The Age of Empathy (10 page)

Soon the inevitable happened: Imitation was elevated to a uniquely human skill. Never mind that such claims are always tricky, which is why they’re being adjusted every couple of years, and that animals learn remarkably easily from companions. Examples range from birds or whales picking up songs from one another to the picnic wars between bears and people in the American wilderness. The bears invent new tricks all the time (they’ve learned, for example, that jumping up and down on top of a specific brand of car will pop open all of its doors), which then spread like wildfire through the population (resulting in warning signs at park entrances for the owners of these particular cars). Clearly, bears notice one another’s successes. At the very least, human uniqueness claims should be downgraded to something more reasonable, such as that our imitation is more developed than that of other animals. But even then I’d be cautious, because our own research has fully restored faith in the aping skills of apes. By eliminating the human experimenter, we have gotten quite different results from the above studies. Given a chance to watch their own kind, apes copy every little detail they see.

Let me start with spontaneous imitation. Small infants in our chimpanzee colony sometimes get a finger stuck in the wire fence. Hooked the wrong way into the mesh, the finger cannot be extracted by force. Adults have learned not to pull at the infant, who always manages to free itself in the end. In the meantime, however, the entire colony has become agitated by the infant’s screams: This is a rare but dramatic event analogous to a wild ape getting caught in a poacher’s snare.

On several occasions, we have seen other apes mimic the victim’s
situation. The last time, for example, when I approached to assist I was greeted with threat barks from both the mother and the alpha male. As a result, I stayed back. One older juvenile came over to reconstruct the event for me. Looking me in the eyes, she inserted her finger into the mesh, slowly and deliberately hooking it around, and then pulling as if she too had gotten caught. Then two other juveniles did the same at a different location, pushing each other aside to get their fingers in the same tight spot they had found for this game. These juveniles themselves may long ago have experienced this situation for real, but now their charade was prompted by what had happened to the infant.

Our chimps obviously haven’t read the scientific literature that says imitation is a way of reaching a goal or gaining rewards. They do so spontaneously, often without gains in mind. It’s so much a part of their everyday life that I set up an ambitious research project together with a British colleague, Andy Whiten, who had been thinking along the same lines. In contrast to previous studies, we wanted to know how well apes learn from one another. From an evolutionary viewpoint, it doesn’t really matter what they learn from us—all that matters is how they deal with their own kind.

To have one ape act as a model for another, however, is easier said than done. I can tell a co-worker to demonstrate a particular action and to repeat it ten times in a row, but try telling that to an ape! We faced an uphill battle, and our eventual success owes much to a rather “chimpy” young woman from Scotland, Vicky Horner. Mind you, “chimpy” isn’t an insult for anyone who loves apes, and all I mean is that Vicky has the right body language (squatting down, no nervous movements, friendly disposition) and knows exactly which individuals act like divas, which ones demand respect, which just want to play and have fun, and which have eyes bigger than their bellies when there’s food around. She deals with each personality on its own quirky basis, so that all of them feel at ease. If Vicky’s rapport with apes was one weapon in our arsenal, the second was the rapport among the apes themselves. Most of our chimpanzees are either related
or have grown up together, so they’re more than willing to pay attention to one another. Like a close human family, they’re one bickering and loving bunch, far more interested in one another than in us—the way apes ought to be.

Vicky employs the so-called two-action method. The apes get a puzzle box that they can access in two ways. For example, one either pokes a stick into it, and food rolls out, or one uses the stick to lift a lever, and food rolls out. Both methods work equally well. First, we teach the poking technique to one member of the group, usually a high-ranking female, and let her demonstrate it. The whole group gathers around to see how she gets her M&Ms. Then we hand the box over to her group mates, who obviously—if there is any truth to apes being imitators—should now favor the poking technique, too. This is indeed what they do. Next, we repeat our experiment at the same field station on a second group, which lives out of sight of the first. Here we teach another female the lifting technique, and lo and behold, her entire group develops a preference for lifting. We thus artificially create two separate cultures: “lifters” and “pokers.”

The beauty of this outcome is that if chimps were to learn things on their own, each group should show a mix of solutions, not a bias for one or the other technique. Clearly, the example given by one of their group mates makes a huge difference. In fact, when we gave naïve chimps the same box, without any demonstrations, none of them was able to get any food out of it!

Next we tried a variation on the “telephone game” to see how information travels among multiple individuals. A new two-action box was built, one that could be opened by sliding a door to the side, or flipping the same door upward. We’d teach one individual to slide, after which another would watch the first, followed by a third watching the second, and so on. Even after six pairings, the last chimp still preferred sliding the door. Taking the same box to the other group, we produced an equally long chain that preferred the lifting solution.

Following the same procedures with human children in Scotland,
Andy obtained virtually identical results. I must admit to some jealousy, because with children such an experiment takes only a couple of days, whereas each time we set up a new experiment with our apes, we count on approximately a year to complete it. Our chimps live outdoors and participate on a volunteer basis. We call them by name, and just hope that they’ll come in for testing (in fact, they know not only their own names, but also the others’, which allows us to ask one chimp to fetch another). Adult males generally are too busy for our tests: Their power struggles and the need to keep an eye on one another’s sexual adventures have priority. Females, on the other hand, have their reproductive cycles and offspring. If they come in alone, they may be very upset by the separation, which doesn’t help our experiment, whereas if they do come with their youngest offspring, guess who will be playing with the box? That doesn’t do us much good, either. If females are sexually attractive—sporting their balloonlike genital swellings—they may be willing to participate, but there will be three males who want to join incessantly banging on the door, thus killing all concentration. Or it could be that two chimps in a paired test have, unbeknownst to us, had a spat in the morning and now refuse to even look at each other. “It’s always something,” as we say, which explains why scientists have traditionally preferred setups in which apes interact with a human experimenter. This way, at least one party is under control.

Ape-to-ape testing is much harder but has huge payoffs. Allowed to imitate one another, apes entirely live up to their reputation. They’re literally in one another’s faces, leaning on one another, sometimes holding the model’s hand while she’s performing, or smelling her mouth when she’s chewing the goodies she has won. None of this would be possible with a human experimenter, who is usually kept at a safe distance. Adult apes are potentially dangerous, which is why close personal contact with humans is prohibited. In order to learn from others, though, contact makes all the difference. Our chimps watch their model’s every move, and often replicate the observed actions even before they’ve gained any rewards themselves. This means
that they’ve learned purely from observation. This brings me back to the role of the body.

How does one chimp imitate another? Is it because he identifies with the other and absorbs its body movements? Or could it be that he doesn’t need the other, and focuses on the box instead? Maybe all he needs to know is how the thing works. He may notice that the door slides to the side, or that something needs to be lifted up. The first kind of imitation involves reenactment of observed manipulations; the second merely requires technical know-how. Thanks to ingenious studies in which chimps were presented with a ghost box, we know which of these two explanations is correct. A ghost box derives its name from the fact that it magically opens and closes by itself so that no actor is needed. If technical know-how were all that mattered, such a box should suffice. But in fact, letting chimps watch a ghost box until they’re bored to death—with its various parts moving and producing rewards hundreds of times—doesn’t teach them anything.

In order to learn from others, apes need to see actual fellow apes: Imitation requires identification with a body of flesh and blood. We’re beginning to realize how much human and animal cognition runs via the body. Instead of our brain being like a little computer that orders the body around, the body-brain relation is a two-way street. The body produces internal sensations and communicates with other bodies, out of which we construct social connections and an appreciation of the surrounding reality. Bodies insert themselves into everything we perceive or think. Did you know, for example, that physical condition colors perception? The same hill is assessed as steeper, just from looking at it, by a tired person than by a well-rested one. An outdoor target is judged as farther away than it really is by a person burdened with a heavy backpack than by one without it.

Or ask a pianist to pick out his own performance from among others he’s listening to. Even if this is a new piece that the pianist has performed only once in silence (on an electronic piano without headphones on), he will be able to recognize his own play. While listening,
he probably re-creates in his head the sort of bodily sensations that accompany an actual performance. He feels the closest match listening to himself, thus recognizing himself through his body as much as through his ears.

The field of “embodied” cognition is still very much in its infancy but has profound implications for how we look at human relations. We involuntarily enter the bodies of those around us so that their movements and emotions echo within us as if they’re our own. This is what allows us, or other primates, to re-create what we have seen others do. Body-mapping is mostly hidden and unconscious but sometimes it “slips out,” such as when parents make chewing mouth movements while spoon-feeding their baby. They can’t help but act the way they feel their baby ought to. Similarly, parents watching a singing performance of their child often get completely into it, mouthing every word. I myself still remember as a boy standing on the sidelines of soccer games and involuntarily making kicking or jumping moves each time someone I was cheering for got the ball.

Sultan (sitting) making an empathetic grasping movement with his hand while watching Grande reach for bananas.

The same can be seen in animals, as illustrated in an old black-and-white photograph of Wolfgang Köhler’s classic tool-use studies on chimpanzees. One ape, Grande, stands on top of wooden boxes that she has stacked up to reach bananas hung from the ceiling, while Sultan watches intently. Even though Sultan sits at a distance, he raises his arm in precise synchrony with Grande’s grasping movement. Another example comes from a chimpanzee filmed while using a heavy rock as a hammer to crack nuts. The actor is being observed by a younger ape, who swings his own (empty) hand down in sync every time the first one
strikes the nut. Body-mapping provides a great shortcut to imitation.

Identification is even more striking at moments of high emotion. I once saw a chimpanzee birth in the middle of the day. This is unusual: Our chimps tend to give birth at night or at least when there are no humans around, such as during a lunch break. From my observation window I saw a crowd gather around Mai—quickly and silently, as if drawn by some secret signal. Standing half upright with her legs slightly apart, Mai cupped an open hand underneath of her, ready to catch the baby when it would pop out. An older female, Atlanta, stood next to her in similar posture and made exactly the same hand movement, but between
her own
legs, where it served no purpose. When, after about ten minutes, the baby emerged—a healthy son—the crowd stirred. One chimpanzee screamed, and some embraced, showing how much everyone had been caught up in the process. Atlanta likely identified with Mai because she’d had many babies of her own. As a close friend, she groomed the new mother almost continuously in the following weeks.

Similar empathy was described by Katy Payne, an American zoologist, for elephants: