Devon McPhee, "Monkeys’ morality is serious business. Human traits such as cooperation, reconciliation and consolation can be traced to primate behavior" (2005)

CLAREMONT, Calif. — Both primates and people can train themselves to increase their moral well-being, researchers said at a recent lecture.

Morality is a naturally occurring phenomenon, cognitive scientist Evan Thompson and primatologist Frans de Waal said in remarks given at “Primates, Monks and the Mind.”

Thompson, the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science and the Embodied Mind in the philosophy department at York University in Toronto, researches consciousness. He focuses on meditative traditions, especially in Buddhism, to explore the possible biological roots of contemplative experiences including empathy and compassion.

His talk, “Exploring Consciousness: Towards a Contemplative Science of Mind and Brain,” focused on the possibility that contemplative mental states may be part of our biological heritage. The brain and body have distinct reactions to such states, he explained, and those reactions may have important implications for how the brain and body work.

Thompson said that people who meditate — because they can generate specific mental states and precisely report on the essence of those states — provide a route into studying how mental states may modify the structure and dynamics of the brain and body over time.

Having detailed information derived from these precise reports could be of great help, said Thompson. “And, in fact, in some experiments [it] has been used to make intelligible aspects of the brain processes that would otherwise simply be treated as noise,” he said.

Thompson discussed a study of Buddhist monks who regularly practice a form of meditation that focuses on generating a mental state of love, kindness and compassion. The study repeatedly required the monks switch from a meditative state to a non-meditative state.

As Buddhists change contemplative states, Thompson said, the researchers saw a quick shift in brain activity patterns. This quick shift was not seen in a control group of meditation beginners.

“The findings are consistent with the idea that attention and affected processes — particularly ones involving empathy, compassion, love and kindness — are flexible mental skills that can be trained,” Thompson said.

De Waal, the C.H. Chandler Professor of Primate Behavior in the psychology department at Emory University in Atlanta, studies the social interaction of primates, including food sharing, conflict resolution and reciprocity, to illuminate the origins of human morality. His work places the contemplative state of humans within a biological context, which reinforces the idea that the ability to control and generate states of well-being is a trait shared by all living beings.

“In Frans’ work, the emphasis has been on empathy and sense of morality,” said Thompson. “What I tried to sketch very briefly was the possibility of extending that perspective to include things like contemplative mental states.”

In his presentation, titled, “On the Possibility of Empathy in Other Animals,” de Waal explained natural selection has created a social nature in primates that includes moral tendencies. The ability to observe innate, basic moral tendencies in primates, including sympathy, empathy and reciprocity, indicates that morality is a natural state that developed before the split of apes and humans during evolution, he said.

To support his theory, de Waal highlighted studies that observed cooperation between apes as evidence of their ability to sympathize and observed reconciliation and consolation as proof that they are able to empathize.

With regard to evolution, he said, being in tune with others is important to survival. “Let’s take, for example, the simplest case,” said de Waal. “You are a bird, you’re in a flock of birds on the ground, a predator comes in. All the birds take off at once. If you’re not in tune with the rest ... you’re the one who is stuck there and will get eaten.”

Food sharing and grooming experiments indicate that primates practice reciprocity, or the returning of favors, which de Waal said is another important survival tool. For example, one experiment observed that if ape A groomed ape B in the morning, in the afternoon ape B usually shared food with ape A before sharing it with others. In other words, reciprocity is an evolutionary exchange mechanism in which apes show gratitude for one another, something we also observe in humans, de Waal explained.

“I’m not saying that monkeys are moral beings in the sense that we are,” said de Waal, “but we would never have been able to develop the morality that we have without empathy and a sense of reciprocity.”

Devon McPhee is a freelance writer living in Newport Beach, Calif.