8 ms·

Do animals feel empathy? the decades-long quest for an answer

49 points by shawndumas 11y ago

dschiptsov 11y ago
Empathy has been evolved in animal communities who collectively care about the offsprings. It is an evolutionary strategy to make communities possible. It is protection for offsprings from being murdered and eaten as it happens among reptiles, fishes, etc. It is a weak bond though. What they need a decade-long quest for, except funding? And, obviously, higher animals do have at least some cross-species empathy toward pups. Any villagers who had cat and dog pups will tell you that. The sexual attraction and parent-offspring bonds, including affection towards young, are the strongest evolutionary forces.
- anon4 11y ago
  Could it be that all animals have empathy, but some have a much smaller and/or different set of feelings they experience? As an analogy, if I see you eating candy, I can understand that you're currently tasting sweet, but if a cat sees you, it has no concept of sweet, because its tongue doesn't have those receptors. You can also see this in people, the most egregious example being "Let them eat cake" oft mis-attributed to Marie Antoinette. If you have never felt something yourself, either due to your upbringing or because your species has no capacity to experience that feel, is it that you have no empathy towards someone having that experience or that you simply cannot so much as conceive of the feeling in question?
  - maxxxxx 11y ago
    I know quite a few humans in the business world that I think don't really have empathy but have learned to behave as if they had it.
kristiandupont 11y ago
I don't think anyone who's had a dog could ever question whether animals can feel empathy, it's just so obvious. I am sure that the level varies from species to species and also within a species, as it does in humans. But a story like this https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped-friend-1353550663.html https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped-friend-135355... is hard to read and not feel a little warmer.
- soft_dev_person 11y ago
  I was gonna post the same sentiment. My dog has such a huge range of emotions, it's no doubt in my mind he feels in many ways like we do. He even has dreams and nightmares.
- amelius 11y ago
  Slightly OT: according to actual scientific research ([1]) done by Rupert Sheldrake, dogs are even telepathic. There is also a very interesting Google-talks video of Sheldrake explaining the experiments. [1] http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy
  - laumars 11y ago
    I struggle with the telepathy argument. I think it's just a placeholder explanation for something a little less sci-fi. Such as scent, body language or just dumb coincidence. However I do like the "Falling Skies" (a Sci-Fi drama starring Noah Wyle) explanation for telepathy; which was communication over the electromagnetic spectrum in a frequency that humans wouldn't normally detect (long waves IIRC)
  - Luc 11y ago
    Scientists are wrong all the time, often for their whole lives, and on the balance of things it is extremely likely Mr. Sheldrake is an example of this.
- Lapsa 11y ago
  exactly. i remember my doge trying to cheer me up whenever i felt sad
- kalzium 11y ago
  I have a dog, too and have to admit I sometimes use her as an "emotions detector" - much like a guide dog, because I'm actually not that good at recognizing people's emotions/moods. The angles at which she puts her ears and head are pretty reliable and easy to read indicators. :) When she sees someone's upset or sad she'll walk over to them and cheer them up. Even random people in the street or on the subway. I mostly fail to even notice...
roywiggins 11y ago
It comes down to "do animals feel emotions" which is really just a sneaky way to ask whether animals have a first-person experience at all. It's easiest imho to apply a Turing Test here: if an animal behaves like it has emotions in every way, what authority can you claim to say they don't? If there's no test to distinguish between "fake" emotions and actual emotions, then is it even a meaningful question? Anyway, what are the odds that humans invented empathy, uniquely, somewhere between ourselves and our most recent common ancestor with (mice, dogs, whatever)? It just seems so unlikely. How did our hominin ancestors get along with each other if they didn't have empathy?
- gambiting 11y ago
  Well, people always find a way to doubt that animals have a sense of "self". Like in the test where they painted a dot on a chimps forehead and gave him a mirror - he wiped the dot off after looking at the mirror, which you know - would be a pretty good indication that he understood, in some way, that the creature in the mirror is him and not some other chimp. But obviously you have people who will say that the chimp might have thought that touching his own forehead made the other chimp touch their forehead, without realising that the image in the mirror is him and not another animal.
  - stuxnet79 11y ago
    But every scientific experiment should withstand scrutiny, regardless of how malicious or creative in its criticism it may be. We currently do not have any machine that can measure "qualia" in animals let alone a formal way of quantifying and making sense out of it.
    - roywiggins 11y ago
      We don't have a machine that can measure qualia in humans for that matter!
- jmngomes 11y ago
  Agreed. I think the whole philosophical discussion of this question is mainly complexity introduced by humans; we invented the definition of word and now expect every animal to formally adhere to our definition of what "empathy" is, or be declared "without empathy". Especially when there are plenty documented examples of animals disregarding their own security to help another animal in distress (including humans): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AkANQls234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AkANQls234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn9SC61Bd7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn9SC61Bd7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_daN5_pUlnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_daN5_pUlnE
jmnicolas 11y ago
I'm not some kind of crazy animal activist, but seriously what's wrong with people : researching empathy by dipping mice tails in hot water or injecting them with vinegar is seriously fucked-up. Should we search for empathy the hard way in these scientists too ?
- logicrook 11y ago
  Science is a hard work, and sometimes, you need to have some fun too.
- ivanhoe 11y ago
  yeah, my thoughts exactly... scientists looking for empathy in animals are exposing their own lack of empathy for those very same animals...
  - Ygg2 11y ago
    That's all well and great, but should we let people die, because we don't want to hurt some animals? Animals that are bred for the sole purpose of studies and would otherwise had to be killed? Lab mice don't grow in wilds you know. Where do you stop? Do you stop eating bread because there are bits of mice/crickets in it? Do you stop eating carrots, because a family of rabbits might depend on it? Do you stop eating bread because a strain of fungus (which aren't plants and are capable of moving on its own volition) might depend on it?
    - hamax 11y ago
      This is called the continuum fallacy. Just because we cannot draw a strongly defined line it doesn't mean some things aren't definitely wrong. Killing lab mice to develop life saving medicine is fine with me in most cases. Torturing mice to study empathy probably isn't. Either way, besides killing all the lab mice, we can also just stop breeding them, you know.
      - Ygg2 11y ago
        Sure, but it's more complex, than "Can't believe these scientist torture mice for empathy". For now, mice lab animals are our only reliable models. First they weren't "torturing mice for empathy", they were studying them for examining pain receptors. Second the study was used to determine if something has empathy or not. Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that large rocks posses sentience, would you not want to determine that rocks have sentience, even if you have been milling them into concrete. > Either way, besides killing all the lab mice, we can also just stop breeding them, you know. Imagine you are mouse breeder. Your only source of revenue is gone. Are you going to: A) Release them into general mice populace causing potential short term damage by having too many breedable mice, while their genes are potential long term damage to mice population (mice used to test cancer get cancer really quickly)? B) Feed them and chemically castrate them and or keep them in isolation (solitary confinement, yay!). Costs money, not sure if departments have that much free dough lying around C) Kill them painlessly and efficiently? D) Sell them at a loss as pets, even though they aren't suitable as pets (some of the strains die really really quickly, because they are bred for that).
csn 11y ago
Perhaps the thing we call empathy is just a strange side effect of the negative subconscious feedback a member of group-oriented species gets when their friend is, or is going to be harmed, physically or otherwise. The choice between gaining/saving an ally or gaining a treat can certainly be a selfish one, and in my opinion most likely is.
contingencies 11y ago
Yes, because humans are animals. Ignoring humans, while we are different to other animals, we are not really that different, particularly to other social mammals. So the answer remains yes. Note that this answer is self-evident and did not require torturing other beings.
- antientropic 11y ago
  This is not at all self-evident, and your logic is flawed: you're saying that X (humans) is a subset of Y (animals), all X have property P (empathy), therefore all Y have property P.
  - contingencies 11y ago
    The point was that, while you can raise the query from a western scientific reductionist perspective and put ethics completely on hold, we're ridiculously similar genetically and behaviorally, such that the certainty is very high without the need for torture.
    - contingencies 11y ago
      To put this another way, all science is probability-based. To take your philosophical bent to its logical conclusion, you never know that all animals of a similar species have similar abilities for empathy so you should torture them all!
- Scarblac 11y ago
  By this logic, self-evidently other animals also discuss this on their version of Hacker News.
coldtea 11y ago
>The wrong conclusion to take away from all these studies is that these rodents are humanlike. The right conclusion is that we're animal-like. And yet those two statements are totally analogous -- except for the irrational fear of anthropomorphizing...
- araneae 11y ago
  They're not, actually. The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and animals. You can see that there's a set of traits that are common among all animals, a smaller set common among mammals, an even small set common amongst primates, etc. And then each species has its own set of unique trait. Rodents aren't like humans and humans aren't like rodents, rodents and human share traits that are likely common among many mammals.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and animals. One just uses "animals" as the universal (generic) thing we all participate in (as a continuum), while the other uses "humans" (or "humanity") for that. Sure, we're animals too, but not "just another animal", but (what we know of as the) pinnacle of the thinking/empathy/etc spectrum". We can think of being human-like in this sense as the top degree in that scale that animals can participate too. (So, "human-like is used a stand-in for "empathetic/thinking/conscious", not as "like an actual human person" -- as it doesn't concern other human attributes -- physiology, looks, etc, only emotional and cognitive ones).
madaxe_again 11y ago
To say that animals can't be empathic because they have selfish motives is bizarre - empathy is selfish, as it's a social survival and ingratiation tool, whether you care to admit such or not. both sides falling into an anthropomorphic trap.
DCPOS_Anthony 11y ago
As much as they can afford to I reckon.
staticelf 11y ago
I am a dog owner and I am completely in the belief that my dog can feel empathy. I see it from time to time. I have a really hard time understanding why some would even make the suggestion that animals generally don't feel empathy? If every animal does it, however, is a different question.
- Theodores 11y ago
  Tell me about it... I took my sister's dog to my brother-in-law's dad's funeral. The poor mutt does not speak English, has not seen a priest before, has never been to a funeral before, yet the dog was behaving most unusually, not at all able to hold it together, shaking. This was a small family gathering - it was not as if the dog was scared of some huge crowd - plus it was delightfully sunny without the slightest breeze. There were no other reasons I could see for what was going on inside the walnut-sized brain of this dog other than the events going on around her. Most strange.
reitanqild 11y ago
Had an interesting experience a few years ago. Me and some friends visited another friend that had a parrot. * When we came the parrot said hello to everyone. * One of my friends aggravated the parrot by standing on the far side of the cage and making funny faces. * When we left the parrot said bye to everyone but him. * When we came back a couple of weeks later and he had forgotten about the parrot and came too close to the cage it tried to bite him. Would hardly have believed it if I hadn't been there on both occasions.
eternalban 11y ago
data point: Once saw a cat rush a squirrel in the back yard. I yelled at it and it ran away but apparently the poor thing died in fright. What was amazed me was seeing another squirrel come over and actually hug the other one, trying to get it to stand up.

49 points by shawndumas 11y ago

Empathy has been evolved in animal communities who collectively care about the offsprings. It is an evolutionary strategy to make communities possible. It is protection for offsprings from being murdered and eaten as it happens among reptiles, fishes, etc. It is a weak bond though. What they need a decade-long quest for, except funding? And, obviously, higher animals do have at least some cross-species empathy toward pups. Any villagers who had cat and dog pups will tell you that. The sexual attraction and parent-offspring bonds, including affection towards young, are the strongest evolutionary forces.

anon4 11y ago
Could it be that all animals have empathy, but some have a much smaller and/or different set of feelings they experience? As an analogy, if I see you eating candy, I can understand that you're currently tasting sweet, but if a cat sees you, it has no concept of sweet, because its tongue doesn't have those receptors. You can also see this in people, the most egregious example being "Let them eat cake" oft mis-attributed to Marie Antoinette. If you have never felt something yourself, either due to your upbringing or because your species has no capacity to experience that feel, is it that you have no empathy towards someone having that experience or that you simply cannot so much as conceive of the feeling in question?
- maxxxxx 11y ago
  I know quite a few humans in the business world that I think don't really have empathy but have learned to behave as if they had it.

kristiandupont 11y ago

I don't think anyone who's had a dog could ever question whether animals can feel empathy, it's just so obvious. I am sure that the level varies from species to species and also within a species, as it does in humans. But a story like this https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped-friend-1353550663.html https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped-friend-135355... is hard to read and not feel a little warmer.

soft_dev_person 11y ago
I was gonna post the same sentiment. My dog has such a huge range of emotions, it's no doubt in my mind he feels in many ways like we do. He even has dreams and nightmares.
amelius 11y ago
Slightly OT: according to actual scientific research ([1]) done by Rupert Sheldrake, dogs are even telepathic. There is also a very interesting Google-talks video of Sheldrake explaining the experiments. [1] http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy
- laumars 11y ago
  I struggle with the telepathy argument. I think it's just a placeholder explanation for something a little less sci-fi. Such as scent, body language or just dumb coincidence. However I do like the "Falling Skies" (a Sci-Fi drama starring Noah Wyle) explanation for telepathy; which was communication over the electromagnetic spectrum in a frequency that humans wouldn't normally detect (long waves IIRC)
- Luc 11y ago
  Scientists are wrong all the time, often for their whole lives, and on the balance of things it is extremely likely Mr. Sheldrake is an example of this.
Lapsa 11y ago
exactly. i remember my doge trying to cheer me up whenever i felt sad
kalzium 11y ago
I have a dog, too and have to admit I sometimes use her as an "emotions detector" - much like a guide dog, because I'm actually not that good at recognizing people's emotions/moods. The angles at which she puts her ears and head are pretty reliable and easy to read indicators. :) When she sees someone's upset or sad she'll walk over to them and cheer them up. Even random people in the street or on the subway. I mostly fail to even notice...

roywiggins 11y ago

It comes down to "do animals feel emotions" which is really just a sneaky way to ask whether animals have a first-person experience at all. It's easiest imho to apply a Turing Test here: if an animal behaves like it has emotions in every way, what authority can you claim to say they don't? If there's no test to distinguish between "fake" emotions and actual emotions, then is it even a meaningful question? Anyway, what are the odds that humans invented empathy, uniquely, somewhere between ourselves and our most recent common ancestor with (mice, dogs, whatever)? It just seems so unlikely. How did our hominin ancestors get along with each other if they didn't have empathy?

gambiting 11y ago
Well, people always find a way to doubt that animals have a sense of "self". Like in the test where they painted a dot on a chimps forehead and gave him a mirror - he wiped the dot off after looking at the mirror, which you know - would be a pretty good indication that he understood, in some way, that the creature in the mirror is him and not some other chimp. But obviously you have people who will say that the chimp might have thought that touching his own forehead made the other chimp touch their forehead, without realising that the image in the mirror is him and not another animal.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  But every scientific experiment should withstand scrutiny, regardless of how malicious or creative in its criticism it may be. We currently do not have any machine that can measure "qualia" in animals let alone a formal way of quantifying and making sense out of it.
  - roywiggins 11y ago
    We don't have a machine that can measure qualia in humans for that matter!
jmngomes 11y ago
Agreed. I think the whole philosophical discussion of this question is mainly complexity introduced by humans; we invented the definition of word and now expect every animal to formally adhere to our definition of what "empathy" is, or be declared "without empathy". Especially when there are plenty documented examples of animals disregarding their own security to help another animal in distress (including humans): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AkANQls234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AkANQls234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn9SC61Bd7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn9SC61Bd7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_daN5_pUlnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_daN5_pUlnE

jmnicolas 11y ago

I'm not some kind of crazy animal activist, but seriously what's wrong with people : researching empathy by dipping mice tails in hot water or injecting them with vinegar is seriously fucked-up. Should we search for empathy the hard way in these scientists too ?

logicrook 11y ago
Science is a hard work, and sometimes, you need to have some fun too.
ivanhoe 11y ago
yeah, my thoughts exactly... scientists looking for empathy in animals are exposing their own lack of empathy for those very same animals...
- Ygg2 11y ago
  That's all well and great, but should we let people die, because we don't want to hurt some animals? Animals that are bred for the sole purpose of studies and would otherwise had to be killed? Lab mice don't grow in wilds you know. Where do you stop? Do you stop eating bread because there are bits of mice/crickets in it? Do you stop eating carrots, because a family of rabbits might depend on it? Do you stop eating bread because a strain of fungus (which aren't plants and are capable of moving on its own volition) might depend on it?
  - hamax 11y ago
    This is called the continuum fallacy. Just because we cannot draw a strongly defined line it doesn't mean some things aren't definitely wrong. Killing lab mice to develop life saving medicine is fine with me in most cases. Torturing mice to study empathy probably isn't. Either way, besides killing all the lab mice, we can also just stop breeding them, you know.
    - Ygg2 11y ago
      Sure, but it's more complex, than "Can't believe these scientist torture mice for empathy". For now, mice lab animals are our only reliable models. First they weren't "torturing mice for empathy", they were studying them for examining pain receptors. Second the study was used to determine if something has empathy or not. Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that large rocks posses sentience, would you not want to determine that rocks have sentience, even if you have been milling them into concrete. > Either way, besides killing all the lab mice, we can also just stop breeding them, you know. Imagine you are mouse breeder. Your only source of revenue is gone. Are you going to: A) Release them into general mice populace causing potential short term damage by having too many breedable mice, while their genes are potential long term damage to mice population (mice used to test cancer get cancer really quickly)? B) Feed them and chemically castrate them and or keep them in isolation (solitary confinement, yay!). Costs money, not sure if departments have that much free dough lying around C) Kill them painlessly and efficiently? D) Sell them at a loss as pets, even though they aren't suitable as pets (some of the strains die really really quickly, because they are bred for that).

csn 11y ago

Perhaps the thing we call empathy is just a strange side effect of the negative subconscious feedback a member of group-oriented species gets when their friend is, or is going to be harmed, physically or otherwise. The choice between gaining/saving an ally or gaining a treat can certainly be a selfish one, and in my opinion most likely is.

contingencies 11y ago

Yes, because humans are animals. Ignoring humans, while we are different to other animals, we are not really that different, particularly to other social mammals. So the answer remains yes. Note that this answer is self-evident and did not require torturing other beings.

antientropic 11y ago
This is not at all self-evident, and your logic is flawed: you're saying that X (humans) is a subset of Y (animals), all X have property P (empathy), therefore all Y have property P.
- contingencies 11y ago
  The point was that, while you can raise the query from a western scientific reductionist perspective and put ethics completely on hold, we're ridiculously similar genetically and behaviorally, such that the certainty is very high without the need for torture.
  - contingencies 11y ago
    To put this another way, all science is probability-based. To take your philosophical bent to its logical conclusion, you never know that all animals of a similar species have similar abilities for empathy so you should torture them all!
Scarblac 11y ago
By this logic, self-evidently other animals also discuss this on their version of Hacker News.

coldtea 11y ago

>The wrong conclusion to take away from all these studies is that these rodents are humanlike. The right conclusion is that we're animal-like. And yet those two statements are totally analogous -- except for the irrational fear of anthropomorphizing...

araneae 11y ago
They're not, actually. The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and animals. You can see that there's a set of traits that are common among all animals, a smaller set common among mammals, an even small set common amongst primates, etc. And then each species has its own set of unique trait. Rodents aren't like humans and humans aren't like rodents, rodents and human share traits that are likely common among many mammals.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and animals. One just uses "animals" as the universal (generic) thing we all participate in (as a continuum), while the other uses "humans" (or "humanity") for that. Sure, we're animals too, but not "just another animal", but (what we know of as the) pinnacle of the thinking/empathy/etc spectrum". We can think of being human-like in this sense as the top degree in that scale that animals can participate too. (So, "human-like is used a stand-in for "empathetic/thinking/conscious", not as "like an actual human person" -- as it doesn't concern other human attributes -- physiology, looks, etc, only emotional and cognitive ones).

madaxe_again 11y ago

To say that animals can't be empathic because they have selfish motives is bizarre - empathy is selfish, as it's a social survival and ingratiation tool, whether you care to admit such or not. both sides falling into an anthropomorphic trap.

DCPOS_Anthony 11y ago

As much as they can afford to I reckon.

staticelf 11y ago

I am a dog owner and I am completely in the belief that my dog can feel empathy. I see it from time to time. I have a really hard time understanding why some would even make the suggestion that animals generally don't feel empathy? If every animal does it, however, is a different question.

Theodores 11y ago
Tell me about it... I took my sister's dog to my brother-in-law's dad's funeral. The poor mutt does not speak English, has not seen a priest before, has never been to a funeral before, yet the dog was behaving most unusually, not at all able to hold it together, shaking. This was a small family gathering - it was not as if the dog was scared of some huge crowd - plus it was delightfully sunny without the slightest breeze. There were no other reasons I could see for what was going on inside the walnut-sized brain of this dog other than the events going on around her. Most strange.

reitanqild 11y ago

Had an interesting experience a few years ago. Me and some friends visited another friend that had a parrot. * When we came the parrot said hello to everyone. * One of my friends aggravated the parrot by standing on the far side of the cage and making funny faces. * When we left the parrot said bye to everyone but him. * When we came back a couple of weeks later and he had forgotten about the parrot and came too close to the cage it tried to bite him. Would hardly have believed it if I hadn't been there on both occasions.

eternalban 11y ago

data point: Once saw a cat rush a squirrel in the back yard. I yelled at it and it ran away but apparently the poor thing died in fright. What was amazed me was seeing another squirrel come over and actually hug the other one, trying to get it to stand up.