Rifkin highlights the mysterious entities known as ‘mirror neurons’, which were first discovered in macaque monkeys by Italian researchers in the early 1990s. These are neurons that fire up both when we experience something (such as pain) and also when we see somebody else going through the same experience. People with lots of mirror cells tend to be more empathic, especially in terms of sharing emotions. According to Giacomo Rizzolatti, one of the researchers, ‘mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation’. Rifkin’s conclusion is that, ‘we are soft-wired not for aggression, violence, self-interest and utilitarianism’ but rather ‘for sociability, attachment, affection and companionship’. In other words, we are Homo Empathicus.

The RSA have created a superb animated version of Rifkin’s talk, which begins with his summary of the mirror neuron research, complete with drawings of monkeys. You can watch it here:

What Rifkin doesn’t mention is some of the other research which muddies the picture about the empathic brain. For instance, neuroscientists at the University of Washington have identified core brain areas that seem to be responsible for perspective-taking empathy, which has been shown to stimulate activity in areas known as the posterior cingulate/precuneus and the right temporo-parietal junction. In practice this means, for example, that one part of the brain is active when we think about getting one of our fingers pinched in a door, but different parts of the brain – the empathic spots – are switched on when we think about the same thing happening to another person. This all sounds rather different from mirror neurons.

Other research is based on cases of brain injury. In his book, Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology, Paul Broks describes a  man whose left frontal lobe was damaged in a motorway accident and suffered from a complete loss of his ability to empathise. Following the crash he would regularly say to his wife, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘I don’t love you any more, do I, love?’

Neither of these instances of neurological research into empathy necessarily contradicts the mirror neuron story. But I simply wish to urge caution about how confident we should be with our conclusions. MRI scanners and other new technologies have shown us that empathy is happening in our brains in complex ways. Yet at this stage we have little idea about how it all really functions and links to everyday behaviour. We are like the early astronomers who were able to see new stars with their powerful telescopes, but understood little about what they were made of, or how and why they moved.

Despite all the scientific research, we are still waiting to make the real breakthroughs, such as how to restore empathy when it is lost or how to enhance it.  I, for one, am not yet ready to volunteer to have a brain operation that will transform me into an empathic superhero.

Roman Krznaric: You’ve written a whole book about hedgehogs, and were described in a recent review as having an ‘endearingly batty’ obsession with them. Why do you personally care about these creatures so much?

Hugh Warwick: I started studying the ecology of hedgehogs nearly 25 years ago. To begin with I was just fascinated by how little we knew about this charismatic animal. But the more time I spent with hedgehogs, the more I came to realise that they have a wonderful quality. They endear themselves to people, they are attractive, quirky and eccentric. But my epiphany came on a night out with Nigel – when I ended up nose-to-nose with this hedgehog I was radio-tracking. As he looked up at me and our eyes met I became aware that there is no other wild creature we can do this with. I had a glimpse of his essential wildness, while at the same time he was obviously looking at me. He went back to eating, I was left feeling slightly altered. So at the heart of the whimsically titled book I have written (A Prickly Affair: The Charm of the Hedgehog) is something a little deeper about our connection with the natural world.

RK: There is a lot of debate in empathy circles about whether it is possible for human beings to empathise with animals. The suggestion is that we are so different from bats, dolphins, elephants and most other animals that we are incapable of understanding their feelings and thoughts, and stepping empathetically into their skins. Their experiences are, ultimately, alien to us. As someone who has become intimate with hedgehogs and spoken to hedgehog aficionados worldwide, do you think it is possible for us to empathise with animals in general, and hedgehogs in particular? Can we really step into their spiny skins?

HW: I completely agree that it is impossible to know exactly what it feels like to be a hedgehog, we do not have the vocabulary. But that does not prevent a degree of empathy – and what I ask people to do is to change their perspective. Literally. Get down at hedgehog level, get nose-to-nose with a hedgehog and then look at their world from this position. This will give you an insight into the complications we have thrown in the path of hedgehogs.

But on the whole, and despite the contradiction with my night out with Nigel, I am not that keen on the idea of empathising with a hedgehog – but with hedgehogs. I believe there is a risk of getting mired in sentimentality if you focus your attentions on an individual. But there is freedom to be had when allowing this to spread to the species as a whole – and then on to the ecosystem that supports it. The individual hedgehog is a gatekeeper of a deeper love of the natural world. The risk I believe is in getting stuck in the gate. Don’t stop, keep moving.

Hugh Warwick goes nose-to-nose with a hedgehog

RK: You refer to the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson’s idea of biophilia, which he describes as ‘the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms’. It has always struck me that empathy and biophilia are very closely related. What do you think?

HW: I am not sure whether we are empathising with nature – it would be as if we were empathising with the air we breath and the water we drink. It is more than empathy – it is a deeply seated physical need. There is plenty of evidence that shows we humans suffer when removed from contact with nature.

But certainly the idea is closely related – and I use our empathetic relationship with the hedgehog as a way of altering our perspective on the world around.

As an aside, I wanted to call my book The Hedgehog’s Dilemma (it has that title in the US). It refers to the Schopenhauer idea – two hedgehogs / people want to be close to each other, but if they get too close, they get hurt, yet if they are too far apart, they become bereft. And I believe we have that relationship with the planet – we cannot all go and do a Thoreau and live in the woods, we would destroy it. But if we are totally removed from it, we get sick.

RK: Even if we are able to empathise with hedgehogs and other animals, does it really matter? How can it help us nurture our bonds with the natural world, especially in a way that inspires us to take action to preserve it?

After what I have just said this seems a little prosaic. By sharing a hedgehog’s perspective we can see what problems it faces. Whether it is the cars on the roads that not only threaten extinction, but also fragment the environment, preventing movement – to the litter that collars and kills hedgehogs to the gardens given over to car-ports, decking and patios and the borders cleaned of life with agro-toxins – we get to see those anthropogenic threats all the more clearly.

But for me the most important thing is the contact of the eyes – looking at a hedgehog looking at me – eyes meeting and there being this almost intangible spark of wildness. We cannot get that connection with wildness easily. Maybe hiking up a mountain or along a forest trail, there may be that sense of wildness. But here, in my own back garden, I have a doorway into the wild, one that many people can share without corrupting what we so need to survive. Which is a long way round of saying, gaze at a hedgehog and let yourself fall in love with nature. Once you have fallen in love you are all the more likely to change yourself to enable the relationship to continue. So, go love a hedgehog and help save the world. Or as I put it in the book – ‘Save the hedgehog, Save the world’ (thanks to Heroes for that one).

Get yourself a copy of A Prickly Affair from Amazon or your local independent bookseller. And if you want to find our more about Hugh’s hedgehoggy ideas, visit his great blog or website.

Roman Krznaric: What is the central argument of your new book, The Age of Empathy, and why do you think empathy is such an important idea in today’s world?

Frans de Waal: The evolution of empathy has been an interest of mine since my 1996 book Good Natured. Since then, so many studies have been conducted both by others and by my own team on human and animal empathy that it is getting hard to keep up. The field is blooming, especially in human neuroscience, but increasingly also with regard to animals. There are now empathy studies on mice, monkeys, apes, elephants, et cetera. Since the general public knows little about these developments, they beg to be summarized, which is what I have set out to do in this book, exploring the origins of empathy through all disciplines, from human psychology to animal behavior, and from brain imaging to the evolution of sociality.

My second reason is a bit more political. I can’t stand the many references to biology by conservatives in this country, especially by those who do not really believe in evolution. They use biology as a convenient justification for their policies, saying that since nature is based on a “struggle for life” we ought to build our societies around selfishness and competition. They read into nature what they want to, and I feel it is my task to point out that they got it all wrong. There are many animals that survive through cooperation, and our own species in particular comes from a long line of ancestors dependent on each other. Empathy and solidarity are bred into us, so that our society’s design ought to reflect this side of the human species, too. I have nothing against a market economy, but there is more to life than making money.

Can you see yourself in the 'peaceful, hippie-like bonobo'?

My sensitivity in this regard goes back to the early debates, in the 1960s and 70s, about the aggressive instinct. No one denies that humans are aggressive – in fact, I consider us one of the most aggressive primates – yet the recent discovery of the Ardipithecus fossil should make everyone who believes we are born “killer apes” think twice. Ardipithecus is believed to be close to the split between humans and apes, yet was probably less aggressive than the current chimpanzee. Perhaps Ardipithecus was more like our other close relative, the bonobo. All of the nonsense we have been fed about being inherently aggressive and being predestined to wage war is open to question if in fact we descend from a peaceful, hippie-like bonobo.

Roman Krznaric: What is the single best piece of evidence you have come across showing that empathy – both in animals and humans – is a natural trait that has emerged as part of our evolutionary development?

We have collected thousands of observations of so-called consolation behavior in chimpanzees. As soon as one among them is distressed (has lost a fight, dropped out of a tree, encounters a snake) others will come over to provide reassurance. They embrace the distressed chimp or try to calm him or her with a kiss and grooming. This behavior is typical of chimps (and other apes), and is used in research on children as the main behavioral marker of “sympathetic concern”. I am a Darwinist and follow the assumption that if two closely related species show similar behavior under similar circumstances the psychology behind it is probably similar, too. This is the most parsimonious position, and means of course that if such behavior rests on empathy in the human child it does so, too, in the ape. In fact recent studies support the idea that consolation reduces stress in the recipient.

Experimental evidence is harder to collect but studies are beginning to do so. We conducted recently an experiment on spontaneous altruistic behavior, which in humans is usually explained as a product of empathy. In one experiment, we placed two capuchin monkeys side by side: separate, but in full view. One of them needed to barter with us with small plastic tokens. The critical test came when we offered a choice between two differently colored tokens with different meaning: one token was “selfish”, the other “prosocial”. If the bartering monkey picked the selfish token, it received a small piece of apple for returning it, but its partner got nothing. The prosocial token, on the other hand, rewarded both monkeys equally at the same time. The monkeys gradually began to prefer the prosocial token. The procedures were repeated many times with different pairs of monkeys and different sets of tokens, and the monkeys kept picking the prosocial option showing how much they care about each other’s welfare. This was not based on fear for possible repercussions, because we found that the most dominant monkeys (who have least to fear) were in fact the most generous.

Roman Krznaric: You have sometimes been accused of ‘overinterpreting’ the evidence. For instance, you have cited the example of a gorilla called Binti, who, when a three-year-old boy fell into her cage in the zoo, picked him up, comforted him, then carried him to a door where the zookeepers could remove him. You have argued that this is an instance of empathy. But critics have suggested it could well be evidence of some other trait, such as sympathy or pity. How do you respond?

Frans de Waal: Is this truly an alternative? Does anyone believe sympathy can be achieved without empathy? Empathy is the process of emotional resonance and perspective-taking that we use to be in tune with and understand others. How could one develop sympathy without it? For sympathy to be discriminating it needs to be based on what we think is happening with the other, which is based on empathy. For me all of these phenomena are continuous, from emotional contagion to concern for others to helping actions. It is all related.

But let’s face it, the case of Binti the gorilla cannot prove any of this. I use it as an illustration, just as I use many other illustrations, but the real work needs to be done through systematic research, either by observing hundreds of helping actions among primates (as has been done by several research teams) or by conducting experiments, in which we manipulate a situation in order to see how animals respond. Under the previous question I described such an experiment, and there are many others that have been published in the last few years.

The problem with experiments, though, is that they never concern very risky behavior. In the jargon of my field, they invariably concern “low-cost altruism”. No one is going to throw a human child in with the gorillas to see how they respond, and no one is going to push a baby elephant into a mud hole to see how the adults will save it. For this reason, we have no systematic evidence on animal risky helping behavior just as we don’t have such evidence for humans. We know that humans rescue others who are drowning or asleep in a burning building, but this is all anecdotal material similar the material that we have for animals. Anyone who criticizes the Binti story should keep in mind that we then also should discard all those cases of human heroism. It’s all anecdotal.

Roman Krznaric: As individual human beings, what can we do to develop our natural capacity to empathize?

Frans de Waal: It is instructive to see how political leaders have historically promoted the opposite of empathy (i.e. hatred). The process is called “dehumanization”: emphasize differences by depicting an entire group of people as “rats” or “cockroaches”, saying they are not human, thus making clear how much they differ from us. Hitler did this with the Jews.

Empathy is promoted by similarity and social closeness. Studies have shown this to be true for mice, for monkeys and for humans. The way to promote empathy is the opposite of dehumanization, so we could call it “humanization” because it emphasizes how similar others are to us. We stress that they look the same, feel the same, share the same interests. This helps us empathize.

Find out more about Frans de Waal’s ideas on empathy and the secrets of our evolutionary empathetic inheritance  by treating yourself to his fabulous new book.