The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

by Frans de Waal

Empathy is the grand theme of our time, as reflected in the speeches of Barack Obama, such as when he told graduates at Northwestern University, in Chicago: “I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit….It’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential.”

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

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. As an exercise, try to clap after a lecture when no one else is clapping, or try not to clap when everyone else is. We are group animals to a terrifying degree. Since political leaders are masters at crowd psychology, history is replete with people following them en masse into insane adventures. All that a leader has to do is create an outside threat, whip up fear, and voilà: The human herd instinct takes over.

prisao os outros

Enron’s implosion in 2001. 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

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.

empatia nao tem nada a ver com bondade

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. Most

Mood contagion serves to coordinate activities, which is crucial for any traveling species (as most primates are). If my companions are feeding, feeding, I’d better do the same, because once they move off, my chance to forage will be gone. The

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We’re in suspense watching a high-wire artist, said Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), because we vicariously enter his body and thus share his experience. We’re on the rope with him. 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.” We identify with a high-wire artist to the point that we participate in every step he takes. I prefer the term Einfühlung since it conveys the movement of one individual projecting him- or herself into another. Lipps was the first to recognize the special channel we have to others. 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.”

Dimberg demonstrated that we don’t decide to be empathic—we simply are. Having pasted small electrodes onto his subjects’ faces so as to register the tiniest muscle movements, he presented them with pictures of angry and happy faces on a computer screen. Humans frown in reaction to angry faces and pull up the corners of their mouths in reaction to happy ones. This by itself was not his most critical finding, however, because such mimicry could be deliberate. The revolutionary part was that he got the same reaction if the pictures flashed on the screen too briefly for conscious perception. Asked

Lipps called empathy an “instinct,” meaning that we’re born with it. He didn’t speculate about its evolution, but 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.

We have a tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life sciences hold a more mundane view: It’s all about security, social companionships, and a full belly.

It’s obviously not the imaginative kind of empathy that makes us truly understand how someone else feels, even someone we don’t see, for example, when we read about the fate of a character in War and Peace. Yet 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.

empatia eh emocao automatica. entendimento vem depois.

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?

And even though we identify easily with others, we don’t do so automatically. For example, we have a hard time identifying with people whom we see as different or belonging to another group. We find it easier to identify with those like us—with the same cultural background, ethnic features, age, gender, job, and so on—and even more so with those close to us, such as spouses, children, and friends. Identification is such a basic precondition for empathy that even mice show pain contagion only with their cage mates. If identification

One idea, which I’ll call the “Body First Theory,” holds that it starts with the body and that emotions follow. Someone else’s body language affects our own body, which then creates an emotional echo that makes us feel accordingly. As Louis Armstrong sang, “When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.” If copying another’s smile makes us feel happy, the emotion of the smiler has been transmitted via our body. Strange as it may sound, this theory states that emotions arise from our bodies. For example, our mood can be improved by simply lifting up the corners of our mouth. If people are asked to bite down on a pencil lengthwise, taking care not to let the pencil touch their lips (thus forcing the mouth into a smile-like shape), they judge cartoons funnier than if they have been asked to frown. The primacy of the body is sometimes summarized in the phrase “I must be afraid, because I’m running.”

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

budismo engajado glassman

Think back to 1997, when a Danish mother left her fourteenth-month-old girl in a stroller outside a Manhattan restaurant. Her child was taken into custody and placed in foster care, while the mother ended up in jail. For most Americans, she was either crazy or criminally negligent, but in fact this mother merely did what Danes are used to. Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is frisk luft, or fresh air. The mother counted on safety and good air, whereas New York offered neither. The charges against her were eventually dropped. When I recently visited Denmark and asked colleagues if they’d leave a child unattended outside, all of them nodded that, yes, this is what everybody does. Not because they don’t like to have their babies near them, but because it’s so good for them to be out in the open. No one considers the risk of abduction. My hosts were positively puzzled that anyone could consider such a wicked act, and wondered where one would go with an abducted child. If one were to return with it to one’s own neighborhood, they surmised, wouldn’t everyone ask where that child came from? And wouldn’t the connection be quickly made if newspapers were reporting a missing baby? 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.

Of the three ideals of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—Americans will keep emphasizing the first and Europeans the second, but only the third speaks of inclusion, trust, and community. Morally speaking, fraternity is probably the noblest of the three and impossible to achieve without attention to both others.

prisao empatia

If I were God, I’d work on the reach of empathy.

If being sensitive to others were truly limited to our species, this would make it a young trait, something we evolved only recently. The problem with young traits, however, is that they tend to be experimental. Consider the human back. When our ancestors started walking on two legs, their backs straightened and assumed a vertical position. In doing so, backs became the bearers of extra weight. Since this is not what the vertebral column was originally designed for, chronic back pain became our species’ universal curse. 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. Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need.

prisao empatia. antiguidade

I derive great optimism from empathy’s evolutionary antiquity. It makes it a robust trait that will develop in virtually every human being so that society can count on it and try to foster and grow it. It is a human universal.

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. If we notice a beggar in the street, we can choose to look at him, which may arouse our pity, or we can look away, even walk to the other side of the street, to avoid facing him. We have all sorts of ways to open or close the portal.

o portao da empatia

Cross-cultural studies confirm that women everywhere are considered more empathic than men, so much so that the claim has been made that the female (but not the male) brain is hardwired for empathy. I doubt that the difference is that absolute, but it’s true that at birth girl babies look longer at faces than boy babies, who look longer at suspended mechanical mobiles. Growing up, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of emotional expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another’s perspective. When Carolyn Zahn-Waxler measured reactions to distressed family members, she found girls looking more at the other’s face, providing more physical comfort, and more often expressing concern, such as asking “Are you okay?” Boys are less attentive to the feelings of others, more action- and object-oriented, rougher in their play, and less inclined to social fantasy games. They prefer collective action, such as building something together. Men can be

Mencius is unimpressed by the king’s pity for the ox, telling him that he seems as much concerned with his own tender feelings as the animal’s fate: You saw the ox, and had not seen the sheep. So is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die; having heard their dying cries, he cannot bearto eat their flesh. Therefore he keeps away from his slaughter-houseand cook-room.

* Ayn Rand: In a typical passage of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957, p. 1059), the novel’s main character, John Galt, claims: “Accept the fact that achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness … is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.”

prisao felicidade

* “You saw the ox”: From The Works of Mencius (Book I, Part I, Chapter VII).

Mencius (1895 [orig. fourth century B.C.]). The Works of Mencius. Translation: J. Legge. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.