Moral behavior in animals Frans de Waal
I was born in them boss where the
painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself
after and so I’ve always been very fond
of this painter who lived and worked in
the 15th century and what is interesting
about him in relation to morality is he
lived at a time where religions
influence was waning and he was sort of
wandering I think what would happen with
society if there was no religion or if
there was less religion and so he
painted this famous painting the Garden
of Earthly Delights which some have
interpreted as being humanity before the
fall or being humanity without any fall
at all and so it makes you wonder what
would happen if we hadn’t tasted the
fruit of knowledge so to speak and what
kind of morality we would have much
later as a student I went to a very
different garden is our logical garden
in in arnhem where we keep chimpanzees
this is me at an early age was a baby
chimpanzee and I discovered there that
the chimpanzee is a very power hungry
and wrote a book about it and at that
time the focus in a lot of animal
research was on aggression and
competition and I could be a whole
picture of the animal kingdom and
humanity included was that deep down we
are competitors we are aggressive we are
all out for our own profit basically
this is the launch of my book I’m not
sure how well the chimpanzees read it
but they surely seemed interested in the
book now in the process of doing all
this work on power and dominance and
aggression and so on I discovered that
chimpanzees reconcile after fights and
so what you see here is two males who
have had a fight they ended up in a tree
and one of them holds out a hand to the
other and about a second after I took
the picture they came together in the
fork of the tree and they kissed and
embraced each other and this is very
interesting because at the time
everything was about competition and
aggression and so it wouldn’t make any
sense the only thing that matters is
that you win or that you lose but why
would you reconcile after a fight that
doesn’t make any sense
this is the way bonobos do it bonobos do
everything with sex and so they also
reconcile with sex but the principle is
exactly the same the principle is that
you have a valuable relationship that is
damaged
by conflict so you need to do something
about it and so my whole picture of the
animal kingdom and including humans also
started to change at that time so we
have this image in political science
economics the humanities philosophy for
that matter that man is a wolf to man
and so deep down our nature is actually
nasty I think it’s a very unfair image
for the wolf the wolf is is after all a
very cooperative animal and that’s why
many of you have a dog at home which has
all these characteristics also and it’s
very unfair to humanity because Humanity
is actually much more cooperative and
impacting than you then they’re given
credit for and so I started getting
interested in those issues and studying
that in other animals so these are the
pillars of morality if you ask anyone
what is morality based on these are the
two factors that always come out one is
reciprocity and associated with it
there’s a sense of justice and a sense
of fairness and the other one is empathy
and compassion and human morality is
more than this but if you would remove
these two pillars there would be not
much remaining I think and so they’re
absolutely essential so let me give you
a few examples here this is a very old
video from the Yerkes primate center
where they trained chimpanzees to
cooperate so this is already about a
hundred years ago that we were doing
experiments on cooperation and what you
have here is two young chimpanzees who
have a box and the box is too heavy for
one chimp to pull in and of course it’s
fruit on the box otherwise they wouldn’t
be pulling so hard and so they’re
bringing in the box and you can see that
they’re synchronized you can see that
they work together they pull at the same
moment it’s already a big advance over
over many other animals who wouldn’t be
able to do that and now you’re going to
get a more interesting picture because
now one of the two chimps has been fed
so one of the two is not really
interested in the task anymore
now look at what happens at the very end
of this he thinks basically everything
so the two interesting parts about this
one is that the chimp on the right has a
full understanding he needs to partner
so full understanding of the need for
cooperation the second one is that the
partner is willing to work even though
he’s not interested in the food why
would that be well that probably has to
do with reciprocity is actually a lot of
evidence in primates and other animals
that they return favors and so he’ll
will get a return favor at some point in
the future and so that’s how this all
operates we do the same task with
elephants now with elephants is very
dangerous to work with elephants and
another problem is elephants is that you
cannot make an apparatus that is too
heavy for a single elephant now you can
probably make it but it’s going to be
pretty clumsy apparatus I think and so
what we did in their case it is we do
these studies in Thailand which just
plot makes is we have an apparatus
around of which there’s a rope a single
rope and if you pull on this side of the
Rope the rope disappears on the other
side so two elephants need to pick it up
at exactly the same time and pull
otherwise nothing is going to happen and
the rope disappears so the first tape
you’re going to see is two elephants who
are released together arrived at the
apparatus the apparatus is on the left
with food on it and so they come
together they arrive together they pick
it up together and they pull together so
this is actually fairly simple for them
there they are
I said that’s how they bring it in but
now we’re going to make it more
difficult because the the whole purpose
of this experiment is to see how well
they understand cooperation do they
understand it as well as the chips for
example so what we do in the next step
is we release one elephant before the
other and that elephant needs to be
smart enough to stay there and wait and
not pull at the rope because if he pulls
at the rope and disappears and the whole
test is over
now this elephant does something illegal
that we did not teach it but it shows
the understanding that he has because he
puts his big foot on the Rope stands on
the rope and waits there for the other
and then the other is going to do all
the work for him so it’s it’s what we
call freeloading
but but it shows the intelligence that
the elephants had they they develop
several of these alternative techniques
that we did not approve of necessarily
so the other elephant is now coming and
it’s going to pull it in
now look at the other idea that doesn’t
forget to eat of course this was the
cooperation reciprocity part now
something on empathy empathy is my main
topic at the moment of research and
empathy has sort of two qualities one is
the understanding part of it this is
just a regular definition the ability to
understand and share the feelings of
another and the emotional part and so
empathy has basically two channels one
is the body channel if you talk with a
sad person you’re gonna adopt a sad
expression and a sad posture and before
you know what you feel sad and that’s
sort of the the body channel of amount
of emotional empathy which many animals
have your average dog has that also
that’s actually why people keep mammals
in the home and not turtles or snakes or
something like that who don’t have that
kind of empathy and then there’s a
cognitive channel which is more that you
can take the perspective of somebody
else and and that’s more limited as few
animals I think elephants and Apes can
do that kind of thing but the very few
animals who can do that
so synchronization which is part of that
whole empathy mechanism is a very old
one in the animal kingdom and in humans
of course we can study that with yawn
contagion humans yawn when others yawn
and it’s related to empathy if it
activates the same areas in the brain it
also we know that people who have a lot
of yarn contagion are highly empathic
people who have problems with empathy
such as autistic children they don’t
have yawn contagion so it is connected
and we study that in our chimpanzees by
presenting them as an animated head so
that’s what you see on the upper left
and animated head that yawns and there’s
a chimpanzee watching an actual real
chimpanzee watching a computer screen on
which we play these animations
and so yawn contagion that you probably
are familiar with and maybe you’re gonna
start yawning soon now is something that
we share with other animals and that’s
related to that whole body channel of
synchronization that underlies empathy
and that is universal in the mammals
basically now we also study more complex
expressions this is consolation this is
a male chimpanzee he was lost a fight
and he’s screaming and a juvenile comes
over and puts an arm around him and
calms him down
that’s consolation is very similar to
human consolation and consolation
behavior it’s it’s empathy it’s empathy
driven that’s actually the way they
study empathy and human children is to
instruct a family member to act distress
and and they see what young children do
and so it is related to empathy and
that’s the kind of expressions we look
at we also recently published an
experiment you may have heard about it
on altruism in chimpanzees where the
question is do chimpanzees care about
the welfare of somebody else and effort
for decades it had been assumed that
only humans can do that the only humans
worry about the welfare of somebody else
now we did a very simple experiment we
do that on chimpanzees that live in
Lawrenceville in in the field station of
your keys and so that that’s how they
live and we call them into a room and do
experiments with them in this case we
put two chimpanzees side-by-side and one
has a bucket full of tokens and the
tokens have different meanings one kind
of token fits only the partner who
chooses the other one feeds both of them
so this is a study we did this Vicky
Horner and here you have the two color
tokens so they have a whole bucket full
of them and they have to pick one one of
the two colors you will see how that
goes so if this chimp makes the selfish
choice which is the red token in this
case
need to give it to us we pick it up we
put it on the table where there’s to
food we watch but in this case only the
one on the right gets foods and the one
on the left walks away because she knows
already that this is not a good test for
her then the next one is the pro-social
token so the one who makes the choices
that’s the interesting part here for the
one who makes the choices it doesn’t
really matter so she gives us now a
pro-social token and both chimps could
fit so the one who makes the choices
always get a reward so it doesn’t matter
whatsoever and she should actually be
choosing blindly but what we find is
that they prefer the pro-social token so
this is the 50% line that’s the random
expectation and especially if the
partner draws attention to itself they
choose more and if the partner puts
pressure on them so if the partner
starts spitting water and intimidating
them then this choices go down and they
actually don’t want to it’s as if
they’re saying if you’re not behaving
I’m not gonna be pro-social today and
this is what happens without a partner
and there’s no partner sitting there and
so we found that the chimpanzees do care
about the well-being of somebody else
especially these are other members of
their own group so a final experiment
that I want to mention to you is our
fairness study and so this this became a
very famous study under snow many more
because after we did this about ten
years ago it became very well known and
we did that originally with capuchin
monkeys and I’m gonna show you the first
experiment that we did it has now been
done with dogs and with birds and with
chimpanzees but we saw a brush and we
started out with capuchin monkeys so
what we did is we put two capuchin
monkeys side-by-side again these animals
they live in a group they know each
other we take them out of the group put
them in a test chamber and there’s a
very simple task that they need to do
and if you give both of them cucumber
for the task the two monkeys
side-by-side
they’re perfectly willing to do this 25
times in a row so cucumber even though
it’s really only water in my opinion but
cucumber is perfectly fine for them now
if you give the partner grapes the food
preferences of my capuchin monkeys
correspond exactly with the prices in
the supermarket and so if you give them
grapes there’s a far better food then
you create inequity
between them so that’s the experiment we
did recently we videotaped it with no
monkeys we’ve never done the task is
thinking that maybe they would have a
stronger reaction and that turned out to
be right the one on the left is a monkey
who gets cucumber the one on the right
is the one who gets grapes the one who
gets cucumber note that the first piece
of cucumber is perfectly fine the first
PC eats then sees the other one getting
grape and you will see what happens so
she gives a rock to us that’s the task
and we give her a piece of cucumber and
she eats it the other one needs to give
a rock to us and that’s what she does
and she gets a grape and see the other
one sees that she gives a rock to us now
gets again cucumber
she tests a rock now against the wall if
you need to give it to us and she gets
cucumber again so this is basically the
Wall Street protest that you see here
let me tell you I still have two minutes
left let me tell you a funny story about
is this this study became very famous
and we got a lot of comments especially
anthropologists economists philosophers
they didn’t like this at all because
they had decided in their mind I believe
that that that fairness is a very
complex issue and that animals cannot
have it and so one philosopher even
wrote us that it was impossible that
monkeys had a sense of fairness because
fairness was invented during the French
Revolution
so now and another one wrote a whole
chapter saying that he would believe it
had something to do with fairness if the
one who got grapes would refuse the
grapes now the funny thing is that Sarah
Brosnan who’s been doing this with
chimpanzees had a couple of combinations
of chimpanzees were indeed the one who
would get the grape would refuse the
grape until the other guy also got a
grape
so we’re getting very close to the human
sense of fairness and I think
philosophers need to rethink their
philosophy for a while so let me
summarize I believe there’s an evolved
morality I think morality is much more
than what I’ve been talking about but it
would be impossible without these
ingredients that we find in other
primates which are empathy and
consolation pro-social tendencies and
reciprocity and a sense of fairness and
so we work on these particular issues to
see if we can create a morality from the
bottom up so to speak which are
necessarily God and religion involved
and to see how we can get to an evolved
morality and I thank you for your
attention
you