Empathy No Longer Sets Humans Apart

Human beings want to believe that we are special.  We fervently cling to the ideas that our cleverness and powerful emotions are something unusual and extraordinary in the natural world.  Unfortunately science does not seem to hold humans in as high esteem.  Evolution, after all, is a completely random and directionless system.  It is also an incredibly connected system and the roots of many behaviors and traits can be found strewn across vast numbers of different species and families.  The more that we look for what makes us special, the more we find that we are not.  In the disciplines of cognition and intelligence especially, the borders that long separated humans and animals are becoming blurred.  Scientists are now finding startling similarities between animal brains and our own.

The historically famous, but incorrect, picture showing evolution having direction and culminating in the creation of man
Source: Unknown

If there is one thing that mankind has been proud of, it is empathy.  We have often bragged about our ability to feel for others and to offer help to those that need it.  Often, our art and literature paints the animal world as cruel and uncaring, while humans alone are able to work together to aid one-another.  Unfortunately for these compelling narratives, cognitive researchers have found empathy to exist in a number of animal species and believe that we are thinking of empathy in the wrong way.  In truth, empathy is a simple neurological process that serves as an internal rewards system for social behaviors.  Humans have deluded ourselves into believing what we were experiencing was some isolated phenomenon unlike any other.  This has clouded how we have viewed the cognitive abilities of our fellow animals.

Looking At Altruism Differently

There can be a lot of confusion when empathy is examined scientifically.  This is because the terminology is different then when we talk about empathy in a human perspective.  I would like to explain some of the terms in detail so that there is as little confusion as possible.  To start, there are two major types of social behaviors, which are altruistic and selfish.  These labels can be misleading because they provide ultimate explanations and not proximate explanations, but both are required to fully understand a behavior.  An ultimate cause for a behavior explains why a behavior evolved over thousands of generations and looks at the behavior's effect on natural selection.  A proximate cause for a behavior, on the other hand, explains the immediate situation that triggers the behavior in terms of each individual animal.  To give an example, the ultimate cause behind sex is reproduction and the spreading of one's genes, but the proximate cause of why individuals mate is that it feels good and results in the release of dopamine in the brain.  

It should also be noted that the meaning of altruism in biology is different then what it means in everyday speech.  To the average person, altruism is akin to selflessness.  In biology, the term merely means that a behavior benefits everyone involved, including the actor.  Usually what an actor gains is improved social bonds and potential reciprocity if they are ever in need.

Although perhaps poorly explained, this different meaning is as old as the theory of evolution as Darwin wrote about how altruism in biology is not classically altruistic, "We are thus impelled to relieve the sufferings of another, in order that our own painful feelings may at the same time be relieved".  It is important to understand that "altruism" and "selfish" are purely ultimate definitions and are different then what they mean in the human context.

The question is now, what exactly motivates animals to perform altruistic behaviors?  The ultimate causes and the potential social benefits of these behaviors cannot be the prime motivation for individuals.  This is because most animals who are capable of altruistic behavior lack the cognitive ability to understand ideas like reciprocity and social rewards.  Even though these benefits allowed altruism to be selected for in natural selection, the individuals have no way to understand these consequences.  Thus there must be another proximate explanation for such behaviors, some sort of intrinsic rewards system.  Well it turns out that empathy fits that description perfectly.

Primal Empathy

If empathy is not some grandiose accomplishment of the human experience, then what is it?  The accepted definition in science is, "The capacity to be affected by and share the emotional state of another, assess the reasons for the other's state, and identify with the other, adopting his or her perspective".  Dr. Frans de Waal believes that this definition is a bit misleading, he believes that all of those pieces describe empathy but that they are not all required to utilize the term.  Only the first criteria that must be met for the term to be used and this simpler empathy serves an important purpose.  As de Waal explains in his article "Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy", empathy evolved in animals in order to provide a proximate mechanism for altruistic behavior .  This basic empathy is often called emotional contagion or primal empathy.

In practice, emotional contagion is the ability to feel what another individual is feeling.  For example, many species of animals will have a heightened awareness of pain if they observe an individual of the same species experiencing pain.  Observing someone in stress will cause stress in an individual and will thus drive the individual to alleviate said stress, most likely through social interaction.  Emotional contagion first evolved in parental interactions, as the ability to observe emotions and stress in offspring makes it easier to provide care.  Once this emotional matching ability was established, it spread to family members and social groups as a way to ease social interactions.  It is from the basic machinery of emotional contagion that the more complex features of empathy evolved.

Studies have found pets capable of empathic responses towards humans

Source: Huffington Post

As cognition and intelligence in animals develop, so does their empathy.  What develops next is a phenomenon called sympathetic concern, which is defined as concern about another's state and attempts to ameliorate this state through consolation.  Consolation is an important tool for social animals as it is a way to provide needed support to social partners and as a way to alleviate the actor's own stress.  The final and most intricate level of empathy is empathic perspective-taking and it allows for the understanding of another's specific situation and needs separate from the actor's, combined with emotional contagion.  As of yet, apes are the only animal group that possess the cognitive abilities necessary for empathic perspective-taking.  The issue with these higher empathic abilities is that they mask the simpler processes that fuel them, which is why humans do not realize that emotional contagion affects them.

When humans think of empathy, we employ a top-down perspective in that we start with the complex and cognitive form that we are capable of and judge other species based upon it.  If we are to really understand the evolution and mechanisms of empathy and altruism we must employ a different mindset.

A Bottom-Up Perspective

Humans like to look at things from a top-down point of view.  When we study wars, we focus on the valiant generals and the grand battles instead of the lone infantryman.  When we study architecture, we think of the giant pyramids and massive colosseum instead of the simple bricks that hold them up.  In biology and especially with the study of cognition, we must not follow this pattern because it results in the important rudimentary processes being passed over in favor of complex behaviors.  Thus when we want to study the edifice that is empathic perspective-taking, we must start with primal empathy and work our way up.  In an article, Frans de Waal states why we must not ignore the beginnings of behaviors

As in a Russian doll...the outer layers always contain an inner core.  Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them.  This also means that empathy comes naturally to us.  It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.  At heart, it is a hard-wired response that we fine-tune and elaborate upon in the course of our lives, until it reaches a level at which is becomes such a complex response that it is hard to recognize its origin in simpler responses, such as body mimicry and emotional contagion.

An example of a traditional Russian doll illustrating smaller pieces being used to create a larger whole
Source: Pinterest

When we think of the root of empathy as a rudimentary emotional response to exterior signals, we can begin to understand how more complex emotions and social behaviors arose from it.  Primal empathy provided an innate drive within animals to care for one another and to create an environment where social behavior was rewarded.  With an internal rewards system that prioritized the well-being of others as well as the actor, the ground work of all sociality was laid.

Complex cognitive behaviors such as fairness, culture, compassion, language, consolation, and teaching were all made possible by the ability to share the emotions of another.  We looked at these impressive cognitive abilities, things that made our very civilizations possible, and did not realize that the seed of these things lies in many of the animals that we thought inferior.  Yet now scientists are learning that many species have more empathic abilities than we previously thought possible.

Animal Examples

Unfortunately for research and general human curiosity, it is hard to study empathic responses in a laboratory setting because it can be unethical to do so.  This is because, in order to set up a experimental situation that creates an empathic response, one must create a great amount of stress or pain in another animal.  It is actually easier to study empathy in humans because we can create responses by way of stories, pictures, videos, and human actors.  Animal responses are much harder to fool.  Empirical research on empathic responses have been done on smaller-brained animals but the results bring into question the ethics of the procedures.

Rodents are an animal group where empathic research is plentiful and where there has been found evidence of emotional contagion.  Jaak Panksepp and Jules B. Pankseep reviewed the research done on this group in their article "Toward A Cross-Species Understanding of Empathy".  Both rats and mice have been shown empirically to increase freezing behaviors when distress is induced in social partners, thus they are feeling stress just based on the look and smell of their stressed out partners.  Rats have also been shown to alleviate pain and discomfort in others.  A recent study had rats push a button to acquire food but the button would also cause pain to a nearby social partner.  Once the rats learned the connection between the pain of the partner and their own actions, they would stop pressing the button even though there was a reward.  This is not considered consolation because their actions are not decreasing stress but avoiding it, however it does show an innate drive for altruistic behaviors.  Under modern ethics guidelines, such experiments are allowed on species like rats and mice yet the results show that individuals can be greatly affected by the perceived pain and stress of others.

However, there are other, ethical ways to study empathy, like focusing on behaviors that are tied to empathic responses.  Consolation is well studied behavior that has been found to be important for the maintenance of social groups.  Apes are the most studied animal group that console, chimpanzees especially use consolation to repair social bonds after fights and to alleviate stress in the losers of fights.  Large brained birds and dolphins have been found to console as well through observational empirical studies.

"An example of consolation among chimpanzees: A juvenile puts an arm around a screaming adult male, who has just been defeated in a fight with his rival. Consolation probably reflects empathy, as the objective of the consoler seems to be to alleviate the distress of the other."
Photo by Frans de Waal

Empirical examples are not the only examples of empathy, we also have anecdotal experiences of researchers caring for animals who witness behaviors that are hard to not describe as empathetic.  Nadia Ladygina-Kohts, an ape researcher, describes her experience with a young chimpanzee that was under her care.

If I pretend to be crying, close my eyes and weep, Joni immediately stops his plays or any other activities, quickly runs over to me, all excited and shagged, from the most remote places in the house, such as the roof or the ceiling of his cage, from where I could not drive him down despite my persistent calls and entreaties.  He hastily runs around me, as if looking for the offender; looking at my face, he tenderly takes my chin in his palm, lightly touches my face with his finger, as though trying to understand what is happening, and turns around, clenching his toes into firm fists.

Another real-world example comes from chimpanzees kept captive in zoos and reported by Jane Goodall.

In some zoos, chimpanzees are kept on man-made islands, surrounded by water-filled moats... Chimpanzees cannot swim and, unless they are rescued, will drown if they fall into deep water.  Despite this, individuals have sometimes made heroic efforts to save companions from drowning, and were sometimes successful.  One adult male lost his life as he tried to rescue a small infant whose incompetent mother had allowed it to fall into the water.

It is hard to imagine an adult chimpanzee risking its own life for that of an infant without the powerful drive of emotional contagion.

The Take-Away

Little by little, human beings are learning that we are not as special as we thought we once were.  We are not set apart from the animals, but instead are just some paces ahead in the cognitive development race.  We may have intricate societies and cultures that have shaped this very planet, but the spark that made this all possible has been found in small-brained animals like rodents.  Aside from the increasing of scientific knowledge, how else can these revelations about empathy serve us?  Well, I believe that they can be an important lesson in humility.  What once was thought of as a definitively human experience has now been shown to have roots in the beginning of all social behaviors.  We must accept the idea that animals are capable of emotional responses and that their social entanglements are more complex than we previously thought.

A bottom-up approach, such as that we took when discussing empathy, is an important tool to understanding the evolutionary history of other cognitive abilities.  Starting at the pinnacle of human accomplishment and ability leaves the view down clouded and obscured.  If we want to understand how cognition grows, we must begin at the simple building blocks and work our way up, brick by brick.

Understanding where our feelings of empathy originate could also help us build a better world.  Xenophobia, racism, sexism, and apathy are all culturally created phenomena.  They cause us to ignore our more primal empathic feelings in order to create a sense of foreignness and animosity towards others.  But we live in a globalized world, where the fates of all people are intricately connected.  As Frans de Waal explains in a online piece,

This is the challenge of our time: globalization by a tribal species.  In trying to structure the world such that it suits human nature, the point to keep in mind is that political ideologues by definition hold narrow views. They are blind to what they don’t wish to see. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we are not in the habit of embracing our nature.

Two men shaking hands through the Berlin Wall, a grand metaphor for emotions overcoming ideology
Source: Ron Breeze

We are doing ourselves a disservice by silencing primal empathy through rhetoric, propaganda, and ideology.  By realizing that these innate contagious emotions are fundamental will free us to think of the world differently.  It will do as the process of natural selection originally intended and ease the building of a greater society.