The Evolution of Empathy with Dr. Frans de Waal

Between 3-6 December 2012, Chris and Andrew took their mobile podcast unit on the road to Kyoto for a conference at the International Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) on the Evolutionary Origins of the Human Mind.

During the conference, we were able to sit down with five prominent primate scientists who were invited to the conference to speak about their work. This marks the first installment of this podcast series in which we chatted with Dr. Frans de Waal.

Dr. de Waal is the C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University, and director of Living Links at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

We chatted with Dr. de Waal about his groundbreaking comparative work into the evolution of human empathy, special considerations when working with chimpanzees, and his ties to Japan and Japanese primatology.

Dr. de Waal was featured by Time Magazine as one of the world's 100 most influential people in 2007, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and has written many popular scientific books, including "Chimpanzee Politics", "Peacemaking among Primates", "The Ape and the Sushi Master", "The Age of Empathy", and many more.

Find out more about Dr. de Waal and his work on his profile at Emory University and Living Links.

Additional Content

In addition to the interview, you can check out some photos and video from our trip with Dr. de Waal to Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro's robotics lab, at which we were able to interact with two androids, the Geminoid and Telenoid. Find those here at Facebook and YouTube. Don't miss out!

Join us and Dr. Frans de Waal on The PrimateCast, and feel free to visit us at Facebook and Twitter and leave comments and feedback on this or any other podcast in the series. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

Here's what you can do to get in touch!

• Connect with us on Facebook, X, or Instagram
• Subscribe where you get your podcasts
• Email theprimatecast@gmail.com with thoughts and comments

If you value the show, leave ratings and reviews wherever it is that you listen, and consider donating by clicking the "Support the Show" link above.

Thanks for being part of The PrimateCast Community!

Transcript

0:00

ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the primate cast we're your hosts Andrew Macintosh and Chris Martin and today we're both really excited to be able to present the first of a series of five upcoming podcasts in which we present interviews that we conducted recently at a conference in Kyoto that's right we just got back from the annual Research Conference of The International Institute of advanced studies this year it was on The evolutionary origins of the human mind it was a really interesting conference partly because of how br it was uh we had a lot of speakers coming to discuss things from chimpanzee culture right through cognitive developmental Robotics and that was really incredible to see some of these robot talks it was great and we had the opportunity to visit one of these researchers Dr Hiroshi ishiguro in his lab um just outside of Kyoto where he has worked on a number of projects one of which led to the development of the geminoid that's an Android that looks very similar to him almost identical to him eerily similar to him indeed it even uses his own hair which he grew out just for that purpose but so for our listeners you have to check us out on the primate cast at Facebook and you'll be able to see those pictures of us with the geminoid we'll post those there but it was it was really interesting that uh some many of these researchers in cognitive Robotics are also tackling the issue of the evolution of the of the human mind in both in terms of better understanding in us but also better understanding how we might Advance the field of Robotics right and a lot of that involves interaction studies between humans between humans and robots so there's a lot of overlap with human psychology and maybe Evolution as well speaking of interactions the geminoid wasn't the only robot we were able to have fun with you also had a nice segment there with a robot called the telenoid that's right it's this crazy robot that you hold in your hands and it talks to you someone talks to you over the telephone through the robot and it's really kind of a bizarre experience and so we were able to get some video of that as well and we're going to put that on the primate cast Facebook page and that also has Professor dwall talking to the telenoid right who we're going to have in a minute here so please check that out check that out so getting back to the conference now another announcement is that you happen to be one of the two poster Prize winners so congratulations thank you so what was that like yeah that was a lot of fun I was presenting on some re recent studies that I did on uh chimpanzees sharing a touch panel and some new research in that area so I was happy that people liked it yeah I mean it was a great opportunity for you I mean you have a lot of very notable scientists here in your relevant to your field who were able to see your work which got showcased MH yeah a lot of chimpy researchers were there and so in addition to that we were able to get some interviews done so we were able to sit down with five researchers mhm and I'll just list them so we have Dr France dewal MH Dr Joseph call and Dr William mcru and Dr Dora birau and finally Dr Cricket SS and we'll be presenting these interviews in the next five uh podcasts yep starting with Dr France dwall right so Andrew give us some background on Dr France dwall okay so Dr dwall is another person for whom we don't need to spend too much time with an introduction he is the CH Candler professor of primate Behavior at emmer University in the department of psychology and he's also the director of the living Links at the yeres National Primate Research Center and many of you may know that in 2007 he was also featured by time as one of the world's 100 most influential people now within primatological circles he's probably best known for his work in the development of the field of primate pro-sociality which extends far beyond primates and other mammals as well and strongly focusing within the area of empathy now he's also a very good spokesperson for science a good bridge between scientists in the public and he's written many popular books back in the earlier days some of the most influential being chimpanzee politics and uh PR peacemaking among primates but he's also written extensively about the development of Japanese primatology right and that's especially interesting for us because he actually had a fellowship at Kido University for three months um and also he's just had a long history of interaction with Japanese primatologists so he has an interesting view on on how Japanese primatologist relates to the rest of the field and he's written about it a lot okay so here he is talking about Japanese primatology I've always felt that the the Japanese primatology was underestimated in the west MH uh I felt that that way since I was a student basically because of course the naming of individuals started with imanishi and the following of lineages and matter lines started with him the word culture in primatology started with Iman and so I always felt that Japanese Prim mythology was under represented and and maybe I felt some kinship because I'm I'm not a native English speaker and and and even though my language is much closer to English than let's say the Japanese language I I can see how native English speakers sort of dominate the world because everyone needs to talk their language and it's easy to dominate the world if if others are sort of struggling to keep up with your language mhm and so I always felt some sympathy for the Japanese position in that regard m and then later of course I I started visiting Japan and knowing Japanese and one time I stayed even three months in Kyoto and so and after that I wrote my book um the AP and the sushi Master which which was on that topic basically of how the culture topic had come about and how influential the Japanese had been in that so I forget the uh the researcher who made the comments but there was quite a scating paper about imi's work it came out I don't is it the 70s or 80s and um based on the ideas that he presented in his view of nature was the Japanese view of nature oh yeah forgetting who who that was that was an Englishman who visited here that's right halad wasn't that the name and yeah he had a very negative paper on imanishi he had even visited imanishi and talked with him but after that he and he had given him a bottle of whiskey I believe but after that he was still extremely negative on IM manishi that he was a fool and and uh yeah and and of course later in the early '90s there was a paper by uh Ben galef on the koshima experiment which was also extremely negative and how there was completely misrepresented even though he never made the effort to talk with people who had firsthand knowledge and never made the effort to go to kushima to see how the situation looked and made some outrageous claims about what had been reported for example uh he he he claimed that obviously Miss Meo who who had been handing out potatoes there had been selectively rewarding young monkeys who would wash the potatoes and that's how she got the behavior introduced in the group and and when I talked with misso because I did with an interpreter she doesn't speak English when I talked with her she sort of laughed at that idea she said you first need to feed the adult males because you cannot feed any juveniles before you have fed the adult males because of course they will beat up the juveniles otherwise and so she s of was a silly idea to think that you could start with the juveniles MH so so that's how poorly G's paper was research but he was so opposed to the idea of um culture in animals and for the rest of his life I believe he has remained opposed to that yeah mhm it's really interesting and then there's also another um thing that comes to my mind which is I think it was um when in chib politics you talk about um arnam in sugiyama Sensei could recognize very quickly uhhuh the identities of the chimpanzees yeah so that seems like another connection to the Japanese researcher coming um yeah suyama visited me um he he visited Yan fov my professor and uh he visited me in arnam when I was still a student with long hair and everything you know was quite different from now MH and uh yeah it was interesting to see that because the chimps they uh they don't like strangers MH and they throw stuff at them and and so they were a bit hostile to to me bringing a new person there but in in in addition I remember that sugama learned all the chimps in one day and I found it at the time remarkable uh but of course uh since then field I've noticed that field work is actually very good at this right it's maybe because field workers they they they don't always get to see the whole animal uh and so they're very used to picking up on small details more than other people mhm yeah from from personal experience I find uh preestablished markting systems to be much less effective than just spending a little bit of time and picking up on those exactly those sometimes intangible things so so another story on Japanese primatology that that imanishi in 1968 he tour to us with Italian belief and to explain about his work to to American researchers and and people laughed at him people laughed at the idea that you he claimed that he could recognize 100 monkeys well that was totally impossible uh everyone knew that that was impossible and so he must have been making up stories these were probably the people who laughed at him uh were probably rat researchers or pigeon researchers uh because Carpenter Ray Carpenter the Pioneer uh primatologist in the US he he believed the whole story he had tried it himself obviously and he became a big fan of imun mhm mhm that's really interesting so going back to arnam so that was the beginning of your career and you noticed obviously a lot of interesting you found a lot of interesting behavior in chienes at the arnam zoo and I'm wondering what's your kind of General view of chimp's the evolution of that since then uhhuh has it changed much or the general themes that you that you noticed them have changed because when I started in arnam the goal was to study aggressive behavior mhm now the first year I was was there there was almost no aggressive behavior so I started to do other things like paying attention to their personalities and looking at the details of mod infant interactions and stuff like that so I got very used to chimpanzees in that one year which was very good because when the males then started to politic and and and to have power struggles I was very well prepared because I knew all the individuals very well and I know Aller Behavior very well and uh I I I kept a very detailed diary in addition to all the the data that I collected and and the diary then became the basis for chimpan politics and uh the theme initially was aggressive behavior but very soon I got interested in the reconciliations that happened after aggressive behavior and uh that became sort of my main theme because if I presented to people on reconciliation behavior in chimpances there was always there was this element of surprise like like no no one had expected anything like it uh at that time uh all animal behavior was explained in terms of competition dominance and competition uh and everyone was talking about how you become the most successful baboon so to speak um but no one was talking about how how do you keep a group together and and when I presented reconciliation Behavior Uh it was not that people were theoretically interested in because they they had no theories that related to it they didn't know what to do with the data and I saw that was very intriguing and and so when I went to the United States in 81 I decided that was going to be my theme conflict resolution in instead of focusing on aggression I was going to focus on conflict resolution and I did that initially with Maxs and then I did a study on bonobas at the San Diego Zoo and then I did a food sharing study on chimpanzees at yeres all of that I did in the first 10 years when I was still in Wisconsin and uh then then I started to look for a position where I could be a bit closer to chimpan because they had no chimps in in Wisconsin mhm and and and that remained the theme of my career it's more more focusing instead of conflict and competition and who wins and who loses more focusing on inte social integration empathy cooperation reciprocity that kind of issues so you kind of have these two lines of research one is kind of the observation of the chienes as they fight and reconcile and then the other kind of more recent um has been experiments so I'm wondering what was the impetus for you to start thinking about doing experiments yeah so when I arnm was entirely observational we didn't I don't think we even tried an experiment at the time and then uh oh yeah except for the stuffed lion that we did one time how did that go well The Chimps threw a lot of stuff at the lion and then they lost interest in the stuffed Ling so apart from that then I moved to Wisconsin and I was still largely observational I worked on maacs and also the Boba study was largely like that and then I got interested in manipulating things and my first manipulation was probably the food sharing study at jerks that I did with chanes and I also did one with monkeys where I housed uh different species of maak Reeses and stumptail monkeys together to see if how they would influence each other's Behavior I did that in Wisconsin so when I moved from Wisconsin to yeres which is in 91 I decided I wanted to set up a lab to do experiments and so I took my capuchin monkeys which I had already with me and I modeled my lab on Hans kummer's lab Hans kummer had a lab in Switzerland with long T Macs which are now all of a sudden the rage you know but were not so popular at the time and Hans had decided that you should not keep monkeys in sort of single cages and then take them out and do a test with them you need to to house these monkeys socially in a group and then you can ask them social questions like do you recognize who which female is related to which Offspring and so on and so that seemed to make a lot of sense for me and also since I'm very much opposed to single single housed animals uh so I I insisted at yerys that I would get group housing for the monkeys indoor outdoor group housing for these kuchin monkeys and and set up a lab in which I could run experiments and so the Capuchin Colony became the first place where I started to do experiments then miss chimps also at yoris I did in the beginning mostly observational stuff but since the Capuchin studies were going so well and were so interesting almost all my students they wanted them to work with with um chimpunes and and do similar sort of experiments and so we mve to more experimental things with chimps also and as you know working here with gims it's not so easy mhm they they're sometimes um not cooperative and sometimes they mess up and sometimes they do it on purpose and so gims are difficult animals to work with um but uh it's a real challenge but we started doing that so just an extension from that because of the difficulties you have working with for example chimpan you've often made the point that perhaps those difficulties actually affect the interpretation of studies and the result that are found in chimpan studies that may be not necessarily reflective of of reality you have to be very careful with negative results and I think people have been a bit overly eager to interpret negative results so then they they test let's say children the same way that they test chanes the children do well on the task the chanes do poorly now there's a there's a host of things that can explain that MH for example if if the test is administered by a human it could be that the children relate better to a human than chimpances and that's probably an explanation for a lot of the differences that have been found but it's also that chimps react differently to things they focus on well there's some research now the eye tracking research that you do here that show they look differently at certain situations and so negative results are very hard to interpret and and actually the the interpretation of Last Resort should be that there's a a cognitive difference and and first you need to rule out a whole bunch of methodological issues and so um I've never worked much with negative results if we get negative results which of course happens we try to figure out or or we dro the whole case because I don't know what to do with negative results and some people have been overly eager to interpret them so with chimp yes there's a lot of meth methodological issues and so for example with the pro-social test that we did where you have two chimpan who can one chimpan can select tokens of a different color one color feeds himself and a partner and the other color only feeds himself um they prefer they start to prefer what we call the pro-social token for exchange so that they start to give some food to their partner uh that that is actually an experiment that has been tried before uh with different conditions with a sort of apparatus where they had to pull levers and The Chimps never performed well on that and the conclusion at the time was chimpances don't have pro-social Tendencies and and that's such an overreach of conclusion in my opinion what they should have said is we have tried this and it didn't give any result it only gave random results and here are the possible explanations for that one of which could be a side bias you all know if you work with STS on touch screens that they have side biases they always pull right or they pull left which is such an obvious explanation for A lot of these results so so so you need to rule all of that out before you get to these big conclusions of a cognitive difference yeah so we've had an issue come up with our guests before in the prim a cast where a lot of people think that there's a trend to say in titles of papers like chimpanzees do this or chimpanzees do that whereas what they're really talking about is a specific group of chimpanzees in a specific context with a specific type of apparatus and it sounds like that's kind of what you're saying we should be careful about making these broad generalizations and and kind of lay out the situation in more detail well that's another issue is that that some chimps also in captivity some chimps may be different from others and so dependent on how they were trained or what their background is uh because um there are chimps who are very human oriented and there are chimps who what we call are very chimpy is that they are more focused on each other MH so the ones who are very human oriented who pay attention to what you do and want to please you maybe or want to compete with you or whatever the human orientation is those CHS are going to respond differently in these EXP experiments and so I I believe that there's also the possibility that some chimps like maybe The Chimps at jys are different from The Chimps at lipy and are different from The Chimps at Kyoto right it's possible right so it might be nice to have some kind of more uh broad studies that can look at the same task in different locations might be interesting I want to ask you about uh other species so you have gotten into elephant research and I'm wondering like what was the what was the reason for getting into that and how has that gone for you well I'm very interested in comparative approaches a bit like what Jep call was talking about in his talk and I think that the comparative approach is so powerful in itology I think and of course usually we use it within a Genus or within a group like like ma genus is for example ideal for this because you have 20 species and so the comparisons between the ma genus are really wonderful to very very uh eliminating I think so I've always been in this comparative approach and and I've never worked EXP exclusively with chimps I've also worked with bonobas with kuchin monkeys with Macs very extensively with Macs even though they're so totally different from from the the Apes and so when I got a student who Josh plotnik who said that he he loved to work with elephants I thought well that's great the mirror test still needs to be done on elephants uh because it had been done and and there was a negative result but I think that was easily explained that negative result and so um since I was interested at the time at empathy in empathy and I believe that there's a connection between mirror self-recognition and perspective taking uh I I wanted to know what elephants would do because elephants have this reputation of being highly altruistic and empathic and so on and so that's how we ended up doing a simple experiment with Meers at the Bron zoo and since then Josh has taken that whole operation to Thailand and is doing a lot of interesting things sort of replicating many of the studies on Apes now trying to replicate them on on elephant right it's really exciting research yeah and the Elephant is so understudied everyone of course believes that they are very smart that there there's no doubt uh that they are very smart but no one has really documented that in detail mhm absolutely so you've been able to provide probably over the last number of years some fairly compelling evidence for this idea and pro within Pro sociality Tendencies towards empathy and this kind of thing do you think you've silenced the critics how much what's going to take it is true that criticism has subsided a lot so initially when I would say that even chimpances that chimpances have empathy uh people people were very sort of uh objecting to that kind of idea and I think it is because they had a very high opinion about empathy I believe that povel even R once wrote a paper that chimpances have no empathy what he meant is they have no theory of mind and even that of course is in under debate um but for me empathy is not theory of mind that's that's maybe an outgrowth of it and it is related to it but um in in Psychology there's a lot of resistance to it whereas if you go to the average person in the street and you say does your dog have empathy you always get an affirmative answer because the dog responds to emotions so if you're sad the dog will try to console you and actually recently an experiment was published on that particular issue and and if you're happy the dog will be happy and try to play with you and and so dogs respond to our emotions and we recognize that as related to empathy because that's also in young children how we see empathy and so that kind of resistance has now subsided to a large degree I think because rodents have now empathy According to some people and birds have it according to some people and and so it's not limited I'm not just talking about chimpunes anymore it's it's a wide range of animals and certainly mammals and birds in which we recognize that they're sensitive to the emotions of others and we're not necessarily claiming perspective taking or theory of mind even though I think in some species like elephants and apes that that becomes a big issue and a big possibility so where do you take it from here then well we keep doing experiments on this and and we keep doing experiments on cooperation uh I think the the empathy literature on animals will keep growing the the word is not really a taboo anymore I have the impression and and so it will get bigger and and then people will and that happens with every term that we use if you use the term theory of Mind initially it's a black and white discussion do does this animal have theory of mind yes or no and now we are at the point where the whole concept has sort of Fallen apart in little pieces and we say yes the Scrub Jays they may have this part of it but not that part or the elephants may have this part or not that part and and and humans may have all of Parts but I'm not even sure that humans have all of the parts but um certainly not not in early development and so now the the concept has more or less Fallen apart and and and the same thing will happen with empathy I look at empathy as a sort of umbrella term for how one organism understands another or or relates to the situation and the feelings of another at least but I'm sure 10 years from now we will have divided it up in little pieces and and and a dog will have only some of these pieces that's really interesting well Dr dwell thanks very much for joining us cast you're welcome you have been listening to the primate cast a podcast series dedicated to the study and conservation of primates around the world brought to you by the center for international collaboration and advanced studies in primatology of the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University visit us online at www. cicp. pr. keoto hyphen u.ac.jp newws SLP podcasts and follow us on Facebook at www.fb.com thee primcast and on Twitter at the primate cast