The Age of Empathy Quotes

“So, don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also to our closest relatives, the primates.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Robin Hood had it right.Humanity's deepest wish is to spread the wealth.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“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. There is obvious tension between both views, which recalls that famous dinner conversation between a Russian literary critic and the writer Ivan Turgenev: 'We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,' the critic yelled, 'and you want to eat!”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“biology is usually called upon to justify a society based on selfish principles, but we should never forget that it has also produced the glue that holds communities together.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“All that nature can offer is information and inspiration, not prescription.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is frisk luft, or fresh air. The”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“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.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“The first time occurred when a powerful alpha male, Yeroen, was in the midst of an intimidation display with all of his hair on end. This is nothing to make fun of. All other apes watch with trepidation, knowing that a male in this testosterone-filled state is keen to make his point: He is the boss. Anyone who gets in the way risks a serious beating. Moving like a furry steam locomotive that would flatten everybody and everything, Yeroen went with heavy steps up a leaning tree trunk that he often stamped on in a steady rhythm until the whole thing would shake and creak to amplify his message of strength and stamina. Every alpha male comes up with his own special effects. It had rained, however, and the trunk was slippery, which explains why at the peak of this spectacle the mighty leader slipped and fell. He held on to the trunk for a second, then dropped to the grass, where he sat looking around, disoriented. With a “the show must go on” attitude, he then wrapped up his performance by running straight at a group of onlookers, scattering them amid screams of fear.

Even though Yeroen’s plunge made me laugh out loud, as far as I could tell none of the chimps saw anything remotely comical. They kept their eyes on him as if this was all part of the same show, even though, clearly, it was not how Yeroen had intended things to go. A similar incident happened in a different colony, when the alpha male picked up a hard plastic ball during his display. He often threw this ball up in the air with as much force as possible—the higher the better—after which it would come down somewhere with a loud thud. This time, however, he threw the ball up and checked around with a puzzled expression because the ball had miraculously disappeared. He didn’t know that it was returning to earth by the same trajectory he had launched it on, landing with a smack on his own back. This startled him, and he broke off his display. Again, I found this a rather amusing sight, but none of the chimps showed any reaction that I could tell. Had they been human, they’d have been rolling around, holding their bellies with laughter, or—if fear kept them from doing so—they’d have been pinching one another, turning purple in an attempt to control themselves.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“This doesn’t sound much like the rational profit maximizers that economists make us out to be. Traditional economic models don’t consider the human sense of fairness, even though it demonstrably affects economic decisions. They also ignore human emotions in general, even though the brain of Homo economicus barely distinguishes sex from money. Advertisers know this all too well, which is why they often pair expensive items, such as cars or watches, with attractive women. But economists prefer to imagine a hypothetical world driven by market forces and rational choice rooted in self-interest. This world does fit some members of the human race, who act purely selfishly and take advantage of others without compunction. In most experiments, however, such people are in the minority. The majority is altruistic, cooperative, sensitive to fairness, and oriented toward community goals. The level of trust and cooperation among them exceeds predictions from economic models.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Social hierarchies may have been out of fashion when our ancestors lived in small-scale societies, but they surely made a comeback with agricultural settlement and the accumulation of wealth. But the tendency to subvert these vertical arrangements never left us. We’re born revolutionaries. Even Sigmund Freud recognized this unconscious desire, speculating that human history began when frustrated sons banded together to eliminate their imperious father, who kept all women away from them. The sexual connotations of Freud’s origin story may serve as metaphor for all of our political and economic dealings, a connection confirmed by brain research. Wanting to see how humans make financial decisions, economists found that while weighing monetary risks, the same areas in men’s brains light up as when they’re watching titillating sexual images. In fact, after having seen such images, men throw all caution overboard and gamble more money than they normally would. In the words of one neuroeconomist, “The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men’s evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Animals develop such relationships quite readily, also between species. As pets, they do so with us, so that we can hold them upside down or stuff them under our sweater—scary moves that they won’t accept from strangers. Or, conversely, we stick an arm into the mouth of a large dog—a carnivore designed to take a chunk out of it. But animals also learn to trust one another. In an old-fashioned zoo, a monkey kept in the same enclosure as a hippopotamus acted as dental cleaner. After the hippo had eaten its fill of cucumbers and heads of salad, the little monkey would approach and tap the hippo’s mouth, which would open wide. It was obvious that they had done this before. Like a mechanic under the hood of a car, the monkey would lean in and systematically pull food remains from between the hippo’s teeth, consuming whatever he pulled out. The hippo seemed to enjoy the service, because he’d keep his mouth open as long as the monkey was busy.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“In the first, two monkeys sit opposite each other on a branch, both inserting a finger ever deeper into the other’s nostril until the finger vanishes up to the first knuckle. Swaying gently, they sit like this with expressions on their faces described as “trancelike.” The monkeys are normally hyperactive and sociable, but hand-sniffers sit apart from the group, concentrating on each other for up to half an hour.
Even more curious is the second game, in which one monkey inserts almost a whole finger between the other’s eyelid and eyeball. Monkey fingers are tiny, but relative to their eyes and noses they aren’t any smaller than ours. Also, their fingers have nails, which obviously aren’t particularly clean, so this behavior potentially scratches the cornea or causes infections. Now, the monkeys really need to sit still; otherwise someone may lose an eye. These games are most painful to watch! The pair keeps its posture for minutes, while the one whose eye is being poked may stick a finger into the other’s nostril.
What purpose these weird games serve is unclear, but one idea is that the monkeys are testing their bonds. This explanation has also been offered with respect to human rituals in which we make ourselves vulnerable. Tongue-kissing, for example, carries the risk of disease transmission. Intimate kissing is either pleasurable or totally disgusting depending on the partner: Engaging in it thus says a lot about how we perceive the relationship. In couples, kissing is thought to test the love, enthusiasm, even faithfulness of the partner. Perhaps capuchin monkeys, too, are trying to find out how much they really like each other, which may then help them decide who can be trusted to support them during confrontations within the group. A second explanation is that these games help the monkeys reduce stress, of which they have no shortage. Their group life is full of drama. During eye-poking or hand-sniffing, they seem to enter an unusually calm, dreamy state. Are they exploring the borderline between pain and pleasure, perhaps releasing endorphins in the process?”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“And then there was our Siamese cat, Sarah, who had been adopted as a kitten by our big tomcat, Diego, who would lick and clean her, let her knead his tummy as if she were nursing, and sleep with her. For about a decade they were best buddies, until Diego died of old age. Even though Sarah was younger and in perfect health, she stopped eating and died two months after Diego for no reason that the veterinarian could determine.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Long before this, our ancestors lived on a thinly populated planet, with altogether only a couple of million people. Their density may have resembled that of the Bushmen, who live on ten square miles per capita. There are even suggestions that before this, about seventy thousand years ago, our lineage was at the edge of extinction, living in scattered small bands with a global population of just a couple of thousand. These are hardly the sort of conditions that promote continuous warfare. Furthermore, our ancestors probably had little worth fighting over, again like the Bushmen, for whom the only such exceptions are water and women. But Bushmen share water with thirsty visitors, and regularly marry off their children to neighboring groups. The latter practice ties groups together and means that the men in one group are often related to those in the other. In the long run, killing one’s kin is not a successful trait.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“We can’t return to this preindustrial way of life. We live in societies of a mind-boggling scale and complexity that demand quite a different organization than humans ever enjoyed in their state of nature. Yet, even though we live in cities and are surrounded by cars and computers, we remain essentially the same animals with the same psychological wants and needs.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“So much for Western origin stories, which depict our forebears as ferocious, fearless, and free. Unbound by social commitments and merciless toward their enemies, they seem to have stepped straight out of your typical action movie. Present-day political thought keeps clinging to these macho myths, such as the belief that we can treat the planet any way we want, that humanity will be waging war forever, and that individual freedom takes precedence over community.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Modern psychology and neuroscience fail to back these bleak views. We’re preprogrammed to reach out. Empathy is an automated response over which we have limited control. We can suppress it, mentally block it, or fail to act on it, but except for a tiny percentage of humans—known as psychopaths—no one is emotionally immune to another’s situation. The fundamental yet rarely asked question is: Why did natural selection design our brains so that we’re in tune with our fellow human beings, feeling distress at their distress and pleasure at their pleasure? If exploitation of others were all that mattered, evolution should never have gotten into the empathy business.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Like other primates, humans can be described either as highly cooperative animals that need to work hard to keep selfish and aggressive urges under control or as highly competitive animals that nevertheless have the ability to get along and engage in give-and-take. This is what makes socially positive tendencies so interesting: They play out against a backdrop of competition. I rate humans among the most aggressive of primates but also believe that we’re masters at connecting and that social ties constrain competition. In other words, we are by no means obligatorily aggressive. It’s all a matter of balance: Pure, unconditional trust and cooperation are naïve and detrimental, whereas unconstrained greed can only lead to the sort of dog-eat-dog world that Skilling advocated at Enron until it collapsed under its own mean-spirited weight.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“Stress begs alleviation, which rhesus monkeys achieve through grooming. The relaxing effect of this activity wasn’t easy to prove, however, because for every time our monkey was being groomed we needed a perfect match, such as an almost identical situation in which she was not being groomed. The difference in heart rate could then be attributed to the grooming. We found indeed that grooming slows down the heart, which was the first such demonstration for any animal in a naturalistic setting. It confirmed the widely held assumption that grooming is an enjoyable, calming activity that serves not only to remove lice and ticks, but also to eliminate stress and foster social ties. Drops in heart rate have also been found in horses being petted by humans, and conversely, in humans petting their pets. In fact, animal companions are so effective against stress that they are increasingly recommended for heart patients.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“The dolphins spent far more time near the mirror, inspecting their reflection, when they had been visibly marked than when they had been sham marked. They seemed to recognize that the mark they saw in the mirror had been put on their own body. Since they hardly paid any attention to marks on other dolphins, it was not as if they were obsessed with marks in general. They were specifically interested in the ones on themselves. Critics complained that the dolphins in this study failed to touch their own body. or rub off the mark, as humans or apes do, but I’m not sure we should hold the absence of self-touching against an animal that lacks the anatomy for it. Until better tests have been designed, it seems safe to let dolphins join the cognitive elite of animals that recognize themselves in a mirror.
Dolphins possess large brains (larger than humans, in fact), and show every sign of high intelligence. Each individual produces its own unique whistle sound by which the others recognize him or her, and there are even indications that they use these sounds to call each other “by name,” so to speak. They enjoy lifelong bonds, and reconcile after fights by means of sexy petting (much like bonobos), while males form power-seeking coalitions. They may encircle a school of herring to drive them together in a compact ball, releasing bubbles to keep them in place, after which they pick their food like fruit from a tree.
With regard to the co-emergence hypothesis, it is important to note the level of dolphin altruism. Does self-awareness go hand in hand with perspective-taking, and do dolphins show the sort of targeted helping known of humans and apes? One of the oldest reports in the scientific literature concerns an incident on October 30, 1954, off the coast of Florida. During a capture expedition for a public aquarium, a stick of dynamite was set off underwater near a pod of bottlenose dolphins. As soon as one stunned victim surfaced, heavily listing, two other dolphins came to its aid: “One came up from below on each side, and placing the upper lateral part of their heads approximately beneath the pectoral fins of the injured one, they buoyed it to the surface in an apparent effort to allow it to breathe while it remained partially stunned.” The two helpers were submerged, which meant that they couldn’t breathe during their effort. The entire pod remained nearby (whereas normally they’d take off immediately after an explosion), and waited until their companion had recovered. They then all fled in a hurry, making tremendous leaps. The scientists reporting this incident added: “There is no doubt in our minds that the cooperative assistance displayed for their own species was real and deliberate.”
― Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society