WEBVTT

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I was born in Den Bosch,

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where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after.

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And so 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

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if there was no religion 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

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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,

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I went to a very different garden,

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a zoological garden in Arnhem

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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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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,

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was that deep down we are competitors,

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we are aggressive,

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we're 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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Now in the process

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of doing all this work on power and dominance

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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, they came together in the fork of the tree

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and they kissed and embraced each other.

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Now this is very interesting

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because at the time everything was about competition and aggression,

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and so it wouldn't make any sense.

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

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But why would you reconcile after a fight?

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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

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a valuable relationship

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that is damaged by conflict,

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so you need to do something about it.

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So my whole picture of the animal kingdom,

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and including humans also,

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started to change at that time.

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So we have this image

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in political science, economics, the humanities,

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philosophy for that matter,

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that man is a wolf to man.

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And so deep down our nature's 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,

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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,

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but if you would remove these two pillars,

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there would be not much remaining I think.

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And 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 train chimpanzees to cooperate.

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["1937"] So this is already
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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And 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

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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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So 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? 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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So he will get a return favor

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

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Another problem with elephants

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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 flimsy 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,

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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

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and the rope disappears.

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And the first tape you're going to see

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is two elephants who are released together

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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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And 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 whole 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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And so what we do in the next step

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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

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that we did not teach it.

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But it shows the understanding that 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 develop several of these alternative techniques

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that we did not approve of necessarily.

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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. The other doesn't forget to eat, of course.

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(Laughter)

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This was the cooperation, 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 sort of two qualities.

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One is the understanding part of it. 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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And so empathy has basically two channels.

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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 actually 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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There's few animals -- I think elephants and apes can do that kind of thing --

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but there are very few animals who can do that.

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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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And in humans, of course, we can study that

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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,

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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

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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Now 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. It's very similar to human consolation.

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And consolation behavior,

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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 they 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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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

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about the welfare of somebody else?

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And for decades it had been assumed

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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So this is a study we did with Vicky 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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So 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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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,

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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

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is that they prefer the pro-social token.

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

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And especially if the partner draws attention to itself, they choose more.

NOTE Paragraph

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And if the partner puts pressure on them --

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so if the partner starts spitting water and intimidating them --

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then the choices go down.

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It's as if they're saying,

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"If you're not behaving, I'm not going to be pro-social today."

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And this is what happens without a partner,

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when there's no partner sitting there.

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And so we found that the chimpanzees do care

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about the well-being of somebody else --

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especially, these are other members of their own group.

NOTE Paragraph

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So the final experiment that I want to mention to you

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is our fairness study.

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And so this became a very famous study.

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And there's now many more,

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because after we did this about 10 years ago,

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it became very well known.

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And we did that originally with capuchin monkeys.

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And I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did.

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It has now been done with dogs and with birds

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and with chimpanzees.

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But with Sarah Brosnan we started out with capuchin monkeys.

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So what we did

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is we put two capuchin monkeys side-by-side.

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Again, these animals, they live in a group, they know each other.

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We take them out of the group, put them in a test chamber.

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And there's a very simple task

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that they need to do.

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And if you give both of them cucumber for the task,

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the two monkeys side-by-side,

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they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row.

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So cucumber, even though it's only really water in my opinion,

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but cucumber is perfectly fine for them.

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Now if you give the partner grapes --

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the food preferences of my capuchin monkeys

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correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket --

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and so if you give them grapes -- it's a far better food --

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then you create inequity between them.

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So that's the experiment we did.

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Recently we videotaped it with new monkeys who'd never done the task,

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thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction,

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and that turned out to be right.

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The one on the left is the monkey who gets cucumber.

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The one on the right is the one who gets grapes.

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The one who gets cucumber,

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note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine.

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The first piece she eats.

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Then she sees the other one getting grape, and you will see what happens.

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So she gives a rock to us. That's the task.

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And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it.

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The other one needs to give a rock to us.

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And that's what she does.

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And she gets a grape and she eats it.

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The other one sees that.

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She gives a rock to us now,

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gets, again, cucumber.

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(Laughter)

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She tests a rock now against the wall.

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She needs to give it to us.

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And she gets cucumber again.

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(Laughter)

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So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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Let me tell you --

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I still have two minutes left, let me tell you a funny story about this.

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This study became very famous

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and we got a lot of comments,

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especially anthropologists, economists,

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philosophers.

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They didn't like this at all.

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Because they had decided in their minds, I believe,

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that fairness is a very complex issue

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and that animals cannot have it.

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And so one philosopher even wrote us

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that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness

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because fairness was invented during the French Revolution.

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(Laughter)

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Now another one wrote a whole chapter

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saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness

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if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes.

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Now the funny thing is that Sarah Brosnan,

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who's been doing this with chimpanzees,

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had a couple of combinations of chimpanzees

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where, indeed, the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape

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until the other guy also got a grape.

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So we're getting very close to the human sense of fairness.

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And I think philosophers need to rethink their philosophy for awhile.

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So let me summarize.

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I believe there's an evolved morality.

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I think morality is much more than what I've been talking about,

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but it would be impossible without these ingredients

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that we find in other primates,

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which are empathy and consolation,

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pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness.

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And so we work on these particular issues

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to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up, so to speak,

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without necessarily God and religion involved,

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and to see how we can get to an evolved morality.

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And I thank you for your attention.

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(Applause)