all relying on one another, or if many different levels of employees make up a company, this is possible only because of our advanced abilities of organization, task division, storing of past interactions, connecting effort with reward, building trust, and discouraging freeloading. Human psychology evolved to permit ever larger and more complex stag hunts, going well beyond anything in the animal kingdom. While the actual hunting of large prey may have driven this evolution, our ancestors engaged in other cooperative ventures, such as communal care for the young, warfare, the building of bridges, and protection against predators. They benefited from cooperation in myriad ways.

One school of thought proposes that our ancestors became such great team players because of their dealings with strangers. This forced them to develop reward and punishment schemes that worked even with outsiders whom they had never met and would never see again. It is well known that human strangers brought together in the laboratory adopt strict rules of cooperation and turn against anyone who fails to comply. This is known as
strong reciprocity.
We just get very upset if we put in a lot of effort and then get shortchanged by someone who acts as if he’s playing along but in fact takes advantage of us. We have all kinds of ways to exclude or punish such people. But while no one doubts that we disapprove of cheaters, the evolutionary origin of these feelings is a point of debate. The fact that we apply norms to strangers doesn’t necessarily mean that these norms evolved specifically for
this purpose. Were strangers really that important in human evolution? Robert Trivers, the originator of the theory of reciprocal altruism, doubts it:

Remember our discussion of “motivational autonomy,” of how a behavior may have evolved for reason X, yet in reality be used for reasons X, Y, and Z? The example I gave was parental care, which evolved for the benefit of offspring yet is often applied to adopted children, even household pets. In the same way, Trivers believes that norms of exchange began between individuals who knew one another and lived together, after which they were extended to strangers. We shouldn’t focus too much on anonymous encounters, therefore, because the true cradle of cooperation is the community. This is of course also the context in which apes engage in social exchange, so that the difference with humans is probably less dramatic than originally thought.

In fact, evolution never produces “huge anomalies.” Even the neck of the giraffe is still a neck. Nature knows only variations on themes. The same applies to cooperation. Trying to set human cooperation apart from the larger natural scheme including apes, monkeys, vampire bats, and cleaner fish hardly qualifies as an evolutionary approach.

How often have you seen rich people march in the street shouting that they’re earning too much? Or stockbrokers complaining about the “Onus of the Bonus!”? The well-to-do rather follow Bob Dylan’s
observation that “man is opposed to fair play, he wants it all and he wants it his way.” Instead, protesters typically are blue-collar workers yelling that the minimum wage has to go up, or that their jobs shouldn’t go overseas. A more exotic example was the 2008 march by hundreds of women through the capital of Swaziland. Given their destitute economy, they felt that the king’s wives had overstepped their privileges by chartering an airplane for a shopping spree in Europe.

Fairness is viewed differently by the haves and have-nots. The reason for stating the obvious is the common claim that our sense of fairness transcends self-interest, that it’s concerned with something larger than ourselves. True, most of us subscribe to this ideal, as do many of our institutions. Yet it’s also clear that this is not how fairness started. The underlying emotions and desires aren’t half as lofty as the ideal itself. The most recognizable emotion is resentment. Look at how children react to the slightest discrepancy in the size of their pizza slice compared with their sibling’s. They shout “That’s not fair!” but never in a way transcending their own desires. As a matter of fact, in my younger years I’ve had fights like this with my wife until we hit on the brilliant solution that one of us would do the dividing and the other the choosing. It’s amazing how quickly one develops perfect cutting skills.

We’re all for fair play so long as it helps us. There’s even a biblical parable about this, in which the owner of a vineyard rounds up laborers at different times of the day. Early in the morning, he goes out to find men, offering each one a denarius for their labor. He goes again in the middle of the day, offering the same. At the “eleventh hour” he hires a few more with the same deal. By the end of the day, he pays all of them, starting with the last ones hired. Each one gets a denarius. Watching this, the other workers expect to get more since they had worked through the heat of the day. Yet they get paid one denarius as well. The owner doesn’t feel he owes them any more than what he had promised. The passage famously concludes with “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”