Many have felt as if they were waking up from a bad dream about a big casino where the people’s money had been gambled away, enriching a happy few without the slightest worry about the rest of us. This nightmare was set in motion a quarter century earlier by Reagan-Thatcher trickle-down economics and the soothing reassurance that markets are wonderful at self-regulation. No one believes this anymore. (Location 25)
The emphasis is on what unites a society, what makes it worth living in, rather than what material wealth we can extract from it. (Location 29)
Are we our brothers’ keepers? Should we be? Or would this role only interfere with why we are on earth, which according to economists is to consume and produce, and according to biologists is to survive and reproduce? That both views sound similar is logical given that they arose at around the same time, in the same place, during the English Industrial Revolution. Both follow a competition-is-good-for-you logic. (Location 41)
The ugly secret of economic success is that it sometimes comes at the expense of public funding, thus creating a giant underclass that no one cares about. (Location 70)
Every debate about society and government makes huge assumptions about human nature, which are presented as if they come straight out of biology. But they almost never do. (Location 86)
Why are assumptions about biology always on the negative side? In the social sciences, human nature is typified by the old Hobbesian proverb Homo homini lupus (“Man is wolf to man”), a questionable statement about our own species based on false assumptions about another species. A biologist exploring the interaction between society and human nature really isn’t doing anything new, therefore. The only difference is that instead of trying to justify a particular ideological framework, the biologist has an actual interest in the question of what human nature is and where it came from. (Location 92)
There is exciting new research about the origins of altruism and fairness in both ourselves and other animals. For example, if one gives two monkeys hugely different rewards for the same task, the one who gets the short end of the stick simply refuses to perform. In our own species, too, individuals reject income if they feel the distribution is unfair. Since any income should beat none at all, this means that both monkeys and people fail to follow the profit principle to the letter. By protesting against unfairness, their behavior supports both the claim that incentives matter and that there is a natural dislike of injustice. (Location 104)
Those who highlight individual freedom often regard collective interests as a romantic notion, something for sissies and communists. They prefer an every-man-for-himself logic. (Location 114)
My point is that there is both ownership and sharing. In the end, usually within twenty minutes, all of the chimpanzees in the group will have some food. Owners share with their best buddies and family, who in turn share with their best buddies and family. It is a rather peaceful scene even though there is also quite a bit of jostling for position. I still remember a camera crew filming a sharing session and the cameraman turning to me and saying, “I should show this to my kids. They could learn from it.” (Location 125)
So, don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also to our closest relatives, the primates. In a study done at Taï National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards; they licked their mates’ blood, carefully removed dirt, and waved away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense, given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof. (Location 131)
The notion of “pure reason” is pure fiction. (Location 150)
If morality is derived from abstract principles, why do judgments often come instantaneously? (Location 151)
Much occurs on a bodily level that we rarely think about. We listen to someone telling a sad story, and unconsciously we drop our shoulders, tilt our head sideways like the other, copy his or her frown, and so on. These bodily changes in turn create the same dejected state in us as we perceive in the other. Rather than our head getting into the other’s head, it’s our body that maps the other’s. The same applies to happier emotions. I remember one morning walking out of a restaurant and wondering why I was whistling to myself. How did I get into such a good mood? The answer: I had been sitting near two men, obviously old friends, who hadn’t seen each other in a long time. They had been slapping each other’s backs, laughing, relating amusing stories. This must have lifted my spirit even though I didn’t know these men and hadn’t been privy to their conversation. (Location 167)
Married couples resemble each other, therefore, not because they pick partners who look like them, but because their features converge over the years. The similarity was strongest for couples who reported the greatest happiness. Daily sharing of emotions apparently leads one partner to “internalize” the other, and vice versa, to the point that anyone can see how much they belong together. (Location 177)
Touching stories, one might say, but what do they have to do with human behavior? The point is that we are mammals, which are animals with obligatory maternal care. Obviously, bonding has incredible survival value for us, the most critical bond being the one between mother and offspring. This bond provides the evolutionary template for all other attachments, including those among adults. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, if humans in love tend to regress to the parent-offspring stage, feeding each other tidbits as if they can’t eat by themselves, and talking nonsense with the same high-pitched voices normally reserved for babies. I myself grew up with the Beatles’ love song lyrics “I wanna hold your hand”—another regression. (Location 210)
Unfortunately, environments like the baby farm existed, and all we can say about them is that they were deadly! This became clear when psychologists studied orphans kept in little cribs separated by white sheets, deprived of visual stimulation and body contact. As recommended by scientists, the orphans had never been cooed at, held, or tickled. They looked like zombies, with immobile faces and wide-open, expressionless eyes. Had Watson been right, these children should have been thriving, but they in fact lacked all resistance to disease. At some orphanages, mortality approached 100 percent. (Location 233)
At a primate laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, Harlow demonstrated that monkeys reared in isolation were mentally and socially disturbed. When put in a group they lacked the tendency, let alone the skill, to interact socially. As adults, they couldn’t even copulate or nurse offspring. Whatever we now think of the ethics of Harlow’s research, he proved beyond any doubt that deprivation of body contact is not something that suits mammals. (Location 240)
Bonding is essential for our species, and it is what makes us happiest. And here I don’t mean the sort of jumping-for-joy bliss that the French leader General Charles de Gaulle must have had in mind when he allegedly sneered that “happiness is for idiots.” The pursuit of happiness written into the U.S. Declaration of Independence rather refers to a state of satisfaction with the life one is living. This is a measurable state, and studies show that beyond a certain basic income, material wealth carries remarkably little weight. The standard of living has been rising steadily for decades, but has it changed our happiness quotient? Not at all. Rather than money, success, or fame, time spent with friends and family is what does people the most good. (Location 248)
These reflexes go back to the deepest, most ancient layers of our brain, layers that we share with many animals, not just mammals. Look at how fish, such as herring, swim in schools that tighten instantly when a shark or porpoise approaches. Or how schools turn abruptly in one silvery flash, making it impossible for the predator to target any single fish. Schooling fish keep very precise individual distances, seek out companions of the same size, and perfectly match their speed and direction, often in a fraction of a second. Thousands of individuals thus act almost like a single organism. Or look at how birds, such as starlings, swarm in dense flocks that in an instant evade an approaching hawk. (Location 340)
Security is the first and foremost reason for social life. This brings me to the second false origin myth: that human society is the voluntary creation of autonomous men. The illusion here is that our ancestors had no need for anybody else. They led uncommitted lives. Their only problem was that they were so competitive that the cost of strife became unbearable. Being intelligent animals, they decided to give up a few liberties in return for community life. This origin story, proposed by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the social contract, inspired America’s founding fathers to create the “land of the free.” It is a myth that remains immensely popular in political science departments and law schools, since it presents society as a negotiated compromise rather than something that came naturally to us. (Location 356)
As is true for many mammals, every human life cycle includes stages at which we either depend on others (when we are young, old, or sick) or others depend on us (when we care for the young, old, or sick). We very much rely on one another for survival. It is this reality that ought to be taken as a starting point for any discussion about human society, not the reveries of centuries past, which depicted our ancestors as being as free as birds and lacking any social obligations. (Location 365)
When our ancestors left the forest and entered an open, dangerous environment, they became prey and evolved a herd instinct that beats that of many animals. We excel at bodily synchrony and actually derive pleasure from it. Walking next to someone, for example, we automatically fall into the same stride. We coordinate chants and “waves” during sporting events, oscillate together during pop concerts, and take aerobics classes where we all jump up and down to the same beat. (Location 379)
Because of interdependencies between groups with scarce resources, our ancestors probably never waged war on a grand scale until they settled down and began to accumulate wealth by means of agriculture. This made attacks on other groups more profitable. Instead of being the product of an aggressive drive, it seems that war is more about power and profit. This also implies, of course, that it’s hardly inevitable. (Location 433)
Evolutionary theory is remarkably popular among those on the conservative end of the spectrum, but not in the way biologists would like it to be. The theory figures like a secret mistress. Passionately embraced in its obscure persona of “Social Darwinism,” it is rejected as soon as the daylight shines on real Darwinism. In a 2008 Republican presidential debate, no less than three candidates raised their hand in response to the question “Who doesn’t believe in evolution?” No wonder that schools are hesitant to teach evolutionary theory, and that zoos and natural history museums avoid the e-word. Its hate-love relation with biology is the first great paradox of the American political landscape. (Location 462)
Social Darwinism is all about what Gordon Gekko called “the evolutionary spirit.” It depicts life as a struggle in which those who make it shouldn’t let themselves be dragged down by those who don’t. This ideology was unleashed by British political philosopher Herbert Spencer, who in the nineteenth century translated the laws of nature into business language, coining the phrase “survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly attributed to Darwin). (Location 468)
Whereas the book found in most American homes and every hotel room urges us on almost every page to show compassion, Social Darwinists scoff at such feelings, which only keep nature from running its course. (Location 477)
I find it hard to see how Christians can embrace such a harsh ideology without a massive case of cognitive dissonance, but many seem to do so. (Location 479)
The problem is that one can’t derive the goals of society from the goals of nature. Trying to do so is known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is the impossibility of moving from how things are to how things ought to be. Thus, if animals were to kill one another on a large scale, this wouldn’t mean we have to do so, too, any more than we would have an obligation to live in perfect harmony if animals were to do so. All that nature can offer is information and inspiration, not prescription. (Location 495)
The idea of competition within the same species over the same resources appealed to Darwin and helped him formulate the concept of natural selection. He had read Thomas Malthus’s influential 1798 essay on population growth, according to which populations that outgrow their food supply will automatically be cut back by hunger, disease, and mortality. Unfortunately, Spencer read the same essay and drew different conclusions. If strong varieties progress at the expense of inferior ones, this was not only how it was, Spencer felt, but how it ought to be. Competition was good, it was natural, and society as a whole benefited. He applied the naturalistic fallacy to a T. (Location 506)
Since the goal of every immigrant is to build a better life, the inevitable outcome is a culture revolving around individual achievement. (Location 530)
Insofar as such arguments are based on what is supposedly natural, however, they are fundamentally flawed. In Spencer’s days, this was exposed by the unlikely character of a Russian prince, Petr Kropotkin. Though a bearded anarchist, Kropotkin was also a naturalist of great distinction. In his 1902 book, Mutual Aid, he argued that the struggle for existence is not so much one of each against all, but of masses of organisms against a hostile environment. Cooperation is common, such as when wild horses or musk oxen form a ring around their young to protect them against attacking wolves. (Location 540)
Mutual aid has become a standard ingredient of modern evolutionary theories, albeit not exactly in the way Kropotkin formulated it. Like Darwin, he believed that cooperative groups of animals (or humans) would outperform less cooperative ones. In other words, the ability to function in a group and build a support network is a crucial survival skill. (Location 552)
In all of these cases, primates show community concern: They try to ameliorate the state of affairs in the group as a whole. (Location 576)
The effect of the knockouts was entirely negative: They produced increased fighting, more intense aggression, less reconciliation after fights, and a drop in grooming and play. On all measures, monkey society was falling apart. (Location 592)
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Social life benefits enormously from policing males. Note that the argument here is not that they sacrifice themselves for the group. (Location 594)
Social Darwinists may disagree, but from a truly Darwinian perspective it is entirely logical to expect a “social motive” in group-living animals, one that makes them strive for a well-functioning whole. (Location 601)
In the same way that Skvara felt an obligation to his wife, society ought to feel an obligation toward him after a lifetime of hard work. This is a moral issue, (Location 617)
The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. It’s good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn’t mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish, this doesn’t mean that genes actually are. Genes can’t be any more “selfish” than a river can be “angry,” or sun rays “loving.” Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are “self-promoting,” because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves. (Location 652)
In short, we agreed on a separation between what drives evolution and what drives actual behavior that is about as well recognized in biology as is the separation of church and state outside Georgia. (Location 671)
When it comes to behavior, too, the original function doesn’t always tell us how and why a behavior will be used in daily life. Behavior enjoys motivational autonomy. A good example is sex. (Location 682)
If humans usually engage in sex without giving reproduction a thought—which is why we have the morning-after pill—this holds even more for animals, which don’t know the connection between sex and reproduction. They have sex because they are attracted to one another, or because they have learned its pleasurable effects, but not because they want to reproduce. One can’t want something one doesn’t know about. This is what I mean by motivational autonomy: The sex drive is hardly concerned with the reason why sex exists in the first place. (Location 687)
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. (Location 698)
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. (Location 715)
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. (Location 724)
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. (Location 743)
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. (Location 755)
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. (Location 772)
When several people burst out laughing at the same moment, they broadcast solidarity and togetherness. (Location 779)
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. (Location 790)
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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. (Location 798)
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. (Location 803)
Mood contagion serves to coordinate activities, which is crucial for any traveling species (as most primates are). If my companions are feeding, I’d better do the same, because once they move off, my chance to forage will be gone. (Location 818)
Sometimes, a mother ape returns to a whimpering youngster who is unable to cross the gap between two trees. The mother first swings her own tree toward the one the youngster is trapped in, and then drapes her body between both trees as a bridge. This goes beyond mere movement coordination: It’s problem-solving. The female is emotionally engaged (mother apes often whimper as soon as they hear their offspring do so), and adds an intelligent evaluation of the other’s distress. Tree-bridging is a daily occurrence in traveling orangutans, in which mothers regularly anticipate their offspring’s needs. (Location 843)
Remarkably, children with autism are immune to the yawns of others, thus highlighting the social disconnect that defines their condition. Body-mapping (Location 864)
I must say that I find neonatal imitation deeply puzzling. How does a baby—whether human or not—mimic an adult? Scientists may bring up neural resonance or mirror neurons, but this hardly solves the mystery of how the brain (especially one as naïve as that of a neonate) correctly maps the body parts of another person onto its own body. This is known as the correspondence problem: How does the baby know that its own tongue, which it can’t even see, is equivalent to the pink, fleshy, muscular organ that it sees slipping out from between an adult’s lips? In fact, the word know is misleading, because obviously all of this happens unconsciously. (Location 870)
Ape-to-ape testing is much harder but has huge payoffs. Allowed to imitate one another, apes entirely live up to their reputation. They’re literally in one another’s faces, leaning on one another, sometimes holding the model’s hand while she’s performing, or smelling her mouth when she’s chewing the goodies she has won. None of this would be possible with a human experimenter, who is usually kept at a safe distance. Adult apes are potentially dangerous, which is why close personal contact with humans is prohibited. In order to learn from others, though, contact makes all the difference. Our chimps watch their model’s every move, and often replicate the observed actions even before they’ve gained any rewards themselves. This means that they’ve learned purely from observation. This brings me back to the role of the body. (Location 962)
In order to learn from others, apes need to see actual fellow apes: Imitation requires identification with a body of flesh and blood. We’re beginning to realize how much human and animal cognition runs via the body. Instead of our brain being like a little computer that orders the body around, the body-brain relation is a two-way street. The body produces internal sensations and communicates with other bodies, out of which we construct social connections and an appreciation of the surrounding reality. Bodies insert themselves into everything we perceive or think. (Location 975)
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The field of “embodied” cognition is still very much in its infancy but has profound implications for how we look at human relations. We involuntarily enter the bodies of those around us so that their movements and emotions echo within us as if they’re our own. This is what allows us, or other primates, to re-create what we have seen others do. Body-mapping is mostly hidden and unconscious but sometimes it “slips out,” such as when parents make chewing mouth movements while spoon-feeding their baby. They can’t help but act the way they feel their baby ought to. Similarly, parents watching a singing performance of their child often get completely into it, mouthing every word. I myself still remember as a boy standing on the sidelines of soccer games and involuntarily making kicking or jumping moves each time someone I was cheering for got the ball. (Location 985)
Identification is even more striking at moments of high emotion. I once saw a chimpanzee birth in the middle of the day. This is unusual: Our chimps tend to give birth at night or at least when there are no humans around, such as during a lunch break. From my observation window I saw a crowd gather around Mai—quickly and silently, as if drawn by some secret signal. Standing half upright with her legs slightly apart, Mai cupped an open hand underneath of her, ready to catch the baby when it would pop out. An older female, Atlanta, stood next to her in similar posture and made exactly the same hand movement, but between her own legs, where it served no purpose. When, after about ten minutes, the baby emerged—a healthy son—the crowd stirred. One chimpanzee screamed, and some embraced, showing how much everyone had been caught up in the process. Atlanta likely identified with Mai because she’d had many babies of her own. As a close friend, she groomed the new mother almost continuously in the following weeks. (Location 999)
Not only do we mimic those with whom we identify, but mimicry in turn strengthens the bond. Human mothers and children play games of clapping hands either against each other or together in the same rhythm. These are games of synchronization. And what do lovers do when they first meet? They stroll long distances side by side, eat together, laugh together, dance together. Being in sync has a bonding effect. Think about dancing. Partners complement each other’s moves, anticipate them, or guide each other through their own movements. Dancing screams “We’re in synchrony!” which is the way animals have been bonding for millions of years. (Location 1011)
Like chameleons changing their color to match the environment, primates automatically copy their surroundings. (Location 1029)
The way our bodies—including voice, mood, posture, and so on—are influenced by surrounding bodies is one of the mysteries of human existence, but one that provides the glue that holds entire societies together. It’s also one of the most underestimated phenomena, especially in disciplines that view humans as rational decision makers. Instead of each individual independently weighing the pros and cons of his or her own actions, we occupy nodes within a tight network that connects all of us in both body and mind. (Location 1032)
This connectedness is no secret. We explicitly emphasize it in an art form that is literally universal. Just as there are no human cultures without language, there are none that lack music. Music engulfs us and affects our mood so that, if listened to by many people at once, the inevitable outcome is mood convergence. The entire audience gets uplifted, melancholic, reflective, and so on. Music seems designed for this purpose. (Location 1036)
Their wild and raucous songs grow in perfect unison into what has been called “the most complicated opus sung by a land vertebrate other than man.” At the same time that the duet communicates “Stay out!” to other members of their species, it also proclaims “We’re one.” (Location 1059)
The German language elegantly captures this process in a single noun: Einfühlung (feeling into). Later, Lipps offered empatheia as its Greek equivalent, which means experiencing strong affection or passion. British and American psychologists embraced the latter term, which became “empathy.” (Location 1071)
We can’t feel anything that happens outside ourselves, but by unconsciously merging self and other, the other’s experiences echo within us. We feel them as if they’re our own. Such identification, argued Lipps, cannot be reduced to any other capacities, such as learning, association, or reasoning. Empathy offers direct access to “the foreign self.” (Location 1077)
it’s now believed that empathy goes back far in evolutionary time, much further than our species. It probably started with the birth of parental care. During 200 million years of mammalian evolution, females sensitive to their offspring outreproduced those who were cold and distant. When pups, cubs, calves, or babies are cold, hungry, or in danger, their mother needs to react instantaneously. There must have been incredible selection pressure on this sensitivity: Females who failed to respond never propagated their genes. (Location 1100)
The evolution of attachment came with something the planet had never seen before: a feeling brain. The limbic system was added to the brain, allowing emotions, such as affection and pleasure. This paved the way for family life, friendships, and other caring relationships. (Location 1122)
In 1959, American psychologist Russell Church published a scientific paper under the provocative title “Emotional Reactions of Rats to the Pain of Others.” Church trained rats to obtain food by pressing a lever, and found that if one rat noticed that lever-pressing shocked a neighboring rat, it would stop. This is remarkable. Why shouldn’t the rat simply continue to get food and ignore its companion dancing in pain on an electric grid? Did these rats stop pressing because they were distracted, worried about their companion, or fearful for themselves? (Location 1148)
Finally, the investigators exposed pairs of mice to different sources of pain. One was the same acetic acid as before, but the second was a radiant heat source that might burn them if they came too close. Mice observing a cage mate in pain from the acid withdrew more quickly from the heat source, thus indicating heightened sensitivity to a completely different pain stimulus that required a different reaction. This precludes motor mimicry as an explanation: The mice seemed sensitized to pain in general. Any pain. (Location 1185)
it’s good to keep in mind that imagination is not what drives empathy. Imagining another’s situation can be a cold affair, not unlike the way we understand how an airplane flies. Empathy requires first of all emotional engagement. The mice show us how things may have gotten started. Seeing another’s emotions arouses our own emotions, and from there we go on constructing a more advanced understanding of the other’s situation. Bodily connections come first—understanding follows. (Location 1193)
I’m exaggerating, of course. Cats do give affection and can show strong emotional connectedness. Otherwise, why would they always want to be in the same room we are in? The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores and not with, say, iguanas or turtles—which are easier to keep—is that mammals offer us something no reptile ever will: emotional responsiveness. Dogs and cats have no trouble reading our moods and we have no trouble reading theirs. This is immensely important to us. We feel so much more at ease, so much more attached to animals with this capacity. (Location 1217)
Libraries’ worth of books try to draw a sharp line between selfishness and altruism, but what if we’re facing an immense gray area? We can’t exactly call empathy “selfish,” because a perfectly selfish attitude would simply ignore someone else’s emotions. Yet it doesn’t seem appropriate either to call empathy “unselfish” if it is one’s own emotional state that prompts action. The selfish/unselfish divide may be a red herring. Why try to extract the self from the other, or the other from the self, if the merging of the two is the secret behind our cooperative nature? (Location 1237)
Compared with the attention science has paid to negative emotions, such as fear and aggression, there has been a profound neglect of positive ones. It should be possible, however, to study empathy in a more benign way, as we do with humans. (Location 1256)
The empathy literature is completely human-centered, never mentioning animals, as if a capacity so visceral and pervasive and showing up so early in life, could be anything other than biological. Empathy is still often presented as a voluntary process, requiring role-taking and higher cognition, even language. (Location 1290)
What makes these neurons special is the lack of distinction between “monkey see” and “monkey do.” They erase the line between self and other, and offer a first hint of how the brain helps an organism mirror the emotions and behavior of those around it. (Location 1305)
Identification is such a basic precondition for empathy that even mice show pain contagion only with their cage mates. (Location 1320)
If identification with others opens the door for empathy, the absence of identification closes that door. Since wild chimps occasionally kill one another, they must be capable of shutting the door completely. This takes place mostly when groups compete, which is of course also the situation in which humans run lowest on empathy. (Location 1321)
But empathy needs a face. With impoverished facial expression comes impoverished empathic understanding, and a bland interaction devoid of the bodily echoing that humans constantly engage in. As French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it, “I live in the facial expression of the other, as I feel him living in mine.” When we try to talk to a stone-faced person, we fall into an emotional black hole. (Location 1370)
Sympathy differs from empathy in that it is proactive. Empathy is the process by which we gather information about someone else. Sympathy, in contrast, reflects concern about the other and a desire to improve the other’s situation. (Location 1448)
until recently empathy was not taken seriously by science. Even with regard to our own species, it was considered an absurd, laughable topic classed with supernatural phenomena such as astrology and telepathy. A trailblazing child-empathy researcher once told me about the uphill battle to get her message across thirty years ago. Everything connected with empathy was seen as ill-defined, bleeding-heart kind of stuff, more suitable for women’s magazines than hard-nosed science. (Location 1486)
Of the many instances of bonobo sympathy known to me, perhaps the most remarkable one concerns a reaction to a bird. I’ve described this event before and normally would not repeat it here but there was an intriguing follow-up. The event concerns Kuni, who had found a stunned bird that had hit the glass wall of her zoo enclosure. Kuni took the bird up to the highest point of a tree to set it free. She spread its wings as if it were a little airplane, and sent it out into the air, thus showing a helping action geared to the needs of a bird. Obviously, such helping would not have worked for another bonobo, but for a bird it seemed perfectly appropriate. Kuni’s reaction was probably based on what she knew about birds, seeing them fly by every day. (Location 1497)
Given what contact comfort does for our psychological well-being, one can only wonder at the “no-hug policy” of a middle school in Virginia. Students could be sent to the principal’s office for hugging, holding hands, or even high-fiving. Trying to stop inappropriate behavior, the school had come up with a rule that banned the most elementary expressions of affection. (Location 1546)
It is as if nature has endowed the organism with a simple behavioral rule: “If you feel another’s pain, get over there and make contact.” (Location 1561)
When our species claims to be the only talking primate, babbling is obviously not what we have in mind, but this is no reason to belittle it. The fact that everyone’s linguistic career starts with this baby lingua franca—which is identical across the globe—illustrates how deeply ingrained language is. It develops out of a primitive urge without any of the refinements of the final product, exactly what I’m proposing for the impulse to attend to someone else’s distress. (Location 1570)
With preconcern in place, learning and intelligence can begin to add layers of complexity, making the response ever more discerning until full-blown sympathy emerges. Sympathy implies actual concern for the other and an attempt to understand what happened. Yoni’s pulling at Kohts’s hands comes to mind, as he seemed intent on reading her eyes. The observer tries to figure out the reason for the other’s distress, and what might be done about it. Since this is the level of sympathy that we, human adults, are familiar with, we think of it as a single process, as something you either have or lack. But in fact, it consists of many different layers added by evolution over millions of years. Most mammals show some of these—only a few show them all. (Location 1578)
The persistence of Rock in following Belle around suggests a conviction on his part that she knew something that she didn’t wish to reveal, which is the sort of perspective-taking often referred to as theory of mind. Rock seemed to have an idea (a theory) of what might be going on in Belle’s head. (Location 1604)
Commitment to others, emotional sensitivity to their situation, and understanding what kind of help might be effective is such a human combination that we often refer to it as being humane. I do believe that our species is special in the degree to which it puts itself into another’s shoes. We grasp how others feel and what they might need more fully than any other animal. Yet our species is not the first or only one to help others insightfully. Behaviorally speaking, the difference between a human and an ape jumping into water to save another isn’t that great. Motivationally speaking, the difference can’t be that great, either. (Location 1758)
Children read “hearts” well before they read minds. At a very young age, they already understand that other people have wants and needs, and that not everybody necessarily wants or needs the same. They recognize, for example, that a child looking for his rabbit will be happy to find it, whereas a child searching for his dog will be largely indifferent to finding a rabbit. (Location 1783)
A chimp would watch a human unsuccessfully reach through the bars for a plastic stick. The human would not give up, but the stick would stay out of reach. The chimp, however, was in an area where he could just walk up to the stick. Spontaneously, the apes would help the reaching person by picking up the desired item and handing it to him. They were not trained to do so, and rewarding them for their effort made no difference. A similar test with young children led to the same outcome. (Location 1871)
When a tsunami hits people a world away, what makes us decide to send money, food, or clothes? A simple newspaper headline “Tsunami in Thailand Kills Thousands” won’t do the trick. No, we respond to the televised images of dead bodies on the beach, of lost children, of interviews with tearful victims who never found their loved ones. Our charity is a product of emotional identification rather than rational choice. (Location 1905)
emociones racionalidad empatia cita identificación prosocialidad
But is this altruism? If helping is based on what we feel, or how we connect with the victim, doesn’t it boil down to helping ourselves? If we feel a “warm glow,” a pleasurable feeling, at improving the plight of others, doesn’t this in fact make our assistance selfish? The problem is that if we call this “selfish,” then literally everything becomes selfish, and the word loses its meaning. A truly selfish individual would have no trouble walking away from another in need. If someone is drowning: Let him drown. If someone is crying: Let her cry. If someone drops his boarding pass: Look away. These are what I’d call selfish reactions, which are quite the opposite of empathic engagement. Empathy hooks us into the other’s situation. Yes, we derive pleasure from helping others, but since this pleasure reaches us via the other, and only via the other, it is genuinely other-oriented. (Location 1910)
Around the same time children pass the rouge test, they become sensitive to how others look at them, show embarrassment, use personal pronouns (“That’s mine!” or “Look at me!”), and develop pretend play in which they act out little scenarios with toys and dolls. These developments are linked. Children passing the rouge test use more “I” and “me” and show more pretend play than children failing this test. (Location 1998)
Since all of these abilities emerge at the same time as mirror self-recognition, I’ll speak of the co-emergence hypothesis. Advanced empathy belongs to the same package. This has been extensively tested on Swiss children by Doris Bischof-Köhler. She’d have a child eat quark (a dairy cream) sitting next to an adult instructed to look sad at a given moment because her spoon broke. The child might pick up an extra spoon left on the table or offer its own spoon. Some children would try to feed their partner with the broken spoon. Or the adult would “accidentally” rip off a limb from her teddy bear, whereupon she was instructed to sob for minutes. Children who repaired the teddy, offered another toy, or stayed close and made eye contact were considered prosocial. When the same children were tested with mirrors, the outcome was entirely in line with the co-emergence hypothesis. Children who had acted prosocially passed the mirror test, whereas those who had given no assistance failed the test. Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings. (Location 2008)
If so, species that recognize themselves in a mirror should be marked by advanced empathy, such as perspective-taking and targeted helping. Species that don’t recognize themselves, on the other hand, should lack these capacities. This is a testable idea, and Gallup felt that the prime candidates to look at, apart from the apes, would be dolphins and elephants. Dolphins were the first to fit his prediction. (Location 2036)
On a cold December Sunday in 2005, a female humpback whale was spotted off the California coast, entangled in the nylon ropes used by crab fishermen. She was about fifty feet long. A rescue team was dispirited by the sheer amount of ropes, about twenty of them, some around the tail, one in the whale’s mouth. The ropes were digging into the blubber, leaving cuts. The only way to free the whale was to dive under the surface to cut away the ropes. Divers spent about one hour doing so. It was a herculean job, obviously not without risk given the power of a whale’s tail. The most remarkable part came when the whale realized it was free. Instead of leaving the scene, she hung around. The huge animal swam in a large circle, carefully approaching every diver separately. She nuzzled one, then moved on to the next, until she had touched all of them. James Moskito described the experience: It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it. It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun. It seemed kind of affectionate, like a dog that’s happy to see you. I never felt threatened. It was an amazing, unbelievable experience. (Location 2110)
It’s widely accepted, therefore, that monkeys don’t pass. This doesn’t mean that they find mirrors totally baffling or that they lack any sense of self. They must have some self-awareness, because no animal can do without it. Every animal needs to set its body apart from the surrounding environment and have a sense of agency. You wouldn’t want to be a monkey up in a tree without awareness of how your own body will impact a lower branch on which you intend to land. (Location 2399)
That simple act of communication went against an entire body of literature that links pointing to language and has therefore no room for nonlinguistic creatures. Pointing, a so-called deictic gesture, is defined as drawing another’s attention to an out-of-reach object by locating the object in space for the other. There’s obviously no point to pointing unless you understand that the other has not seen what you have seen, which involves realizing that not everyone has the same information. It’s yet another example of perspective-taking. Humans point all the time, and automatically follow the pointer’s attention. Inevitably, academics have surrounded pointing with heavy theoretical artillery. Some have focused on the typically human gesture with outstretched arm and index finger. (Location 2463)
We walk on two legs: a social and a selfish one. We tolerate differences in status and income only up to a degree, and begin to root for the underdog as soon as this boundary is overstepped. We have a deeply ingrained sense of fairness, which derives from our long history as egalitarians. (Location 2586)
cita inequidad evolución primatología justicia
Our species has a distinctly subversive streak that ensures that, however much we look up to those in power, we’re always happy to bring them down a peg. Present-day egalitarians, who range from hunter-gatherers to horticulturalists, show the same tendency. They emphasize sharing and suppress distinctions of wealth and power. The would-be chief who gets it into his head that he can order others around is openly told how amusing he is. People laugh in his face as well as behind his back. Christopher Boehm, an American anthropologist interested in how tribal communities level the hierarchy, has found that leaders who become bullies, are self-aggrandizing, fail to redistribute goods, or deal with outsiders to their own advantage quickly lose respect and support. The weapons against them are ridicule, gossip, and disobedience, but egalitarians are not beyond more drastic measures. A chief who appropriates the livestock of other men or forces their wives into sexual relations risks death. (Location 2613)
Social hierarchies may have been out of fashion when our ancestors lived in small-scale societies, but they surely made a comeback with agricultural settlement and the accumulation of wealth. But the tendency to subvert these vertical arrangements never left us. We’re born revolutionaries. Even Sigmund Freud recognized this unconscious desire, speculating that human history began when frustrated sons banded together to eliminate their imperious father, who kept all women away from them. The sexual connotations of Freud’s origin story may serve as metaphor for all of our political and economic dealings, a connection confirmed by brain research. (Location 2620)
This doesn’t sound much like the rational profit maximizers that economists make us out to be. Traditional economic models don’t consider the human sense of fairness, even though it demonstrably affects economic decisions. They also ignore human emotions in general, even though the brain of Homo economicus barely distinguishes sex from money. Advertisers know this all too well, which is why they often pair expensive items, such as cars or watches, with attractive women. But economists prefer to imagine a hypothetical world driven by market forces and rational choice rooted in self-interest. This world does fit some members of the human race, who act purely selfishly and take advantage of others without compunction. In most experiments, however, such people are in the minority. The majority is altruistic, cooperative, sensitive to fairness, and oriented toward community goals. The level of trust and cooperation among them exceeds predictions from economic models. We obviously have a problem if assumptions are out of whack with actual human behavior. The danger of thinking that we are nothing but calculating opportunists is that it pushes us precisely toward such behavior. It undermines trust in others, thus making us cautious rather than generous. (Location 2629)
Exposing yourself to risk on the assumption that others won’t take advantage is the deepest trust there is. What these monkeys seem to be telling each other—similar to humans when they drop backward into the arms of others—is that based on what they know about each other, they have faith that all will end well. This is obviously a wonderful feeling, one we mostly appreciate with friends and family. (Location 2683)
Trust is the lubricant that makes a society run smoothly. (Location 2714)
The main message of this study, and many others, is that our species is more trusting than predicted by rational-choice theory. (Location 2720)
The problem with any cooperative system is that there are those who try to get more out of it than they put in. The whole system will collapse if we don’t put a halt to freeloading, which is why humans are naturally cautious when they deal with others. (Location 2722)
Even though it is hard to resist these charming children, they lack friends. The reason is that they trust everyone indiscriminately and love the whole world equally. We withdraw from such people since we don’t know whether we can count on them. Will they be grateful for received favors, will they support us if we get into a fight, will they help us achieve our goals? Probably none of the above, which means that they don’t have anything that we’re looking for in a friend. They also lack the basic social skill of detecting the intentions of others: They never assume wrong intentions. (Location 2730)
teoría de la mente vínculo infancia empatía cita
The faith that Danes unthinkingly place in one another is known as “social capital,” which may well be the most precious capital there is. In survey after survey, Danes have the world’s highest happiness score. (Location 2763)
Adam Smith thought that this approach characterized all animals: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog …” True, but Smith was wrong to think that animals never trade, or that fairness is alien to them. He underestimated the sociality of animals since he believed that they didn’t need one another. My guess, though, is that the great Scottish philosopher would have been delighted to see how far the fledgling field of animal “behavioral economics” has come. Let me illustrate this with an incident among capuchin monkeys that we taught to pull a tray with food. By making the tray too heavy for a single individual, we gave them a reason to join forces. On this occasion, the pulling was to be done by two females, Bias and Sammy. They successfully brought the food within reach, as they’d done so many times before. Sammy, however, collected her rewards so quickly that she released the tray before Bias had a chance to grab hers. The tray bounced back due to the counterweight and was now out of reach. While Sammy happily munched on her food, Bias threw a tantrum. She screamed her lungs out for half a minute until Sammy approached her pull-bar for the second time, glancing at Bias. She then helped Bias bring in the tray again. This time Sammy didn’t pull for her own good, because she only had an empty cup in front of her. Sammy made this rectification in direct response to Bias’s protest against the loss of her reward. Such behavior comes close to human economic transactions: cooperation, communication, and the fulfillment of an expectation, perhaps even an obligation. Sammy seemed sensitive to the quid pro quo: Bias had helped her, so how could she refuse to help Bias? This kind of sensitivity is not surprising given that the group life of these monkeys has the same mixture of cooperation and competition of our own societies. (Location 2774)
As in the 1980s hit song “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” the chimps seem to recall previous favors, such as grooming. We analyzed no less than seven thousand approaches to food owners to see which ones met with success. During the mornings before every feeding session, we had recorded spontaneous grooming. We then compared the flow of both “currencies”: food and grooming. If the top male, Socko, had groomed May, for example, his chances of getting a few branches from her in the afternoon were greatly improved. We found this effect all over the colony: Apparently, one good turn deserves another. This kind of exchange must rest on memory of previous events combined with a psychological mechanism that we call “gratitude,” that is, warm feelings toward someone whose act of kindness we recall. Interestingly, the tendency to return favors was not equal for all relationships. Between good friends, who spend a lot of time together, a single grooming session carried little weight. They both groom and share a lot, probably without keeping careful track. Only in the more distant relationships did small favors stand out and were specifically rewarded. Since Socko and May were not particularly close, Socko’s grooming was duly noticed. (Location 2823)
As it turned out, if both monkeys brought in the food, the CEO shared more through the mesh with the other than if he had secured the food by himself. In other words, he shared more after having been helped. We also found that sharing fosters cooperation, because if the CEO was stingy with his food, the success rate of the pair dropped dramatically. Without sufficient rewards, laborers simply went on strike. In short, monkeys seem to connect effort with compensation. Perhaps owing to their collective pursuits in the wild, they grasp the first rule of the stag hunt, which is that joint effort requires joint rewards. (Location 2876)
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. (Location 2888)
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. (Location 2916)
The reaction of children to perceived unfairness shows how deeply seated these sentiments are, and the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers suggests its long history. In some cultures, hunters aren’t even allowed to carve up their own kill, so as to prevent them from favoring their family. The antiquity of fairness is underappreciated by those who regard it as a noble principle of recent origin, formulated by wise men during the French Enlightenment. I seriously doubt that we will ever appreciate the human condition by looking back a couple of centuries rather than millions of years. Do wise men ever formulate anything new, or are they just good at reformulating what everybody knows? They often do so in an admirable fashion, but to credit them with the concepts themselves is a bit like saying that the Greeks invented democracy. The elders of many preliterate tribes listen for hours, sometimes days, to the opinions of all members before making an important decision. Aren’t they democratic? Similarly, the fairness principle has been around since our ancestors first had to divide the spoils of joint action. (Location 3006)
While testing capuchin monkeys in pairs, Sarah had noticed how much they disliked seeing their partner get a better reward. At first, this was just an impression based on their refusal to participate in our tests. We weren’t too surprised. But then we realized that economists had given these reactions the fancy label of “inequity aversion,” which they had turned into a topic of serious academic debate. This debate obviously revolved around human behavior, but what if monkeys showed the same aversion? Testing two monkeys at a time, Sarah would offer a pebble to one and then hold out her hand so that the monkey could give it back in exchange for a cucumber slice. Alternating between them, both monkeys would happily barter twenty-five times in a row. The atmosphere turned sour, however, as soon as we introduced inequity. One monkey would still get cucumber, while its partner now enjoyed grapes, a favorite food. The advantaged monkey obviously had no problem, but the one still working for cucumber would lose interest. Worse, seeing its partner with juicy grapes, this monkey would get agitated, hurl the pebbles out of the test chamber, sometimes even throwing those paltry cucumber slices. A food normally devoured with gusto had become distasteful. (Location 3040)
Discarding perfectly fine food simply because someone else is getting something better resembles the way we reject an unfair share of money or grumble about an agreed-upon denarius. Where do these reactions come from? They probably evolved in the service of cooperation. Caring about what others get may seem petty and irrational, but in the long run it keeps one from being taken advantage of. It’s in everyone’s interest to discourage exploitation and free riding, and make sure that one’s interests are taken seriously. (Location 3050)
There’s even one observation of a bonobo worried about getting too much. While being tested in a cognitive laboratory, a female received plenty of milk and raisins but felt the eyes of her friends on her, who were watching from a distance. After a while, she refused all rewards. Looking at the experimenter, she kept gesturing to the others until they too got some of the goodies. Only then did she finish hers. (Location 3092)
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. (Location 3187)
The more the poor resent the rich, the more the rich fear the poor and retreat into gated communities. But an even greater burden is health: U.S. life expectancy now ranks below that of at least forty other nations. In principle, this could be due to recent immigration, lack of health insurance, or poor eating habits, but the relation between health and income distribution is in fact not explained by any of these factors. The same relation has also been demonstrated within the United States: Less egalitarian states suffer higher mortality. (Location 3214)
Robin Hood had it right. Humanity’s deepest wish is to spread the wealth. (Location 3257)
Marxism foundered on the illusion of a culturally engineered human. It assumed that we are born as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, to be filled in by conditioning, education, brainwashing, or whatever we call it, so that we’re ready to build a wonderfully cooperative society. A similar illusion plagued the U.S. feminist movement, which (unlike its vive-la-différence European counterpart) assumed that gender roles were ready for a complete overhaul. At around the same time, a famous sexologist proposed that a boy who’d lost part of his penis be surgically castrated and raised as a girl, and predicted that he’d be perfectly happy. This “experiment” produced a deeply confused individual, who committed suicide years later. One can’t just ignore the biology of gender identity. In the same way, our species has behavioral tendencies that no culture has ever been able to do away with. (Location 3281)
So, strange as it may sound, I’d be reluctant to radically change the human condition. But if I could change one thing, it would be to expand the range of fellow feeling. (Location 3301)
Empathy for “other people” is the one commodity the world is lacking more than oil. (Location 3310)
Fostering empathy isn’t made easier by the entrenched opinion in law schools, business schools, and political corridors that we are essentially competitive animals. Social Darwinism may be dismissed as old hat, a leftover of the Victorian era, but it’s still very much with us. A 2007 column by David Brooks in The New York Times ridiculed social government programs: “From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest.” Conservatives love to think this. (Location 3317)
Empathy is part of our evolution, and not just a recent part, but an innate, age-old capacity. Relying on automated sensitivities to faces, bodies, and voices, humans empathize from day one. It’s really not as complex a skill as it has been made out to be, such as when empathy is said to rest on the attribution of mental states to others, or the ability to consciously recall one’s own experiences. No one denies the importance of these higher strata of empathy, which develop with age, but to focus on them is like staring at a splendid cathedral while forgetting that it’s made of bricks and mortar. (Location 3323)
The poor dogs are doing everything to make their feelings known, yet science throws itself into linguistic knots to avoid mentioning them. (Location 3342)
I believe that the reluctance to talk about animal emotions has less to do with science than religion. And not just any religion, but particularly religions that arose in isolation from animals that look like us. With monkeys and apes around every corner, no rain forest culture has ever produced a religion that places humans outside of nature. (Location 3344)
religión cita emociones animales
If empathy were truly like a toupee put on our head yesterday, my greatest fear would be that it might blow off tomorrow. Linking empathy to our frontal lobes, which achieved their extraordinary size only in the last couple of million years, denies how much it is a part of who and what we are. Obviously, I believe the exact opposite, which is that empathy is part of a heritage as ancient as the mammalian line. (Location 3382)
The full capacity seems put together like a Russian doll. At its core is an automated process shared with a multitude of species, surrounded by outer layers that fine-tune its aim and reach. Not all species possess all layers: Only a few take another’s perspective, something we are masters at. But even the most sophisticated layers of the doll normally remain firmly tied to its primal core. (Location 3387)
even our most thoughtful reactions to others share core processes with the reactions of young children, other primates, elephants, dogs, and rodents. (Location 3399)
empathy goes a thousand times deeper: It touches parts of the brain where screams don’t just register, but induce fear and loathing. We literally feel a scream. (Location 3418)
One mental illness is marked by a permanent disconnect between perspective-taking and the deeper regions of empathy. The label of “psychopath” is often associated with violence, such as serial killers (Location 3427)
Empathy needs both a filter that makes us select what we react to, and a turn-off switch. Like every emotional reaction, it has a “portal,” a situation that typically triggers it or that we allow to trigger it. Empathy’s chief portal is identification. We’re ready to share the feelings of someone we identify with, which is why we do so easily with those who belong to our inner circle: For them the portal is always ajar. Outside this circle, things are optional. It depends on whether we can afford being affected, or whether we want to be. (Location 3463)
Only a small percentage of men—perhaps 1 or 2 percent—does the vast majority of killing during a war. This may be the same category of humans discussed before, the one immune to the suffering of others. Most soldiers report a deep revulsion: They vomit at the sight of dead enemies, and end up with haunting memories. Lifelong combat trauma was already known to the ancient Greeks, as reflected in Sophocles’ plays about the “divine madness” that we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Decades after a war, veterans still can’t hold back tears when asked about the killings they have witnessed. (Location 3559)
ptsd cita violencia guerra homo sapiens
Empathy builds on proximity, similarity, and familiarity, which is entirely logical given that it evolved to promote in-group cooperation. Combined with our interest in social harmony, which requires a fair distribution of resources, empathy put the human species on a path toward small-scale societies that stress equality and solidarity. (Location 3590)
A society based purely on selfish motives and market forces may produce wealth, yet it can’t produce the unity and mutual trust that make life worthwhile. This is why surveys measure the greatest happiness not in the wealthiest nations but rather in those with the highest levels of trust among citizens. (Location 3594)
reliance on greed as the driving force of society is bound to undermine its very fabric. (Location 3609)
The machine just won’t run smoothly without a strong community sense in every citizen. Smith frequently mentioned honesty, morality, sympathy, and justice, seeing them as essential companions to the invisible hand of the market. (Location 3610)
In effect, society depends on a second invisible hand, one that reaches out to others. The feeling that one human being cannot be indifferent to another if we wish to build a community true to the meaning of the word is the other force that underlies our dealings with one another. The evolutionary antiquity of this force makes it all the more surprising just how often it is being ignored. (Location 3612)
Every individual is connected to something larger than itself. Those who like to depict this connection as contrived, as not part of human biology, don’t have the latest behavioral and neurological data on their side. The connection is deeply felt and, as Mandeville had to admit, no society can do without it. (Location 3621)
The firmest support for the common good comes from enlightened self-interest: the realization that we’re all better off if we work together. (Location 3628)
One can’t expect high levels of trust in a society with huge income disparities, huge insecurities, and a disenfranchised underclass. And remember, trust is what citizens value most in their society. (Location 3652)