The Age of Empathy

by Frans de Waal

  Take the magpie. Applying the same sham-mark design as used with dolphins and elephants, a recent study has shown mirror self-recognition in magpies. Now, mind you, the magpie isn’t just any bird: It is a corvid, a family that includes crows, ravens, and jays, endowed with exceptionally large brains. Put in front of a mirror, magpies will try to remove a tiny colored sticker attached to their throat feathers. They will keep scratching with their foot until the mark is gone, but will leave a black mark alone probably because it doesn’t stand out against their black throat. They also won’t do any frantic scratching if there’s no mirror to see themselves in. The videos of Helmut Prior and his fellow German scientists are quite compelling. When I saw them in an audience full of corvid experts, I could sense great pride in “their” birds.

  The finding is interesting in relation to the magpie’s reputation. As a child, I learned never to leave small shiny objects, such as teaspoons, unattended outdoors since these raucous birds will steal anything they can put their filthy beaks on. This folklore even inspired a Rossini opera, La Gazza Ladra (“The Thieving Magpie”). Nowadays, this view has been replaced with one more sensitive to ecological balance, in which magpies are depicted as murderous robbers of the nests of innocent songbirds. Either way, they are despised as black-and-white gangsters.

  But no one has ever called a magpie stupid. For me, the big question is whether its self-recognition supports or undermines the co-emergence hypothesis. For the moment, I believe the former. Perspective-taking may be critically important for a species that plunders the nests of others and steals from humans. The capacity may be even more useful in relation to its own kind. Magpies cache food and undoubtedly steal from one another the way jays also do. This requires watching to see if you’re being watched, because if another bird has seen where you hide your food, it’s bound to disappear. This topic has been studied in jays ever since a British scientist, Nicky Clayton, observed scrub jays over lunchtime at the University of California at Davis. Clayton noticed the fierce competition for leftover scraps, which the birds would cache away from one another. Some jays went further, however, returning to rebury their treasures once their rivals had left the scene.

  Follow-up research with Nathan Emery at Cambridge University led to the intriguing claim that “it takes a thief to know a thief.” Jays apparently extrapolate from their own experiences to the intentions of others, so that those who in the past have misappropriated the caches of others are especially keen on keeping the same thing from happening to themselves. Perhaps this process, too, requires the ability to parse the self from the other. As the ultimate bird thief, the magpie may have an even greater need to guess the intentions of others. Curiously, their self-recognition may therefore relate to a life of crime.

  At the very least, these new insights into la gazza ladra offer fresh meaning to its love affair with reflective items.

  Pointing Primates

  Nikkie, a chimpanzee, once showed me how to manipulate attention. He had gotten used to my throwing wild berries across the moat at the zoo where I worked. One day, while I was recording data, I had totally forgotten about the berries, which hung on a row of tall bushes behind me. Nikkie hadn’t. He sat down right in front of me, locked his red-brown eyes into mine, and—once he had my attention—abruptly jerked his head and eyes away from mine to fixate with equal intensity on a point over my left shoulder. He then looked back at me and repeated the move. I may be dense compared with a chimpanzee, but the second time I turned around to see what he was looking at, and spotted the berries. Nikkie had indicated what he wanted without a single sound or hand gesture.

  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. That gesture has been linked to symbolic communication, which calls up the image of early humans walking around on the savanna, pointing and assigning words to objects: “Let’s call the animal over there a zebra, and let’s call this here your belly button.” Yet doesn’t such a scenario imply that our ancestors understood pointing prior to the evolution of language? If so, the idea that our nonlinguistic relatives point shouldn’t upset anyone.

  The first step is to move away from silly Western definitions, such as the one requiring an outstretched index finger. In our own species, too, a lot of pointing is done without the hands, and in many parts of the world hands are in fact taboo. In 2006, a major health organization advised American business travelers to refrain from finger-pointing altogether, since so many cultures consider it rude. Among Native Americans, for example, approved forms of pointing involve pursed lips, chin movements, a nod with the head, or pointing with knees, feet, or shoulders. I’ve even heard in-jokes about it, such as the hunting dog whom the white owner brought back to its Indian trainer for retraining, because the dog only knew to indicate game by puckering its lips.

  Most people have felt the need to warn companions at a party that the dreaded character X has just entered the room and is heading their way. In such a situation, you don’t simply point or shout, even though those are natural inclinations. No, you raise your eyebrows at your companion, jerk your head a bit in the direction of the approaching X, and maybe clamp your lips firmly together to warn your companion to stay mum.

  We should take a broad view, therefore, of what constitutes pointing. After all, we have bred dogs (called “pointers”) to freeze into a particular stance to indicate a covey of quail. Monkeys, too, often point with their whole bodies and heads when they recruit allies during fights. If monkey A threatens monkey B, B may walk over to his usual protector, C. Sitting next to C, he then looks at him, jerks his head with grunts and threats toward A, and repeats this back-and-forth many times, as if telling C: “Look at that guy—he’s bothering me!” Among macaques, an aggressor points with lifted chin and staring eyes at the opponent, in between conspicuously glancing at the ally. Among baboons, the same behavior is so repetitive and exaggerated that fieldworkers call it “head-flagging.” The goal is to make absolutely clear to the ally where one’s adversary is.

  In Emil Menzel’s classic studies of knowledge attribution, one chimp knew hidden food or danger, whereas others didn’t. The others quickly grasped whether the concealed object was attractive or frightening, and its approximate location, by watching the first chimp’s body language. Menzel considered body orientation a highly accurate indicator, especially for an observer in a tree or other high point, adding that “it is primarily a bipedal animal such as man—whose body posture is a much less accurate ‘pointer’ than the posture of a quadrupedal animal—who actually needs to extend some appendage to indicate direction precisely.”

  A widely employed criterion for the intentionality of pointing is that the pointer checks the results of his actions. The pointer should make sure, by looking back and forth between the object he is pointing at and his partner, that the partner is paying attention and the pointer is not pointing for nothing. Nikkie did this by locking his eyes with mine. A number of recent experiments have investigated this issue in great apes, using manual pointing—not because this is the most natural way for them to point, but because captive apes readily learn that the gesture is most successful in getting a human response.

  At the Yerkes Primate Center, David Leavens worked with chimps who regularly see people walk by. It is logical for the apes to learn how to draw
attention to things they want, such as a piece of fruit that has dropped outside of their cage. This was tested systematically by placing food at certain locations. As it turns out, two-thirds of more than one hundred chimps gestured to the experimenter. A few did so by stretching out an open palm. Most, however, used the whole hand to point at a banana outside their cage, although no one had ever trained them to point this way. A few even pointed with an index finger.

  There were signs that the apes monitored the effect of their gestures the same way children do. An ape would make eye contact with the human and then point while alternating its gaze between the food and the human. One chimp, afraid to be misunderstood, pointed first with her hand at a banana and then with a finger at her mouth.

  Just to illustrate how creative chimps can be, a typical incident happened to me not long ago. A young female, Liza, at the field station, grunted at me from behind the mesh and kept looking at me with shiny eyes (indicating she knew something exciting), alternating with pointed stares into the grass near my feet. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted, until she spit into the grass. From the trajectory, I noticed a small green grape. When I gave it to her, Liza ran to another spot and repeated her performance. She proved a very accurate spitter, and altogether got three rewards this way. Liza must have memorized the places where a caretaker had dropped the fruits; she then found me to do her bidding.

  Additional evidence comes from what may be the most telling study of referential signaling by apes; that is, signaling with reference to external objects or events, conducted by Charles Menzel (son of Emil) at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University. Menzel let a female chimpanzee, named Panzee, watch him from her enclosure while he hid an object in the surrounding forest. When the caretakers arrived the next morning, they didn’t know what Menzel had done. Panzee recruited them by means of pointing, beckoning, panting, and calling, until they had located the item in the forest and given it to her. She was very insistent and explicit in her directions, occasionally using finger-pointing.

  It’s highly unusual for apes to point things out for one another, though. Perhaps they don’t need signals as overt as the ones we employ since they are such incredibly astute readers of body language. But there do exist a few reports of manual pointing, one observed by myself in the 1970s:

  The threatened female challenges her opponent with a high-pitched, indignant bark, at the same time kissing and making a fuss of the male. Sometimes she points at her opponent. This is an unusual gesture. Chimpanzees do not point with a finger but with their whole hand. The few occasions on which I have seen them actually point have been when the situation was confused; for example, when the third party had been lying asleep or had not been involved in the conflict from the start. On such occasions the aggressor would indicate her opponent by pointing her out.

  Another account involves wild bonobos in dense forest, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, studied in 1989 by Spanish primatologist Jordi Sabater-Pi. One ape alerted his travel companions to the presence of hidden scientists:

  Noises are heard coming from the vegetation. A young male swings from a branch and leaps into a tree…. He emits sharp calls, which are answered by other individuals who are not visible. He points—with his right arm stretched out and his hand half closed except for his index and ring fingers—to the position of the two groups of camouflaged observers who are in the undergrowth (30 meters apart). At the same time he screams and turns his head to where the other members of the group are. The same individual repeats the pointing and calling sequence twice. Other neighboring members of the group approach. They look towards the observers. The young male joins them.

  In both examples, the context was entirely appropriate (the apes pointed at objects that others had failed to notice), and the behavior was accompanied by visual checking of its effects. Also, the pointing disappeared once the others had looked or walked into the indicated direction. Among our chimpanzees at the field station we have seen similar cases, one of which we captured on video: a finger-pointing female with fully stretched arm, looking almost accusatory as she aimed her gesture at a male who had just slapped her.

  One difference with human pointing is that primates show this behavior so rarely, and only in relation to what they consider urgent matters, such as food or danger. Free sharing of information is unusual among them, whereas we do it all the time. Two people may walk through a museum and draw each other’s attention to item after item while discussing ancient artifacts; a child will point at a balloon in the air to make sure her parents don’t miss it, or someone will point at my bicycle lamp at night to let me know it isn’t working. The absence of such behavior in other primates has been taken to indicate a major cognitive gap, but my own guess is that it has more to do with lack of motivation. After all, it’s hard to see why a species that points to food to get humans to fetch it couldn’t do the same with regard to inedible objects. If they don’t do so, it must be because they don’t feel like it.

  But here too exceptions occur. Bonobos utter small peeps—high-pitched, brief vocalizations—when they discover something of interest. Watching bonobos at the San Diego Zoo day in and day out, I was struck by one group of juveniles, which every morning after their release went around a large grassy enclosure, emitting peeps for lots of things (that I rarely could identify), whereupon the others would hurry over to check out the indicated object. Perhaps they were drawing attention to discoveries such as insects, bird droppings, flowers, and the like. Given how the others reacted, the peeps conveyed something like “Come look at this!”

  In our chimpanzee colony, active information-sharing occurred when the always intrepid Katie was digging into the dirt underneath a large tractor tire. Katie uttered soft “hoo” alarm calls during the job, then pulled out something wriggly that looked like a live maggot. She was holding it away from herself between her index and middle finger, a bit like a cigarette. First she sniffed it and then turned and showed it to others, including her mother, holding it up with an outstretched arm. Katie then dropped the object and moved off. Her mother, Georgia, came over and started digging at the same spot. She pulled out something, sniffed at it, and immediately started to alarm bark, but much louder than her daughter had done. She dropped the object and sat down at a distance, still alarm-calling to herself. Then the young daughter of Georgia’s sister (Katie’s niece) went to the same exact spot under the tire and pulled out something. She walked bipedally over to Georgia and held the object up for her. Georgia now alarm-called even more intensely. Then it was all over.

  Vicky Horner, who observed this sequence, thought that the object of interest must have been a disgusting dead rat or something else under the tire that the apes could smell and that was covered with maggots, but she couldn’t be sure.

  What makes information-sharing interesting is that it relies on the same comparison of one’s own perspective with that of someone else—detecting something that others need to know about—which also underlies advanced empathy. Perhaps the capacity to do so appeared only in those few species with a strong sense of self, which is also what permits two-year-old children to engage in such behavior. But very soon children go further, and information-sharing becomes an obsession with them. They feel the need to comment on everything, and ask about everything. This seems uniquely human and may have to do with our linguistic specialization. Language requires consensus, which can’t be achieved without continual comparing and testing.

  If I point out an animal in the distance and say “zebra,” and you disagree, saying “lion,” we have a problem that, at other times, may get us into deep trouble. It’s a uniquely human problem, but so important to us that deictic gestures and language evolution are closely intertwined.

  Fair Is Fair

  Every man is presumed to seek what is good for himselfe naturally,

  and what is just, only for Peaces sake, and accidentally.

  —THOMAS HOBBES, 1651

  In the early spring
of 1940, with Nazi troops marching on the city, the population of Paris packed up and fled. In Suite Française, eyewitness Irène Némirovsky—who would perish in Auschwitz a few years later—describes how the wealthy lost everything in this mass exodus, including their privileges. They would start out with servants and cars, packing their jewelry and carefully wrapping up their precious porcelain, but soon their servants would abandon them, gas would run out, the cars would fall apart, and the porcelain, well, who cares when survival is at stake?

  Even though Némirovsky herself came from a wealthy background, between the lines of her novel the reader detects a certain satisfaction that at times of crisis class differences fade. There’s an element of justice to the fact that when everybody suffers, the upper crust suffers, too. High-handed manners that normally would get aristocrats into a hotel, for example, don’t help when all rooms are filled to the brim, and an aristocrat’s stomach responds the same to being empty as everyone else’s. The only difference is that the upper class feels the indignity of the situation more keenly:

  He looked at his beautiful hands, which had never done a day’s work, had only ever caressed statues, pieces of antique silver, leather books, or occasionally a piece of Elizabethan furniture. What would he, with his sophistication, his scruples, his nobility—which was the essence of his character—what would he do amid this demented mob?

  Passages like these seem almost designed to induce the opposite of empathy: Schadenfreude. They exploit the secret satisfaction we take in the misfortune of the rich. Never the poor, which is telling. We humans are complex characters who easily form social hierarchies, yet in fact have an aversion to them, and who readily sympathize with others, unless we feel envious, threatened, or concerned about our own welfare. 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.