Frans de Waal studies empathy in monkeys — thus this book is biased towards the positive aspects of empathy. He tells stories and anecdotes about animal studies and he also tells, most of which are based on his research or related research. He generalizes some things to humans. He challenges the notion that human society is ONLY competitive, war-like and selfish.

There are 3 key things I got from this book:

• A definition and description of empathy
  • state-matching emotional contagion – innermost/foundational is matching the state of the other – this is done by emotional contagions. It is thought that mirror neurons, mimicry and body mapping/reading all play roles in state-matching (my interpretation)
  • concern for others consolation behavior - 2nd layer is ability to express concern and try to console the other — such as a young child or monkey trying to console a mother who is crying
  • perspective taking targeted helping – this last layer is about the ability to understand what the other needs. Being able to help the other in a specific, targeted way implies the ability to understand their need from their point of view.
• Animal research into fairness and how it links to communal survival
  • The main reason humans seek fairness is to prevent negative reactions upon rejoining the group (think about the CEOs who flew in private jet planes to receive bailouts). We may however, relax our rules about fairness when it comes to a close relation.
  • If you don’t act in a fair manner, others will take note and repay you in kind when you are in need (yes, monkeys do this too!)
  • however, there are way to kill prosocial behavior:
    • pair the monkey with a stranger
    • put the partner who you should be acting fairly towards, out of sight, and selfish behavior emerges
    • others must see the outcome.
• Change in empathetic behavior depends on kinship or group ties
  • As noted in examples above
  • This is not fully explored — I would like to know more about how we promote identification and/or kinship between groups. This dehumanization is the cause of many wars, no?

Though a bit long-winded at times (needs a good edit IMHO!) – this book is worth the effort to read. It’s not scannable, you actually have to read the stories and anecdotes to get the most out of it. Frans de Waal does extrapolate somewhat freely to human behavior, either explicitly or implicitly. The underlying assumption is that we are very similar in base behavior to monkeys, apes, dolphins and elephants — and that might be hard for some people to take.

Some additional quotes I liked:

• Security is the first and foremost reason for social life (20)
• Is war an aggressive drive or driven by power and profit? (25)
• Discussion of body mapping within species and between species (53)
• Plutarch – “if you live with a cripple, you will learn to limp.”
• Mirror neurons – the firing of brain cells when doing and action, and to a similar extent when *watching* another do an action (79)
• lack of distinction between monkey see and monkey do, erasing the line between self and other
• Oscar the cat – who would stay with a dying person at an old folks home — and he always knew when someone was going to die, even before the nurses did!
• Self-protective altruism – helping another shields self from adverse reactions (75)
• petting relieves stress in the monkey/human that is petting or being petted
• identification is a basic pre-condition for empathy (80)
• Do emotions arise from the body (body first theory – “i run, therefore I am scared”) (81)
• Or do emotions in others raise awareness in ourselves (emotions first theory) – leads to emotional contagion concept (monkeys run from those that have experienced a negative emotion like fear from rattlesnake)
• body posture wins out over facial expression in judging emotional states
• but faces still matter – people can’t relate to those with immobilized faces
• self-absorption kills empathy – you have to distangle yourself from the other to pinpoint actual source of feelings –> leads to perspective taking and targeted helping
• VEN cells – go deep in to the brain (are like neurons) and are thought to connect disparate parts of brain (138)
• true cradle of cooperation is the community (182)
• thus human fairness goes hand in hand with communal survival (187)
• inequity aversion (187)
• empathy is understanding another; sympathy is taking action
• Theory of the mind – understanding the state of the other (98)
• 3 ideals of the French Revolution – liberty (US has this bias); equality (Europe has this bias); fraternity (forgotten?)
• the tendency towards social hierarchy/competitiveness undercuts empathy/cooperation – as emphasized in institutions such as in the military and church (political bias)
• cruelty also rests on perspective taking (knowing what will hurt the other the most)
• we often operated in enlightened self-interest
• one cannot expect trust in a society with huge income disparities, insecurities, disenfranchised underclass

Initial thoughts:

• Wireless communications have untethered our social norms
  • Sherry Turkle observed how we have become tethered to our virtual identities via cellphones and other devices.
  • What used to be considered rude – answering the phone while talking face-to-face with someone – is now the norm (in most of North America)
  • I don’t know what the social norms are in other countries/cultures.
  • Establish a new norm in your learning environment – via ground rules or other means. Discuss and create the norm up front.
    • Discuss how the backchannel can be used. What appropriate to say and not.
    • Give a list of web sites related to your topic for those who will want to surf the web (if laptops are allowed.) Have people surf in areas related to your topic.

• Presenters need to change their expectations.
  • Don’t expect full attention - design with this in mind.
    • Tell the learners what to pay attention to – keywords
  • Expect the back-channel conversation – bring it to to the foreground occasionally during the presentation or have someone moderating it and bring it up. Give the audience the #hashtag so you can let them know that you  know and so that you can follow. Give them the venue for the backchannel.
  • Stop presenting – let the audience engage with each other, either face-to-face table talk or just via the backchannel.
  • Or if you want to be authoritative and have the power – ban latops and blackberries from the room. I’ve seen this done in corporate settings. But you know, people might resort to passing notes.
• Partial-attention learners
  • Initial research into attention and performance showed that even when people are performing other tasks, they would still hear a message when primed to listen for a target word. (Treisman, 1964 Attenuation Theory). Does this mean we should be keying our learners for target words?
  • Perhaps as learners we should learn how to better target our attention and learn when to switch
  • Perhaps presenters should provide break points, pauses that allow for the swtiching.
• Treat the presentation like a game
  • What if we were to treat the presentation like a game?
  • The presenter sets the rules – back-channel rules, front-channel rules
  • The presenter sets the goals – prize to indivdual or table group that can complete a task within a certain amount of time or that answers the quiz at the end.
  • Points for the best answer…
  • Have to think about this one more.

Just some initial thoughts on changing/setting expectations and skills we can learn and sharpen. The game has changed in intensity, lets change with it.

Addtional note (added later 10/14/09): there are two types of attention under current research: top-down attention (attending to a task such as looking for keys or listening to a presentation) & bottom-up attention (automatic attention to something salient or attention-grabbing, such as a fire-alarm or key words) . See full blog post from Scientific American: link.