Empathy: A gift of evolution
The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society
by Frans de Waal
A review by Joan Silk
The thesis of Frans de Waal’s new book, The Age of Empathy, is that empathy comes "naturally" to humans, by which he means that it is a biologically grounded capacity that all people share. According to de Waal, empathy has deep evolutionary roots, having originated before the order Primates came into existence. The antiquity of empathy firmly fixes its place in human nature, he believes, making it a robust trait that develops in all societies. De Waal makes an impassioned and eloquent case that understanding the role of empathy in nature can help us build a kinder and more compassionate society. His message will have considerable resonance for many readers.
De Waal has long been a critic of the notion that evolution drives us (and our primate relatives) to express the darker sides of our natures. He has been impatient with colleagues who are fixated on the struggle for existence and give short shrift to the need for cooperation and accommodation among interdependent animals that live in groups. Thus, while many primatologists have focused on evolutionary pressures that generate high levels of competition and conflicts within a group, de Waal has emphasized the importance of the mechanisms that primates use to defuse tension, resolve conflicts and repair the damage caused by them.
De Waal’s argument in this book hinges on his claim that empathy is an ancient trait. Emphasizing the continuity in empathic concern across species, he speculates that empathy may be as old as maternal care itself. His reasoning is partly based on the selective advantages that he thinks empathy would have provided for mothers. Females who were sensitive to, and able to anticipate, the needs of their developing offspring would have been more successful mothers than those who were less responsive, he argues. But even if that’s the case, it does not necessarily mean that mammals actually evolved the capacity for empathy. After all, it might also have been useful for mammalian males to have the capacity to lactate, because in some circumstances males who could provide nourishment for their young might have had greater reproductive success than those who lacked this capacity. Nevertheless, except under rare specific conditions, mammalian males do not lactate.
Even though de Waal is firmly convinced that empathy is old and is widespread among mammals, not everyone agrees; there is a lively debate about these matters in the literature. Part of the controversy stems from the fact that the term empathy is used to describe a range of phenomena, from emotional contagion (in which one individual "catches" the emotions of another) to what Stephanie D. Preston and de Waal were the first to refer to as cognitive empathy — the ability to understand the feelings of others and to appreciate the distinction between their feelings and our own. Emotional contagion is a primitive form of true empathy, de Waal says; when one baby’s cry sets off a chorus of cries from the other babies in the nursery, that’s emotional contagion. Cognitive empathy is what allows us to understand the anguish of a mother whose child is diagnosed with a terminal illness.
The practical problem is that in any particular case it can be difficult to distinguish between emotional contagion and more elaborate forms of empathy. After all, how do we know what is actually going on in one baby’s head when she hears another baby cry? Nevertheless, the distinction is crucial, because an understanding of others’ needs is a prerequisite for the transformation of empathy into compassionate action. The contagion metaphor can be used to illustrate this point: If you catch a cold from your partner, you’ll share your partner’s symptoms. But feeling the same way as someone else is not the same thing as knowing how that person will want to be treated. To take care of your partner, you need to know whether he or she likes to be coddled when sick or prefers being left alone with a good book. If you have that information, you can be helpful even if you don’t have a cold yourself.
This means that if we want to understand the capacity that other animals have for compassion, we have to figure out what is going on in their heads. Carefully designed experiments have given us some insight into what animals know about the minds of others. For example, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney conducted an experiment in which female macaques learned that a box in their enclosure contained a frightening stimulus (a fake snake). Although the mothers were frightened when they came upon the snake and avoided the box afterward, they did not react when their infants approached the box, and they did not warn the infants of the danger the snake presumably represented. Based on these findings, Cheney and Seyfarth concluded that the mothers were unaware that their own knowledge differed from the knowledge of their offspring. The findings of a substantial body of cleverly designed experiments have resulted in a general consensus that monkeys have a less-well-developed understanding of others’ minds than do apes.
The ability of apes to understand others’ minds might allow them to understand others’ specific needs and to act compassionately. De Waal believes that apes do understand others’ needs and that they act compassionately based on that understanding, a conclusion he bases in part on a number of one-time observations, several of which he describes here. For example, …
