WEBVTT

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Host: This morning, our first presenter
is doctor Frans de Waal.

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He directs the Living Links Center

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at the Yerkes National
Primate Research Center

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at Emory University.

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And his work as a primatologist

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has directed him
to today's idea worth sharing

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and that is morality without religion.

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So if you will, please,
join me in welcoming doctor Frans de Waal.

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(Applause)

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Frans de Waal: Good morning.

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It's a bit of a heavy topic, I think,
to start a day with -

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morality and religion...

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I work with animals, and I'll give you
a slightly different take.

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That could be the most appropriate talk
at a zoo, I think, to give.

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So let me say first
a few things about myself.

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I was born in Den Bosch,

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very close to Maastricht,
which was just mentioned -

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where the painter Hieronymus Bosch
named himself after.

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And I've always been very fond
of this painter

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who lived and worked in the 15th century.

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And what is interesting about him
in relation to morality

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is that he lived at a time
where religion's influence was waning,

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and he was sort of wondering, I think,

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what would happen with society
if there was no religion

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or if there was less religion.

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And so he painted this famous painting,
"The Garden of Earthly Delights,"

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which some have interpreted
as being humanity before the Fall,

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or being humanity without any Fall at all.

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And so it makes you wonder,

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what would happen if we hadn't tasted
the fruit of knowledge, so to speak,

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and what kind of morality would we have.

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Much later, as a student,
I went to a very different garden,

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a zoological garden in Arnhem
where we keep chimpanzees.

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This is me at an early age
with a baby chimpanzee.

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(Laughter)

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And I discovered there

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that the chimpanzees are very power-hungry
and wrote a book about it -

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The Chimpazee Politics,

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which is still in print, 25 years later.

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And at that time the focus
in a lot of animal research

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was on aggression and competition.

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I painted a whole picture
of the animal kingdom

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and humanity included, was that deep down
we are competitors, we are aggressive,

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we are all out
for our own profit, basically.

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This is the launch of my book.

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I'm not sure how well
the chimpanzees read it,

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but they surely seemed
interested in the book.

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(Laughter)

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Now in the process of doing all this work

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on power and dominance
and aggression and so on,

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I discovered that chimpanzees
reconcile after fights.

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And so what you see here
is two males who have had a fight.

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They ended up in a tree, and one of them
holds out a hand to the other.

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And about a second
after I took the picture,

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they came together in the fork of the tree

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and kissed and embraced each other.

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And this is very interesting

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because at the time, everything
was about competition and aggression,

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so it wouldn't make any sense.

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The only thing that matters
is that you win or you lose.

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But why reconcile after a fight?
That doesn't make any sense.

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This is the way bonobos do it.
Bonobos do everything with sex.

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And so they also reconcile with sex.

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But the principle is exactly the same.

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The principle is that you have
a valuable relationship

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that is damaged by conflict,
so you need to do something about it.

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So my whole picture of the animal kingdom,
and including humans also,

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started to change at that time.

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So we have this image in political
science, economics, the humanities,

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the philosophy for that matter,
that man is a wolf to man.

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And so deep down,
our nature is actually nasty.

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I think it's a very unfair
image for the wolf.

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The wolf is, after all,
a very cooperative animal.

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And that's why many of you
have a dog at home,

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which has all these characteristics also.

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And it's really unfair to humanity,

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because humanity is actually
much more cooperative and empathic

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than given credit for.

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So I started getting
interested in those issues

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and studying that in other animals.

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So these are the pillars of morality.

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If you ask anyone,
"What is morality based on?"

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these are the two factors
that always come out.

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One is reciprocity,

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and associated with it is a sense
of justice and a sense of fairness.

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And the other one is empathy
and compassion.

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And human morality is more than this,
but if you would remove these two pillars,

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there would be not much
remaining, I think.

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So they're absolutely essential.

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So let me give you a few examples here.

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This is a very old video
from the Yerkes Primate Center,

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where they trained
chimpanzees to cooperate.

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So this is already
about a hundred years ago

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about a hundred years ago,

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that we were doing
experiments on cooperation.

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What you have here is two
young chimpanzees who have a box,

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and the box is too heavy
for one chimp to pull in.

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And of course, there's food on the box.

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Otherwise they wouldn't
be pulling so hard.

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And so they're bringing in the box.

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And you can see that they're synchronized.

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You can see that they work together,
they pull at the same moment.

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It's already a big advance
over many other animals

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who wouldn't be able to do that.

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Now you're going to get
a more interesting picture,

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because now one
of the two chimps has been fed.

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So one of the two is not really interested
in the task anymore.

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(Laughter)

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(Laughter)

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(Laughter)

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[- and sometimes appears to convey
its wishes and meanings by gestures.]

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Now look at what happens
at the very end of this.

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(Laughter)

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He takes basically everything.

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(Laughter)

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There are two interesting
parts about this.

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One is that the chimp on the right

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has a full understanding
he needs the partner...

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So a full understanding
of the need for cooperation.

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The second one is that the partner
is willing to work

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even though he's not
interested in the food.

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Why would that be?

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Well, that probably
has to do with reciprocity.

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There's actually a lot of evidence
in primates and other animals

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that they return favors.

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He will get a return favor
at some point in the future.

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And so that's how this all operates.

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We do the same task with elephants.

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Now, it's very dangerous
to work with elephants.

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Another problem with elephants
is that you cannot make an apparatus

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that is too heavy for a single elephant.

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Now you can probably make it,

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but it's going to be a pretty
clumsy apparatus, I think.

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And so what we did in that case...

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We do these studies in Thailand
for Josh Plotnik...

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Is we have an apparatus around which
there is a rope, a single rope.

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And if you pull on this side of the rope,
the rope disappears on the other side.

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So two elephants need to pick it up
at exactly the same time, and pull.

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Otherwise nothing is going to happen
and the rope disappears.

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The first tape you're going to see

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is two elephants who are released together
arrive at the apparatus.

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The apparatus is on the left,
with food on it.

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And so they come together,
they arrive together,

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they pick it up together,
and they pull together.

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So it's actually fairly simple for them.

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There they are.

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So that's how they bring it in.

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But now we're going to make it
more difficult.

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Because the purpose of this experiment

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is to see how well
they understand cooperation.

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Do they understand that as well
as the chimps, for example?

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What we do in the next step is we release
one elephant before the other

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and that elephant needs to be smart enough

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to stay there and wait
and not pull at the rope...

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Because if he pulls at the rope,
it disappears and the whole test is over.

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Now this elephant does something illegal
that we did not teach it.

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But it shows the understanding he has,

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because he puts his big foot on the rope,

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stands on the rope
and waits there for the other,

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and then the other is going
to do all the work for him.

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So it's what we call freeloading.

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(Laughter)

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But it shows the intelligence
that the elephants have.

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They developed several
of these alternative techniques

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that we did not approve of, necessarily.

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(Laughter)

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So the other elephant is now coming...

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and is going to pull it in.

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Now look at the other;
it doesn't forget to eat, of course.

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(Laughter)

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This was the cooperation
and reciprocity part.

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Now something on empathy.

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Empathy is my main topic
at the moment, of research.

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And empathy has two qualities:

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One is the understanding part of it.

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This is just a regular definition:

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the ability to understand and share
the feelings of another.

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And the emotional part.

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Empathy has basically two channels:
One is the body channel,

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If you talk with a sad person,

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you're going to adopt
a sad expression and a sad posture,

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and before you know it, you feel sad.

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And that's sort of the body channel
of emotional empathy,

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which many animals have.

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Your average dog has that also.

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That's why people keep mammals in the home

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and not turtles or snakes
or something like that,

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who don't have that kind of empathy.

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And then there's a cognitive channel,

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which is more that you can take
the perspective of somebody else.

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And that's more limited.

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Very few animals, I think elephants
and apes, can do that kind of thing.

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So synchronization,

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which is part of that whole
empathy mechanism,

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is a very old one in the animal kingdom.

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In humans, of course,
we can study that with yawn contagion.

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Humans yawn when others yawn.

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And it's related to empathy.

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It activates the same areas in the brain.

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Also, we know that people
who have a lot of yawn contagion

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are highly empathic.

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People who have problems with empathy,
such as autistic children,

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they don't have yawn contagion.

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So it is connected.

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And we study that in our chimpanzees
by presenting them with an animated head.

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So that's what you see on the upper-left,
an animated head that yawns.

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And there's a chimpanzee watching,

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an actual real chimpanzee
watching a computer screen

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on which we play these animations.

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(Laughter)

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So yawn contagion
that you're probably all familiar with...

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And maybe you're going
to start yawning soon now...

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Is something that we share
with other animals.

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And that's related to that whole
body channel of synchronization

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that underlies empathy,

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and that is universal
in the mammals, basically.

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We also study more complex expressions...
This is consolation.

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This is a male chimpanzee
who has lost a fight and he's screaming,

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and a juvenile comes over
and puts an arm around him

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and calms him down.

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That's consolation.

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It's very similar to human consolation.

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And consolation behavior...

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(Laughter)

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it's empathy driven.

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Actually, the way to study
empathy in human children

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is to instruct a family member
to act distressed,

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and then to see what young children do.

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And so it is related to empathy,

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and that's the kind
of expressions we look at.

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We also recently published an experiment
you may have heard about.

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It's on altruism and chimpanzees,

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where the question is: Do chimpanzees care
about the welfare of somebody else?

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And for decades it had been assumed
that only humans can do that,

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that only humans worry
about the welfare of somebody else.

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Now we did a very simple experiment.

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We do that on chimpanzees
that live in Lawrenceville,

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in the field station of Yerkes.

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And so that's how they live.

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And we call them into a room
and do experiments with them.

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In this case, we put
two chimpanzees side-by-side,

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and one has a bucket full of tokens,
and the tokens have different meanings.

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One kind of token feeds
only the partner who chooses,

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the other one feeds both of them.

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You will see a little video of this.

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So this is a study we did
with Vicki Horner.

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And here, you have the two color tokens.

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So they have a whole bucket full of them.

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And they have to pick
one of the two colors.

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You will see how that goes.

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So if this chimp makes the selfish choice,

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which is the red token in this case,

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he needs to give it to us,

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we pick it up, we put it on a table
where there's two food rewards,

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but in this case, only the one
on the right gets food.

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The one on the left walks away
because she knows already

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that this is not a good test for her.

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Then the next one is the pro-social token.

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So the one who makes the choices...
That's the interesting part here...

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For the one who makes the choices,
it doesn't really matter.

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So she gives us now a pro-social
token and both chimps get fed.

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So the one who makes the choices
always gets a reward.

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So it doesn't matter whatsoever.

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And she should actually
be choosing blindly.

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But what we find is that they prefer
the pro-social token.

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So this is the 50 percent line,
that's the random expectation.

00:12:57.323 --> 00:13:01.272
And especially if the partner draws
attention to itself, they choose more.

00:13:01.296 --> 00:13:03.304
And if the partner
puts pressure on them...

00:13:03.328 --> 00:13:06.467
So if the partner starts spitting water
and intimidating them...

00:13:06.491 --> 00:13:08.019
Then the choices go down.

00:13:08.043 --> 00:13:09.082
(Laughter)

00:13:10.406 --> 00:13:12.276
It's as if they're saying,

00:13:12.300 --> 00:13:15.287
"If you're not behaving,
I'm not going to be pro-social today."

00:13:15.311 --> 00:13:17.315
And this is what happens
without a partner,

00:13:17.339 --> 00:13:19.153
when there's no partner sitting there.

00:13:19.177 --> 00:13:22.996
So we found that the chimpanzees do care
about the well-being of somebody else...

00:13:23.020 --> 00:13:25.643
Especially, these are other members
of their own group.

00:13:25.675 --> 00:13:28.444
So the final experiment
that I want to mention to you

00:13:28.468 --> 00:13:30.115
is our fairness study.

00:13:30.139 --> 00:13:33.029
And so this became a very famous study.

00:13:33.053 --> 00:13:34.476
And there are now many more,

00:13:34.500 --> 00:13:36.643
because after we did this
about 10 years ago,

00:13:36.667 --> 00:13:38.476
it became very well-known.

00:13:39.024 --> 00:13:41.317
And we did that originally
with Capuchin monkeys.

00:13:41.341 --> 00:13:44.131
And I'm going to show you
the first experiment that we did.

00:13:44.155 --> 00:13:46.967
It has now been done
with dogs and with birds

00:13:46.991 --> 00:13:48.476
and with chimpanzees.

00:13:49.645 --> 00:13:53.076
But with Sarah Brosnan,
we started out with Capuchin monkeys.

00:13:53.618 --> 00:13:56.823
So what we did is we put
two Capuchin monkeys side-by-side.

00:13:56.847 --> 00:13:59.676
Again, these animals, live in a group,
they know each other.

00:13:59.700 --> 00:14:02.454
We take them out of the group,
put them in a test chamber.

00:14:02.995 --> 00:14:06.090
And there's a very simple task
that they need to do.

00:14:06.565 --> 00:14:09.945
And if you give both of them
cucumber for the task,

00:14:09.969 --> 00:14:11.399
the two monkeys side-by-side,

00:14:11.423 --> 00:14:14.253
they're perfectly willing
to do this 25 times in a row.

00:14:14.277 --> 00:14:17.724
So cucumber, even though
it's only really water in my opinion,

00:14:17.748 --> 00:14:20.986
but cucumber is perfectly fine for them.

00:14:21.010 --> 00:14:23.293
Now if you give the partner grapes...

00:14:23.317 --> 00:14:25.464
The food preferences
of my Capuchin monkeys

00:14:25.488 --> 00:14:28.528
correspond exactly with the prices
in the supermarket...

00:14:28.552 --> 00:14:31.957
And so if you give them grapes...
It's a far better food...

00:14:31.981 --> 00:14:34.184
Then you create inequity between them.

00:14:34.902 --> 00:14:36.748
So that's the experiment we did.

00:14:36.765 --> 00:14:39.812
And I'm going to show you
a little videotape of this.

00:14:40.372 --> 00:14:42.453
Recently, we videotaped it
with new monkeys

00:14:42.477 --> 00:14:43.814
who'd never done the task,

00:14:43.838 --> 00:14:46.470
thinking that maybe they would have
a stronger reaction,

00:14:46.494 --> 00:14:48.033
and that turned out to be right.

00:14:48.057 --> 00:14:50.553
The one on the left is the monkey
who gets cucumber.

00:14:50.577 --> 00:14:52.836
The one on the right
is the one who gets grapes.

00:14:53.260 --> 00:14:54.607
The one who gets cucumber...

00:14:54.631 --> 00:14:57.341
Note that the first piece
of cucumber is perfectly fine.

00:14:57.451 --> 00:14:59.176
The first piece she eats.

00:14:59.600 --> 00:15:03.205
Then she sees the other one getting grape,
and you will see what happens.

00:15:04.694 --> 00:15:07.273
So she gives a rock to us.
That's the task.

00:15:07.297 --> 00:15:10.355
And we give her a piece
of cucumber and she eats it.

00:15:10.379 --> 00:15:12.376
The other one needs to give a rock to us.

00:15:13.788 --> 00:15:15.576
And that's what she does.

00:15:16.187 --> 00:15:17.799
And she gets a grape...

00:15:19.179 --> 00:15:20.342
and eats it.

00:15:20.366 --> 00:15:21.561
The other one sees that.

00:15:21.585 --> 00:15:22.901
She gives a rock to us now,

00:15:22.925 --> 00:15:24.497
gets, again, cucumber.

00:15:27.960 --> 00:15:34.960
(Laughter)

00:15:41.341 --> 00:15:43.342
(Laughter ends)

00:15:43.366 --> 00:15:46.341
She tests a rock now against the wall.

00:15:46.365 --> 00:15:47.721
She needs to give it to us.

00:15:48.584 --> 00:15:50.600
And she gets cucumber again.

00:15:52.943 --> 00:15:59.399
(Laughter)

00:16:02.051 --> 00:16:05.180
So this is basically
the Wall Street protest that you see here.

00:16:05.204 --> 00:16:07.576
(Laughter)

00:16:07.600 --> 00:16:11.826
(Applause)

00:16:12.777 --> 00:16:14.563
I still have two minutes left...

00:16:14.587 --> 00:16:16.550
Let me tell you a funny story about this.

00:16:16.561 --> 00:16:20.171
This study became very famous
and we got a lot of comments,

00:16:20.195 --> 00:16:23.801
especially anthropologists,
economists, philosophers.

00:16:23.825 --> 00:16:25.233
They didn't like this at all.

00:16:25.257 --> 00:16:27.819
Because they had decided
in their minds, I believe,

00:16:27.843 --> 00:16:31.887
that fairness is a very complex issue,
and that animals cannot have it.

00:16:31.912 --> 00:16:34.375
And so one philosopher even wrote us

00:16:34.399 --> 00:16:37.173
that it was impossible that monkeys
had a sense of fairness

00:16:37.197 --> 00:16:39.978
because fairness was invented
during the French Revolution.

00:16:40.002 --> 00:16:42.419
(Laughter)

00:16:42.443 --> 00:16:45.125
And another one wrote a whole chapter

00:16:45.149 --> 00:16:48.676
saying that he would believe
it had something to do with fairness,

00:16:48.700 --> 00:16:51.097
if the one who got grapes
would refuse the grapes.

00:16:51.121 --> 00:16:54.993
Now the funny thing is that Sarah Brosnan,
who's been doing this with chimpanzees,

00:16:55.017 --> 00:16:57.163
had a couple of combinations
of chimpanzees

00:16:57.187 --> 00:16:59.543
where, indeed, the one
who would get the grape

00:16:59.567 --> 00:17:02.473
would refuse the grape
until the other guy also got a grape.

00:17:02.497 --> 00:17:05.263
So we're getting very close
to the human sense of fairness.

00:17:05.288 --> 00:17:08.723
And I think philosophers need
to rethink their philosophy for a while.

00:17:09.358 --> 00:17:10.675
So let me summarize.

00:17:11.291 --> 00:17:13.104
I believe there's an evolved morality.

00:17:13.127 --> 00:17:16.347
I think morality is much more
than what I've been talking about,

00:17:16.371 --> 00:17:18.821
but it would be impossible
without these ingredients

00:17:18.846 --> 00:17:20.344
that we find in other primates,

00:17:20.367 --> 00:17:22.204
which are empathy and consolation,

00:17:22.229 --> 00:17:25.935
pro-social tendencies and reciprocity
and a sense of fairness.

00:17:25.959 --> 00:17:28.016
And so we work on these particular issues

00:17:28.040 --> 00:17:31.385
to see if we can create a morality
from the bottom up, so to speak,

00:17:31.409 --> 00:17:33.842
without necessarily
god and religion involved,

00:17:33.866 --> 00:17:36.332
and to see how we can get
to an evolved morality.

00:17:36.766 --> 00:17:38.506
And I thank you for your attention.

00:17:38.530 --> 00:17:45.530
(Applause)