The Age of Empathy (36 page)

43
“Scratch an ‘altruist’”
: Michael Ghiselin (1974, p. 247).

43
“pretense of selflessness”
: Robert Wright (1994, p. 344).

43
Monty Python
: “The Merchant Banker” sketch,
Monty Python’s Flying Circus,
1972.

44
Chimpanzee Politics
:
My book about the political dramas at the Arnhem Zoo focused on power and aggression, drawing parallels with the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. Nevertheless, in the context of all this jockeying for position, I noticed a great need in the apes to maintain social relationships, make up after fights, and reassure distressed parties, which got me thinking about empathy and cooperation. The death of Luit opened my eyes to the abyss into which these animals fall if conflict management fails.

45
a backdrop of competition
: Every human society needs to achieve its own equilibrium among three poles: (1) competition over resources, (2) social cohesion and solidarity, and (3) a sustainable environment. Tensions exist between all three poles, but my book focuses exclusively on tension between the first and second ones.

47
laughter originated from scorn
: Thomas Hobbes
(Leviathan,
1651, p. 43): “Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.” A similar view has been expressed by Richard Alexander (1986).

47
laughing epidemics
: Robert Provine’s
Laughter: A Scientific Investigation
(2000) describes
kuru,
a degenerative disease found among cannibals in the highlands of New Guinea. It is marked by excessive laughter
(including laughing at one’s own stumbling and falling) even though the disease invariably has a fatal outcome.

48
when young apes put on their playface
: In a frame-by-frame analysis of orangutans, Marina Davila Ross found involuntary facial mimicry. If one ape showed a playface—even in the absence of any tickling, wrestling, or jumping—its partner would within a second copy the expression (Davila Ross et al., 2007).

48
“paroxystic respiratory cycle”
: From Oliver Walusinski and Bertrand Deputte (2004). Charles Darwin already commented on the yawn as a universal reflex: “Seeing a dog & horse & man yawn, makes me feel how much all animals are built on one structure” (Darwin’s Notebook M, 1838). Our own chimpanzee study is being conducted by Matthew Campbell and Devyn Carter. Like other forms of basic empathy, however, catching a yawn is not limited to primates: Human yawns make dogs yawn (Joly-Mascheroni et al., 2008).

49
copying of small body movements
: Strictly speaking, we don’t
copy
yawns, because yawning is an involuntary reflex. All we can say is that yawning by one person
induces
yawns in another. From an interview with Steve Platek: “[T]he more empathetic you are, the more likely it is that you’ll identify with a yawner and experience a yawn yourself” (Rebecca Skloot,
New York Times,
December 11, 2005).

50
baboon troop gathered
: This incident happened in April 2007 at Emmen Zoo, in the Netherlands. Another “mass hysteria” occurred when six newly arrived penguins introduced a strange habit to a colony at the San Francisco Zoo, with all birds swimming in circles for weeks. They started every morning until they staggered totally exhausted out of the pool at dusk. “We’ve lost complete control,” complained the penguin keeper (Associated Press, January 16, 2003).

50
horses were trapped
: This spectacular horse rescue was set to music on the Internet:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6vSvOw-4U4
.

51
husky named Isobel
: Struck by blindness, this dog had been removed from her team, but was returned when she stopped eating
(Canadian Press,
November 19, 2007). Isobel’s story reminds me of Darwin’s (1871, p.
77)
account of “an old and completely blind pelican, which was very fat.” Darwin speculated that other birds might have been feeding the blind one, but I wonder if it couldn’t have been that this bird, like Isobel, accompanied others to feeding grounds relying on hearing and air flow in the tight formations that pelicans are known for. But then the question still remains how a blind bird catches fish.

52
“Three times when this happened”
: Jane Goodall (1990, p. 116).

53
children with autism
: Eleven-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder yawn as much as other children of the same age, but don’t yawn more while watching videotaped yawns, whereas typically developing children show a marked increase (Senju et al., 2007).

53
neural resonance
: Obviously, mirror neurons could play a role in the copying of mouth movements and facial mimicry (e.g., Ferrari et al., 2003), but this still does not solve the correspondence problem, which requires preexisting knowledge of which body part of another individual corresponds with one’s own.

53
dolphins mimicked people
: Louis Herman (2002) described dolphin imitation, and Bruce Moore (1992) did the same for an African gray parrot. The bird not only mimicked sounds but also body movements. He’d say “Ciao” while waving goodbye with a foot or wing, or say “Look at my tongue” while sticking out his tongue, just as Moore had shown him. This bird thus solved the correspondence problem with a totally different species.

54
swagger with arms hanging
: White House press release (September 2, 2004) quoting George W. Bush: “Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called ‘walking.’”

54
Arthur Miller
: Cited in
Emotional Contagion
by Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson (1994, p. 83), which book provides an excellent overview of mimicry and emotional contagion, and is the source of some of my human examples.

54
Give a zoo ape a broom
: Anne Russon (1996) describes orangutans in a sanctuary imitating human caretakers, such as stringing up hammocks and washing dishes. They also mimic undesirable (i.e., unrewarded) activities such as siphoning gasoline from a drum.

54
white-coated experimenter
: Apes have traditionally suffered from unfair comparisons with human children, such as when only the apes face a species barrier during testing (e.g., Tomasello, 1999; Povinelli, 2000; Hermann et al., 2007). It is time to move toward ape-to-ape testing, which has greater ecological validity and has produced remarkable breakthroughs in recent years (de Waal, 2001; Boesch, 2007; de Waal et al., 2008).

56
imitation is a way of reaching a goal
: The classical definition
of imitation
is to learn an act by seeing it done (Thorndike, 1898). This definition covers the term’s common meaning—including the my-finger-got-stuck routine described in the text—but narrower definitions
have gained popularity. So-called true imitation entails recognition of another’s goal as well as copying of the other’s technique to reach this goal (Whiten and Ham, 1992). I prefer the older, broader sense of the term, however, for the simple reason that I believe all forms of imitation to be evolutionarily and neurologically continuous.

56
Andy Whiten
: A professor of psychology and primatology at St. Andrews University, Whiten developed the two-action paradigm to test ape imitation. He teamed up with our Living Links Center, in Atlanta, to apply this paradigm to group-living chimps. Results strongly support imitation in apes (e.g., Bonnie et al., 2006; Horner and Whiten, 2007; Horner et al., 2006; Whiten et al., 2005), and relate to the ongoing debate about animal “culture” (e.g., de Waal, 2001; Mc-Grew, 2004; Whiten, 2005).

58
Adult apes are potentially dangerous
: Even a young, relatively small chimpanzee has the muscle strength of several grown men bundled into one. Adult chimpanzees are totally beyond unarmed human control, and have been known to kill people.

59
a ghost box
: Lydia Hopper demonstrated 225 food deliveries from a box controlled by transparent fish lines, before giving the chimps a chance to manipulate the same box without the lines. They had no clue what to do (Hopper et al., 2007).

59
ask a pianist to pick out his own performance
: Saying that mental processes run “via our bodies” is shorthand for saying that they run via neural representations and associated proprioceptive sensations of our bodies in our brain. The examples given are perception (Proffitt, 2006) and pianist self-recognition (Repp and Knoblich, 2004).

60
using a heavy rock as hammer
: Video by Sarah Marshall-Pescini and Andrew Whiten (2008). What I mean by a “shortcut to imitation” is that not all imitation or emulation requires an actual understanding of the other’s goals, methods, and rewards. Unconscious motor mimicry bypasses such cognitive appraisals, producing rapid learning based on bodily closeness to the model (cf. Bonding- and Identification-based Observational Learning, or BIOL; de Waal, 2001).

61
“Once I saw an elephant mother”
: Katy Payne (1998, p. 63) in
Silent Thunder.

62
When a human experimenter imitates
: Described by Andrew Meltzoff and Keith Moore (1995). Macaques, too, recognize when they are
being imitated (Paukner et al., 2005), and apes even test out the imitator, as human children do (Haun and Call, 2008).

62
The Dutch may be notoriously stingy
: Dutch restaurant bills include service charges, hence tips are small. They’re nevertheless higher for waitresses instructed by scientists to repeat orders (van Baaren et al., 2003).

62
Like chameleons
: Human copycat tendencies are in fact known as the “chameleon effect” (Chartrand and Bargh, 1999).

64
“the most complicated opus”
: Joe Marshall and Jito Sugardjito (1986, p. 155).

65
a good siamang marriage
: Thomas Geissmann and Mathias Orgeldinger (2000). The quote comes from an interview in
Spiegel Online
(February 6, 2006). Similar vocal convergence occurs in pairs of male bottlenose dolphins that have formed an alliance: The stronger their bond, the more the males’ vocalizations sound alike (Wells, 2003).

65
Einfühlung
:
The terminology came from an earlier German psychologist, Robert Vischer. In the phrasing of Lipps,
Einfühlung
permits us to gain knowledge about the other self (
das andere Ich)
or the foreign self (
das fremde Ich).
See also Schloßberger (2005) and Gallese (2005). The German language is rich in variations on this terminology, from feeling into, feeling with, and suffering with others—each process denoted by its own single word—but also opposites, such as
Schadenfreude
(literally: hurt-joy), that is, getting pleasure out of someone else’s pain.

66
subliminal presentation
: Ulf Dimberg and co-workers (2000). Recent work by Stephanie Preston and Brent Stansfield (2008) shows that the leakage of facial information even includes the conceptual, semantic level.

67
emotional contagion
:
Defined as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and, consequently, to converge emotionally” (Hatfield et al., 1994, p. 5).

67
one baby crying
: Studies on contagious crying report a stronger response in female than male infants. Some studies have explored a range of other sounds. Human infants respond strongest to real cries produced by other infants, not playbacks of their own cries, cries of older children, chimpanzee screams, or computer-generated wails (Sagi and Hoffman, 1976; Martin and Clark, 1982).

68
“We haven’t yet solved the problem of God”
: From Tom Stoppard’s (2002) play
The Coast of Utopia.

70
One rat’s distress
: Joseph Lucke and Daniel Batson (1980) tried to determine if rats are concerned about the companions they give shocks to, and concluded that they are not. This does not deny, of course, that they can be emotionally affected by another’s distress.

71
The last mouse showed more signs
: Jeffrey Mogil on National Public Radio (July 5, 2006). The study on commiserating mice was published by Dale Langford et al. (2006).

73
Oscar the Cat
: David Dosa (2007), a geriatrician, published “A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat,” saying: “His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has provided companionship to those who otherwise would have died alone” (p. 329).

75
avoid unpleasant sights and sounds
: Inasmuch as self-protective altruism seeks to reduce negative arousal caused by the state another finds itself in, it is based on empathy. I am using the altruism label here in the biological sense: behavior that benefits another at a cost to the self regardless of whether the effect on the other is intended (chapter 2).

76
“a much more skilled interpreter”
: Quoted from Robert Miller (1967, p. 131).

76
I avoid causing pain
: The ethics of animal research is subject to never-ending, often acrimonious debate. Since my own research doesn’t aim at solving pressing medical problems, I feel there is little justification for invasive procedures. My personal two rules of thumb are that (1) I work only with group-living (as opposed to singly housed) primates, and (2) I use relatively stress-free procedures, defined as procedures that I wouldn’t mind applying to human volunteers.