Michelle: Alright Mark, pop quiz. The book is The Age of Empathy. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “empathy” in the context of, say, Wall Street? Mark: A rounding error? Or maybe what you feel for the intern who has to fetch your third kombucha of the morning. Definitely not a business strategy. Michelle: Exactly! And that's precisely the assumption today's book is here to dismantle. We're talking about The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society by the late, great primatologist Frans de Waal. Mark: Right, this guy was the real deal—not just a pop-psychologist. He spent decades at the top of his field studying primates, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His work was foundational. Michelle: Absolutely. And he wrote this book in 2009, right after the financial crisis, as a direct response to the "greed is good" ethos that had just spectacularly imploded. He wanted to show that biology offers a completely different, and far more hopeful, story about our nature. Mark: I’m intrigued. Because that "greed is good" idea, the whole Gordon Gekko speech, feels like it’s baked into our culture. It’s often justified with a nod to biology, right? The whole "survival of the fittest" thing. Michelle: That’s the exact myth de Waal sets out to bust. He argues that this idea is a gross misinterpretation of Darwin, something he calls "the other Darwinism" or Social Darwinism. It’s this belief that nature is nothing but a brutal, every-man-for-himself competition. Mark: And he’s saying that’s wrong? Michelle: He’s saying it’s a dangerously incomplete picture. And he starts by showing us what happens when a society takes that idea to its logical, and toxic, conclusion.

Mark: Okay, so where does he take us? What’s the ultimate real-world example of this philosophy in action? Michelle: He takes us to Enron in the early 2000s. The CEO, Jeff Skilling, was famously a huge fan of Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene. Skilling misinterpreted it to mean that humans are driven only by greed and fear, and he built his entire corporate culture around that idea. Mark: Oh, I've heard about this. This was the "Rank and Yank" system, right? Michelle: That's the one. Every year, employees were brutally ranked against each other by a peer committee. The bottom 15 to 20 percent were publicly humiliated and then fired. They were sent to a corporate "Siberia" for two weeks to desperately find another job within the company before being kicked to the curb. Mark: That sounds absolutely nightmarish. It’s literally engineering a dog-eat-dog world. Michelle: It was. It created a culture of backstabbing, dishonesty, and zero cooperation. People were terrified. And this internal rot eventually spilled outward, leading to massive fraud, like creating artificial power shortages in California to jack up prices. The company, built on this foundation of pure, ruthless self-interest, completely imploded in 2001. It was a catastrophe. Mark: A perfect, if horrifying, illustration of the idea. But that’s a human system. How does de Waal use animals to argue against this? I mean, nature is red in tooth and claw, isn't it? Michelle: That’s the common view, but de Waal offers a beautiful counter-story from his own work at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He describes what happens when they give a group of chimpanzees a big, shareable food item, like a watermelon. Mark: I’m picturing chaos. One big alpha chimp grabs it and runs. Michelle: You'd think so, but that’s not what happens. There's an initial jostle, for sure. Someone gets the watermelon. But once they have it, the group seems to respect a concept of "ownership." The owner is allowed to eat. But then, something else happens. The other chimps, especially friends and family, will come over and beg. They’ll hold out their hand, they’ll whine, they might even throw a little tantrum. Mark: A tantrum? Seriously? Michelle: Yes! And what’s fascinating is that the owner almost always shares. They’ll give a piece to their best friend, who then might share a piece with their own family, and so on. The food gets distributed throughout the group. It’s not a violent free-for-all; it’s a social negotiation. Mark: Wow. So you're saying even chimps have a basic economic system built on more than just brute force? There are rules, like ownership and sharing? Michelle: Exactly! There are rules. And this isn't just a cute anecdote. De Waal’s point is profound: for social animals, cooperation and maintaining social bonds have immense survival value. A group that can’t cooperate will be out-competed by a group that can. The Enron chimps would have starved, while the sharing chimps thrived. Mark: That flips the whole "survival of the fittest" idea on its head. It’s not about the fittest individual, but maybe the most cooperative group. Michelle: Precisely. And this cooperation is built on a foundation of something even deeper: the ability to connect with and feel for others. It’s built on empathy. And that brings us to the next big question: how does this empathy engine actually work? It's not just some vague, warm-and-fuzzy feeling.

Mark: Okay, I’m with you. So if empathy is this biological tool for cooperation, what are its components? How does it function? Michelle: De Waal breaks it down into layers, like a Russian doll. The core is simple emotional contagion—like when one baby starts crying and suddenly the whole nursery is wailing. Or when someone yawns, and you can't help but yawn too. It’s an automatic, bodily response. But for true empathy, you need more. You need a sense of self. Mark: What do you mean, a sense of self? Michelle: You need to be able to distinguish between 'my' feelings and 'your' feelings. If I just feel your distress but can't separate it from my own, I might just run away or get overwhelmed. I can't actually help you. This requires self-awareness. And the classic test for this is the mirror test. Mark: Right, where they put a mark on an animal's face to see if it recognizes itself in the mirror. I know apes can do it. Michelle: Apes, dolphins, and as de Waal thrillingly describes, elephants. He talks about an experiment at the Bronx Zoo where they put a giant, eight-by-eight-foot mirror in the elephant enclosure. At first, the elephants treated the reflection like another elephant. But eventually, one female named Happy started using the mirror to inspect a painted 'X' above her eye. She repeatedly touched the mark on her own face while looking in the mirror. Mark: Whoa. So she knew she was looking at herself. She understood, "That's me." Michelle: Yes! And that capacity for self-awareness, that 'I am me' understanding, is the cognitive foundation for advanced empathy. It allows for perspective-taking—understanding that you are a separate being with your own needs and feelings. Mark: That makes sense. You have to know who 'you' are before you can truly understand someone else. But does this actually lead to... well, fairness? Or justice? That feels like a huge leap. Michelle: It’s not a leap at all! And this is maybe the most powerful and frankly, hilarious, story in the whole book. It’s a study de Waal and his colleague Sarah Brosnan did with capuchin monkeys. Mark: I’m ready. Hit me with the monkey story. Michelle: They had two capuchins in adjacent cages. They trained them to do a simple task: hand a rock to the experimenter. In return, they’d get a reward—a piece of cucumber. At first, both monkeys get cucumber. Everyone's happy. They’ll do this 25 times in a row, no problem. Mark: Okay, a fair day's work for a fair day's cucumber. Michelle: Exactly. But then, they introduce inequity. One monkey does the task and gets a cucumber. The monkey next to her does the exact same task... and gets a grape. Now, for a monkey, a grape is like a gourmet meal. A cucumber is just okay. Mark: Oh, I see where this is going. The cucumber monkey is not going to be happy. Michelle: Not happy is an understatement. The first time, she sees the other monkey get a grape. She looks at her cucumber. She looks back at the experimenter. She still eats the cucumber, but she's hesitant. The next time it happens, she takes the cucumber, but she throws it on the floor. Mark: Ha! A protest. Michelle: It gets better. The third time, the experimenter gives her the cucumber, and the monkey takes it, looks the human straight in the eye, and hurls it back at them with force. She starts shaking the cage walls, rattling her food cup. She is furious. She would rather get nothing than accept an unfair deal. Mark: That is incredible! It's a tiny primate protest for fair wages! It’s the Occupy Wall Street of the monkey world. Michelle: It is! And de Waal calls this "inequity aversion." It’s a primal, emotional reaction to unfairness. It’s not a calculated, rational decision. It’s a gut feeling: "This is wrong." And he argues that this is the evolutionary root of our own human sense of fairness and justice. It’s that same feeling we get when we see injustice, that same fire that says, "That's not right."

Mark: Wow. So putting it all together, from the Enron collapse to the cucumber-throwing monkeys, de Waal is basically arguing that our entire social and economic system, which often lionizes selfishness, is fighting against our deepest biological instincts. Michelle: That’s the heart of it. He’s not saying we're all selfless angels. We are absolutely competitive and have selfish impulses. But we are also hardwired for empathy, cooperation, and fairness. The problem is that for the last few decades, we’ve built systems and told stories that celebrate one side of our nature while ignoring, or even punishing, the other. Mark: So what's the big takeaway here? If we're naturally empathetic, why does the world so often feel like the opposite? Why do we still have the Enrons and the neglect we saw during disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which de Waal also writes about? Michelle: Because empathy is like a muscle. It's our default setting, but it needs to be exercised. It can be strengthened, or it can be allowed to atrophy. Ideologies that celebrate pure self-interest actively suppress this natural instinct. De Waal’s ultimate point isn't that we're destined to be good, but that the biological foundation for a kinder, more cooperative society is already there. It’s our natural inheritance. We just have to choose to build on it. Mark: That’s a really powerful reframe. It’s not about becoming something we’re not; it’s about returning to what we are. It makes you wonder, in our own lives, where are we choosing the 'grape' for ourselves and handing out 'cucumbers' to others without even thinking about it? Michelle: That's a powerful question. And it’s one we can ask at every level—in our families, our workplaces, and our societies. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and share one place you see empathy—or a lack of it—playing out in the world around you. Mark: Let's keep the conversation going. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.