Tracing the Origins of Human Empathy

Chimpanzees’ Caring Behavior Toward Others Hints at the Emotion’s Antiquity; the Mystery of the Contagious Yawn

A pioneer in primate studies, Frans de Waal sees our better side in chimps, especially our capacity for empathy. In his research, Dr. de Waal has gathered ample evidence that our ability to identify with another’s distress — a catalyst for compassion and charity — has deep roots in the origin of our species. It is a view independently reinforced by recent biomedical studies showing that our brains are built to feel another’s pain.

Chimpanzees console one another in ways that echo human behavior. Above, a mother chimp cuddles her offspring.

Like tuning forks, we reflexively respond to others’ moods. We can weep at the plight of people we have never met or, spellbound by fiction, become caught up in the lives of people who never existed. Indeed, we may be hard-wired for empathy, University of Chicago researchers who studied children’s neural responses to others reported last year. “It starts on day one, when a baby cries because it hears another baby cry,” says Dr. de Waal.

In his new book — “The Age of Empathy” — Dr. de Waal, director of Living Links Center at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, traces the origins of our ability to put ourselves in another’s place. Drawing on his experiments and studies by other animal behaviorists, he highlights how chimpanzees and other primates console each other, prefer to share, and nurse the injured. There are no fossils of feelings, but as our closest living relatives, Dr. de Waal believes these primates are reminders of empathy’s antiquity.

Despite our genetic similarity to chimpanzees, evolution has taken us on different paths since our ancestors diverged more than six million years or so ago. Our brains today are quite unlike a chimp’s in size, organization and cellular complexity. A chimp’s brain weighs as much as a can of baked beans — only a quarter the average human weight. Our cerebral cortex, the brain’s most highly evolved region, is three times larger than a chimp’s. Our mind’s emotional intelligence requires all that extra gray matter. And some neuroscientists consider empathy a uniquely human virtue.

Even so, Dr. de Waal contends that empathy, sympathy and compassion are traits shared by every species with a rudimentary capacity for self-awareness. While chimps can be combative and violent, they more often comfort and help each other. Capuchin monkeys enjoy giving to others. Elephants and dolphins aid companions in need. Whales can display something akin to gratitude. Even mice appear to have an ability to sense what their cage-mates are experiencing, says a recent study by researchers at McGill University.

“The old remains present in the new,” Dr. de Waal says. “This is relevant to the story of empathy because it means that even our most thoughtful reactions to others share core processes with the reactions of young children, other primates, elephants, dogs and rodents.”

“All mammals have some degree of it, and I think the origin is in maternal care,” Dr. de Waal says. “I think mammals need a mechanism like this because a female needs to be very sensitive to emotional signals that come from offspring. We just have a more powerful imagination and that amplifies our capacity for empathy.”

Empathy draws us into the life of another’s mind. Synapses fire to marshal sensory cues, muster memories and weave intuitions that our conscious minds could never articulate. As a visceral response to others, empathy can manifest in unexpected ways — through contagious yawning, for instance.

Most people can’t help but yawn reflexively when someone else starts doing it first. No one knows why, but researchers at the State University of New York recently learned that people better able to identify with another’s state of mind also yawn more readily in response to others. Children with autism — a condition characterized by an inability to interact socially — don’t catch yawns, scientists at the University of London’s Birkbeck College reported in 2007.

But monkeys do. Chimpanzees will yawn when shown a computer animation of another monkey yawning, Dr. de Waal and his colleagues reported earlier this month in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. “Yawn contagion is not completely understood, but it is related to empathy,” he says.

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Recommended Reading

We feel another’s pain as if it is our own, researchers report in “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but not Sensory Components of Pain” in Science.

Columbia University investigated our ability to feel another’s state of mind in “The neural bases of empathic accuracy” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other researchers explore the relationship between empathy, yawning and chimpanzee behavior in ““Computer animations stimulate contagious yawning in chimpanzees” in the Proceedings of The Royal Society. Other researchers reported on “Video-induced yawning in stumptail macaques” in Biology Letters. Most people catch yawns, but autistic children usually don’t, researchers report in “Absence of contagious yawning in children with autism spectrum disorder” in Biology Letters.

Primate expert Frans de Waal writes about empathy, evolution and modern society in “The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society.”

Pioneering neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga explores how humans are alike and different from other animals in “Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.”

In “Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think,” behavioral neuroscientist Marc D. Hauser explores animal cognition.

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Emotions are contagious, too. The suffering from a major natural disaster, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, which in 2004 killed more than 200,000 people in 11 countries, can trigger a global pandemic of empathy and compassion. “You cry and I feel sad,” says Dr. de Waal. “There is an echo of your feelings in me.”

Recently, researchers started capturing these emotional echoes with functional magnetic resonance imaging devices that track the oxygenated blood flow associated with neural activity. In the process, they have mapped how empathy arises from the interaction of our oldest and newest brain structures.

Among our synapses, we do feel another’s pain as our own, these brain imaging studies show.

Watching people being jabbed with a needle, shocked with an electrical cable or banged with a hammer activates the same brain networks as when we ourselves are hurt, researchers at the University College London and others have shown. In a similar way, our brain responds to seeing others being touched or expressing disgust as if we are experiencing those sensations ourselves.

“This may be the basis of how we understand each other,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner at Columbia University, who is researching the accuracy of our intuitions about others’ feelings and state of mind.

Not surprisingly, we respond more readily to those with whom we already feel a bond, either through kinship, community or racial group, neuroscientists at Peking University in Beijing reported in June.

However it began, human empathy has evolved into a divining rod that enables us to understand other people’s feelings and sensations even if we have never experienced them ourselves.

Not everyone, for instance, knows the sensation of pain. At the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, neurophysiologist Nicolas Danziger studied empathy among people born unable to feel pain. To understand their sense of other people’s injuries, he monitored their brains while they watched video clips of people in painful mishaps. The neural scans revealed that, with no memories of their own pain to guide them, they had to rely on their empathic ability to imagine the sensation.

“They crossed the bridge with empathy, to realize something that is completely exotic to them,” says Dr. Danziger. “True empathy is the ability to imagine how others are feeling, especially people who are not the same as you.”

Robert Lee Hotz, Wall Street Journal

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See also:

‘The Age of Empathy’

Chapter One: Biology, Left and Right

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.

Slightly earlier and slightly to the north, in Scotland, the thinking was different. The father of economics, Adam Smith, understood as no other that the pursuit of self-interest needs to be tempered by “fellow feeling.” He said so in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book not nearly as popular as his later work The Wealth of Nations. He famously opened his first book with:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

The French revolutionaries chanted of fraternité, Abraham Lincoln appealed to the bonds of sympathy, and Theodore Roosevelt spoke glowingly of fellow feeling as “the most important factor in producing a healthy political and social life.” But if this is true, why is this sentiment sometimes ridiculed as being, well, sentimental? A recent example occurred after Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005. While the American people were transfixed by the unprecedented catastrophe, one cable news network saw fit to ask if the Constitution actually provides for disaster relief. A guest on the show argued that the misery of others is none of our business.

The day the levees broke, I happened to be driving down from Atlanta to Alabama to give a lecture at Auburn University. Except for a few fallen trees, this part of Alabama had suffered little damage, but the hotel was full of refugees: people had crammed the rooms with grandparents, children, dogs, and cats. I woke up at a zoo! Not the strangest place for a biologist, perhaps, but it conveyed the size of the calamity. And these people were the lucky ones. The morning newspaper at my door screamed, “Why have we been left behind like animals?” a quote from one of the people stuck for days without food and sanitation in the Louisiana Superdome.

I took issue with this headline, not because I felt there was nothing to complain about, but because animals don’t necessarily leave one another behind. My lecture was on precisely this topic, on how we have an “inner ape” that is not nearly as callous and nasty as advertised, and how empathy comes naturally to our species. I wasn’t claiming that it always finds expression, though. Thousands of people with money and cars had fled New Orleans, leaving the sick, old, and poor to fend for themselves. In some places dead bodies floated in the water, where they were being eaten by alligators.

But immediately following the disaster there was also deep embarrassment in the nation about what had happened, and an incredible outpouring of support. Sympathy was not absent—it just was late in coming. Americans are a generous people, yet raised with the mistaken belief that the “invisible hand” of the free market—a metaphor introduced by the same Adam Smith—will take care of society’s woes. The invisible hand, however, did nothing to prevent the appalling survival-of-the-fittest scenes in New Orleans.

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. Katrina exposed the underbelly of American society. On my drive back to Atlanta, it occurred to me that this is the theme of our time: the common good. We tend to focus on wars, terror threats, globalization, and petty political scandals, yet the larger issue is how to combine a thriving economy with a humane society. It relates to health care, education, justice, and—as illustrated by Katrina— protection against nature. The levees in Louisiana had been criminally neglected. In the weeks following the flooding, the media were busy finger-pointing. Had the engineers been at fault? Had funds been diverted? Shouldn’t the president have broken off his vacation? Where I come from, fingers belong in the dike—or at least that’s how legend has it. In the Netherlands, much of which lies up to twenty feet below sea level, dikes are so sacred that politicians have literally no say over them: Water management is in the hands of engineers and local citizen boards that predate the nation itself.

Come to think of it, this also reflects a distrust of government, not so much big government but rather the short-sightedness of most politicians.

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