The social scratch is a deceptively simple act, behind which dwells a profound mystery that can’t be resolved by observations alone. I could watch as many of these interactions as Toshisada Nishida, my host in Mahale, has seen in his four decades in the field, and would still have no clue what’s behind them. We cannot ask the chimps why they do it, and we are too late to witness the first social scratch, the one that seeded the custom. This is where research in captivity offers a solution: Problems from the field can be taken into a setting that allows systematic testing. We can see, for example, how sensitive primates are to another’s welfare if we give them the opportunity to do small favors.
Over the last few years, interest in this question has grown. Let me start with two simple studies with our own capuchin monkeys. I have two groups of these cute brown monkeys. They have outdoor space, where they can sit in the sun, catch insects, groom, and play. There’s also an indoor area with doors and tunnels that make it easy to move them into tests. They are used to the procedures, and actually eager to be tested, which almost always involves attractive food. The capuchin is a favorite primate for these kinds of experiments, because they are extremely smart (they have the largest brain relative to body size of all monkeys), share food, and cooperate easily with one another as well as with humans. They are such appealing monkeys that my students have pictures of their darlings on the wall and passionately talk about them as if they’re discussing a soap opera.
Our first experiment tested whether these monkeys recognize the needs of others. Do they understand when one among them is hungry? They indeed seem to do so, because we found that their willingness to share food with another depended on whether they had seen the other just eat. They shared more with a monkey who’d been empty-handed than one whom they’d seen munching on food.
The second experiment was even more revealing since it suggested interest in another’s welfare. We placed two monkeys side by side: separate, but in full view. One of them needed to barter with us, which is something these monkeys understand naturally. For example, if we leave a broom behind in their enclosure, all we need to do is point at it and hold up a peanut, and the monkeys understand the deal: They bring us the broom in exchange. In the experiment, the bartering was done with small plastic tokens, which we’d first give to a monkey, after which we’d hold out an open hand, letting them return the token for a tidbit.
The interesting test came when we offered a choice between two differently colored tokens with different meaning: One token was “selfish,” the other “prosocial.” If the bartering monkey picked the selfish token, it received a small piece of apple for returning it, but its partner got nothing. The prosocial token, on the other hand, rewarded both monkeys equally at the same time. Since the monkey who did the bartering was rewarded either way, the only difference was in what the partner received. To make sure they understood, Kristi Leimgruber, my assistant, would make quite a show by raising either one hand with food and feeding one monkey, or raising both hands and simultaneously handing food to both of them.
We know exactly how socially close any two monkeys are because we watch how much time they spend together in the group. We found that the stronger the tie with its partner, the more a monkey would pick the prosocial token. The procedures were repeated many times with different combinations of monkeys and different sets of tokens, and they kept doing it. Their choices could not be explained by fear of punishment, because in every pair the dominant monkey (the one who had least to fear) proved the more prosocial one.
Does this mean that capuchin monkeys care about the welfare of others? Do they like to do them favors? Or could it be that they just love to eat together? If both monkeys are rewarded, they will sit side by side munching on the same food. Do things taste better together than alone, the way we are more at ease having dinner with family and friends? Whatever the explanation, we showed that monkeys favor sharing over solitary consumption.
Similar experiments with apes initially failed, leading to premature headlines in the media such as “Chimpanzees Are Indifferent to the Welfare of Unrelated Group Members.” But as the old saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. All that we seem to have learned from these experiments is that humans can create situations in which apes put their own interests first. With regard to our own species, too, this wouldn’t be hard to do. Take the way people trample one another to get to the merchandise when a department store opens its doors for a major sale. In 2008, a store employee was killed in the process. But would anyone conclude from these scenes that humans, as a species, are indifferent to one another’s welfare?
Successful approaches often require a flash of insight into what best suits a particular animal. Once achieved, the false negatives will be forgotten. This is what happened when Felix Warneken and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, hit on a winning formula to test ape altruism. They worked with chimpanzees at a sanctuary in Uganda, where the apes spent their days on a large, lush island with lots of trees. Every night they were brought inside a building, which is where the tests took place. 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.
When the investigators increased the cost of helping, by having the apes climb up a platform to retrieve the stick, they still did so. The children also helped even if obstacles were put in their way. Obviously, both apes and children spontaneously help others in need.
But could it be that chimps in a sanctuary help humans because their lives depend on them? Prepared for this argument, the investigators had selected human partners who were barely known to the apes, and certainly not involved in their daily care. They further added a second test to see if the apes would assist one another in the same way.
From behind bars, one chimpanzee would watch a partner struggle to open a door leading to a room where both knew there was food. The room was closed, however. The only way to get in would be if a chain blocking the door were removed, but this chain was beyond the control of the partner. Only the first chimp could undo it. The outcome of this particular experiment surprised even me—I wasn’t sure what to predict given that all the food would go to the partner. Yet the results were unequivocal: One chimp removed the peg that held the chain, thus allowing its companion to reach the food.
What these apes did was far more complex than the choice between tokens faced by our monkeys. They needed to understand the other’s intentions and decide on the best solution for what the other wanted. They showed targeted helping, just as apes do in everyday life. The basic motivation behind their assistance, however, was probably not so different from that of the monkeys: Both care about the well-being of those around them. Traditional views based on payoffs for the actor just can’t explain these results: For the monkeys prosocial choices didn’t yield any more rewards than selfish ones, and for the chimps, too, rewards made no difference.
Warm Glow
Perhaps it is time to abandon the idea that individuals faced with others in need decide whether to help, or not, by mentally tallying up costs and benefits. These calculations have likely been made for them by natural selection. Weighing the consequences of behavior over evolutionary time, it has endowed primates with empathy, which ensures that they help others under the right circumstances. The fact that empathy is most easily aroused by familiar partners guarantees that assistance flows chiefly toward those close to the actor. Occasionally, it may be applied outside this inner circle, such as when apes help ducklings or humans, but generally primate psychology has been designed to care about the welfare of family, friends, and partners.
Humans are em
pathic with partners in a cooperative setting, but “counterempathic” with competitors. Treated with hostility, we show the opposite of empathy. Instead of smiling when the other smiles, we grimace as if the other’s pleasure disturbs us. When the other shows signs of distress, on the other hand, we smile, as if we enjoy their pain. One study described reactions to a hostile experimenter as follows: “His euphoria produced dysphoria and his dysphoria produced euphoria.”
So, human empathy can be turned into something rather unattractive if the other’s welfare is not in our interest. Our reactions are far from indiscriminate, exactly as one would expect if our psychology evolved to promote within-group cooperation. We are biased toward those with whom we have, or expect to have, a positive partnership. This unconscious bias replaces the calculations often assumed behind helping behavior. It’s not that we are incapable of calculations—we do sometimes help others based purely on expected returns, such as in business dealings—but most of the time human altruism, just like primate altruism, is emotionally driven.
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. Why did Sweden, for example, offer such massive support to the affected region, making a substantially larger contribution than other nations? More than five hundred Swedish tourists lost their lives in the 2004 disaster, a fact that aroused great solidarity in Sweden with the affected people in Southeast Asia.
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.
At the same time, there is no good answer to the eternal question of how altruistic is altruism if mirror neurons erase the distinction between self and other, and if empathy dissolves the boundaries between people. If part of the other resides within us, if we feel one with the other, then improving their life automatically resonates within us. And this may not be true only for us. It’s hard to see why a monkey would systematically prefer prosocial over selfish outcomes if there weren’t something intrinsically rewarding about the former.
Perhaps they too feel good doing good.
The Elephant in the Room
Seeing himself in the mirror for the first time, the chimpanzee opened his mouth in amazement and looked questioningly and curiously at the glass, as though asking silently but eloquently: “Whose is this face over there?”
—NADIA KOHTS, 1935
You’d think you’d hear an elephant approach. But you can stand sweating in the sun in a forest clearing in Thailand while one of them comes up from behind, and you won’t feel any vibrations, won’t hear a thing, because elephants are perfectly elastic, walking on velvet cushions while carefully avoiding branches or leaves that might snap under their feet. They’re in fact remarkably elegant animals.
They’re also dangerous. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics rates elephant keeper as the single most dangerous profession. In Thailand alone, more than fifty mahouts (caretakers/trainers) are killed every year. One problem is the unexpected speed of these animals. Another is their cuddly “jumbo” image, which pulls us toward them and makes us lower our guard. The appeal that elephants hold for humans is nothing less than astonishing, and was already witnessed in ancient Rome, not a place known for squeamishness. Pliny the Elder describes the way the crowd reacted to twenty elephants being savaged in an arena:
… when they had lost all hope of escape [they] tried to gain the compassion of the crowd by indescribable gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with a sort of wailing, so much to the distress of the public that they forgot the general and his munificence carefully devised for their honor, and bursting into tears rose in a body and invoked curses on the head of Pompey.
With an anatomy so different from ours, the ease with which elephants arouse human sympathy poses yet another version of the correspondence problem. How do we map their bodies onto ours? We recognize their hostile trunk movements, which are stiff and agitated, but also their gentle rubbing against one another, with trunks feeling into the others’ mouths—a most vulnerable place for this organ to visit. Most of all, we recognize their fun when, for example, they jostle in a water hole, completely covered with mud, pushing one another aside until they slide and splash with their eyes turned outward so that we see a lot of white, which gives the impression that they’re going crazy. They seem to have a sense of humor.
I had come to North Thailand to visit a student, Joshua Plotnik, who’s studying social behavior at the Elephant Nature Park, near Chiang Mai, as well as the Thai Elephant Conservation Center, near Lampang. I had seen African elephants on the savanna, but the big difference with these Asian elephants was that I was not sitting in a Jeep: I stood there right next to these mighty beasts with their shrill trumpeting sounds and deep, drawn-out rumbles, and sensed right away how tiny and vulnerable the human race is.
Elephants are magnificent. But the elephant situation in Thailand is also a sad one of changing habits. Thousands of elephants used to be employed for timber harvesting, but a devastating flood blamed on deforestation led to a nationwide logging ban in 1989. This created an urgent need to care for the animals, for which the owners lacked income. On top of this, there are the three-legged land mine victims from the Thai-Burma border, and other animals in urgent need of care. Today many elephants serve to educate the public, each one controlled day and night by a personal mahout. That is the only way to take care of these animals short of releasing them. The latter may seem preferable, but in a populated nation such as Thailand, and given the danger elephants pose, “liberation” would mean almost certain death.
It’s a bit as if you have a tractor in your garage, which can start its engine on its own anytime and drive out on the road while leveling small dwellings, crushing people, and uprooting leafy vegetation. No one would like to have such a liability, and an elephant in an urban setting would barely be any different. So, under control they are and need to be. I was thoroughly impressed by the commitment of those who maintain them in the parks. The elephants either move together under semifree conditions or conduct shows and trainings, including “orchestral” performances on xylophones and reenactments of their species’ historic employment in the timber industry. These performances ensure their upkeep in parks and sanctuaries, some of which let ecotourists pay for the privilege of shoveling dung.
Now, what other animal could generate such devotion?
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
Two tall adolescent bulls at the Elephant Conservation Center effortlessly pick up a long, heavy log with their tusks, each standing on one end, draping their trunks over the log to keep it from rolling off. Then they walk in perfect unison with the log between them, while the two mahouts on their heads sit chatting and laughing and looking around, and are certainly not directing every move. Training is obviously part of this picture, but one cannot train any animal to be so coordinated. One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild hors
es do the same. For the same reason, one can train two elephants to pick up a log and carry it together to another place, walking in the same rhythm, and lowering the log together to set it down on a pile without a sound, because elephants are extraordinarily well coordinated in the wild. They’re obviously not picking up logs, but they perform concerted actions to support a wounded companion or calf in need.
I ran into a different kind of cooperation in the Elephant Nature Park, where a blind elephant walked around with her seeing friend. The two females were unrelated yet seemed to be joined at the hip. The blind one was clearly dependent on the other, who seemed to understand this. As soon as the latter moved away, one could hear deep sounds coming from both of them, sometimes even trumpeting, which indicated the other’s whereabouts to the blind elephant. This noisy spectacle would continue until they were reunited again. An intensive greeting followed, with lots of ear-flapping, touching, and mutual smelling.
The whole world assumes that these animals are highly intelligent, but in fact there is little official proof. The sort of experiments conducted with monkeys and apes, which reveal what these animals understand, are rarely done with elephants, for the simple reason that they’re not easy to work with. Which university is ever going to set up an elephant lab? Anyone who wishes to test elephants will need to either work in countries with a history of controlling them, such as Thailand or India, or in zoo settings. Before he went to Thailand, Joshua worked at the Bronx Zoo, in New York, where he was involved in our first elephant experiment involving a huge mirror.
This experiment sprang from our interest in empathy. Advanced empathy is unthinkable without a sense of self, which is what mirror tests get at. Of all animals, elephants are perhaps the most empathic, so we were curious to see if they had enough self-identity to recognize their reflection. This capacity was predicted decades ago by Gordon Gallup, the psychologist who first showed that apes (but not monkeys) recognize themselves in a mirror.
The Age of Empathy Page 13
