Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Teach Us about Ourselves

by Frans de Waal

You might think they cry in reaction to any kind of noise, but studies have shown they respond specifically to the cries of same-age babies. Girl babies do so more than boy babies. That the emotional glue of society emerges so early in life reveals its biological nature.

Fortunately, we don’t hear much about “selfish genes” anymore. Buried by a mass of fresh data, the idea that behavior is invariably self-serving has died an inglorious death. Science has confirmed that cooperation is our species’s first and foremost inclination, at least with members of the in-group, so much so that a 2011 book about human behavior by Martin Nowak was entitled SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed.

They gently touch, stroke, hug, or kiss the adult. Girls do so more than boys. The most important finding was that these responses emerge early in life, before the age of two. That toddlers already express empathy suggests it is spontaneous, because it is unlikely that anyone has been instructing them how to respond.25

In contrast, I don’t know of a single woman scientist who has got carried away by the puzzle of altruism. Women would find it hard to leave out maternal nurturance and the constant worry and attention that it entails.

This maternal origin explains the pervasive sex difference in empathy, which starts early in life. At birth, girl babies look longer at faces than do boy babies, who look longer at mechanical toys. Later in life, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of facial expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another’s perspective.

Referencing Simon Baron-Cohen

On the other hand, if the partner had played unfairly against them before the session, the subjects felt cheated, and seeing the other in pain had less of an effect. The door to empathy had shut. For the women, it was still partially open—they still showed mild empathy. But for the men it closed completely—in fact, seeing the unfair player getting shocked activated the pleasure centers in men’s brains. They had moved from empathy to justice and welcomed the punishment of the other. Their main sentiment was Schadenfreude.

The German psychologist Felix Warneken investigated how young chimpanzees and children assist human adults. The experimenter was using a tool but dropped it in midjob: would they pick it up? The experimenter’s hands were full: would they open a cupboard for him? Both species did so voluntarily and eagerly, showing that they understood the experimenter’s problem. Once Warneken started to reward the children for their assistance, however, they became less helpful. The rewards, it seems, distracted them from sympathizing with the clumsy experimenter.

Dogs that are less perturbed by separation, on the other hand, are considered more optimistic: they happily run toward the bowl, expecting it to be full. This so-called cognitive bias is also common in people. Cheery, easygoing people expect good things in life, whereas depressed ones believe that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Teenagers, for example, are embarrassed when their parents are out of tune with fashion or employ a vocabulary from ages (two decades) ago. The same teenagers have no problem with their parents at home, but as soon as their friends are around, things change: What will they think if they see me walking with these Neanderthals? At first sight, being ashamed of one’s parents is about conformity rather than hierarchy, but in the end, it’s all about the teen’s reputation and standing within the peer group.

though in our political system women vote and are able to occupy the highest office, thus allowing for a social order quite different from that of many other species, the fighting rules have hardly changed. They evolved over millions of years and are far too ingrained to be thrown out. A male generally curbs his physical power while confronting a female. This is as true for horses and lions as it is for apes and humans. These inhibitions reside so deeply in our psychology that we react strongly to violations. In the movies, for example, it’s not terribly upsetting to see a woman slap a man’s face, but we cringe at the reverse.

Most astonishing are the euphemisms with which we surround the twin driving forces behind human politics: leaders’ lust for power and followers’ hankering for leadership. Like most primates, we are a hierarchical species, so why do we try to hide this from ourselves? The evidence is all around us, such as the early emergence of pecking orders in children (the opening day at a daycare center may look like a battlefield), our obsession with income and status, the fancy titles we bestow on each other in small organizations, and the infantile devastation of grown men who tumble from the top.

As a student, realizing that my biology books were of little help explaining chimpanzee behavior, I picked up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. It offered an insightful, unadorned account of human behavior based on real-life observations of the Borgias, the Medici, and the popes. The book put me in the right frame of mind to write about ape politics at the zoo.

In an early study, eleven-year-old boys at a summer camp were divided into two groups to compete against each other. In-group cohesiveness increased, as did reinforcement of social norms and leader-follower behavior. The experiment demonstrated that status hierarchies have a unifying quality that is reinforced as soon as concerted action is called for. This is the paradox of power structures: they bind people together.

Civilization is not some outside force: it is us. No abiological humans ever existed, nor any acultural ones. And why do we always consider our biology in the bleakest possible light?

the new alpha female took the top spot.21 The closest human parallel is the fierce competition and intrigues among slave concubines in the Ottoman Imperial Harem, some of whom gained a status equal to the sultan’s wives. These women groomed their sons to become the next sultan. Upon ascension to the throne, the winner would inevitably order the killing of all his brothers, so he would be the only one to sire offspring. We humans simply do things more radically than bonobos.

One is that while being attractive and good-looking is great for men (think of John F. Kennedy or Justin Trudeau), it doesn’t work out equally well for women. This is related to how sexual competition interacts with an electorate that is half male and half female. Attractive women, especially those of childbearing age, are perceived as rivals by other women, which makes it hard for them to get their vote. When John McCain ran against Barack Obama in 2008, he selected a relatively young woman, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. Men in the media regarded it as a brilliant move, calling Palin “hot” and a “MIL F,” but no one seemed to realize how much male enthusiasm might harm Palin’s standing among women. Obama barely won the male vote (49 to 48 percent), but he ran away with the female vote (56 to 43 percent).

Modern female heads of state have all been postmenopausal, such as Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher.

Ghandi had a baby as head of state!

The disappointment of losing Dutch and French soccer fans looks exactly the same.