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["Josh Greenman" <josh.greenman AT gmail.com>]

http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=121

When Monkeys Make Up – Chimps are from Mars, bonobos are from Venus.
(Interview with Robert Sapolsky from In Character, the Journal of
Everyday Virtues)

I never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I
had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla," writes Robert
Sapolsky in his delightful autobiography, A Primate's Memoir: A
Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons. It tells the
story of Sapolsky's three decades of field work in East Africa, where
he studies stress among the members of a tribe of baboons. Baboons
don't willingly come in for a cholesterol test, so the job includes
tranquilizing them with a blowgun. A review in Outside magazine called
the book "a powerful meditation on the biological origins of baboon
and human misery, as well as a naturalist's coming-of-age story
comparable to Jane Goodall's and E. O. Wilson's." In addition to being
an honorary member of the tribe, Sapolsky is a professor of biology
and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur
Foundation genius grant. Like Michael McCullough, who talks about
revenge on page 20, Sapolsky puts forward the idea that reconciliation
is more likely to occur when the relationship of the two parties is
highly valued.

IC: A lot of work is being done with primates and forgiveness. Could
you give us an overview of this research?

Sapolsky: There is this whole hot subject of reconciliation in
primatology. The definition of reconciliation is that after two
animals have had a fight with each other, over the next ten minutes or
an hour or so, there is a higher-than-expected rate of their doing
something nice and affiliative, such as grooming each other. This has
been observed in about twenty-five different species, including most
of the apes. I don't study it in baboons because my beasts never
forgive each other. You see reconciliation with female baboons, but
male baboons never reconcile. For a bunch of reasons, I only study
male baboons. There is nothing that looks like forgiveness among them.

Some primates are miserably aggressive to the point of murder.
Chimpanzees will kill each other. In addition to evolving that, they
also evolve a system that says: Enough. It's over, let's move on. It's
time for some version of reconciliation and it's now called
reconciliative behavior. Certain individuals have a higher rate of
making up than was expected — grooming each other, things like that.
What's fascinating is that it's not just random. There is a pattern
that looks perfectly human, which is that not everybody reconciles
with each other, but some pairings are more likely to reconcile.

What we are seeing is that the more valuable your relationship with
the other animal, the more likely you are to make up afterwards. This
was shown in a brilliant study written by a researcher named Marina
Cords at Columbia University. She took some macaque monkeys, captive
ones, and devised two different situations. Under one the animals were
in two separate cages next to each other and had to individually carry
out a task in order to get a food reward. The other scenario was that
they had to do a cooperative task instead. What she showed was that
the ease of cooperation, when the pair had worked together on a
regular basis, made them more likely to reconcile after tension. This
is akin to saying, "Whoa, he and I go back thirty years to
kindergarten, and we've got a good working relationship. It's probably
worth it to work this out, to get past the tension."

IC: It's interesting that they make up more with members of their own
troops, not enemy troops. Can you elaborate on that phenomenon?

There's a certain logic in that on one level, a strictly utilitarian
level, it's easier to reconcile with animals inside your troop because
these are the ones you're possibly having stable, cooperative
relationships with; and on an emotional level, these are the animals
you know. They're familiar to you. Virtually by definition any baboon
on the other side of the river, whom you don't know, is a scary Other.
So that's going to be a lot harder to do.

IC: What about gender differences in reconciliation?

In my world of baboons, females reconcile, males don't. And what that
may have to do with is almost by definition female relationships with
any other female in the troop are always more valuable than almost any
male's relationship with another male. How come? Because at puberty,
many males pick up and leave their home troop and join some other
troop. Females spend their whole lives in the same troop. So every
adult female has known every other adult female her entire life. They
have a long history together and that means they have more incentive
to make things stable.

IC: Is Frans de Waal, the Dutch-born primatologist now at Emory
University, the big man on campus for the study of primates and
reconciliation?

He is the person who first used the term reconciliation and
demonstrated it among non-human primates. One can say, as I would,
that he is one of the best and most creative primatologists in the
universe. What he has focused on is — number one — that primate
societies have this ability to reconcile in some circumstances. Number
two is that the old, philosophically Hobbesian, view of humans as
intrinsically miserable and violent to each other under a thin veneer
of civility supplied by society is complete nonsense. The evolutionary
roots of altruism and cooperation and even things that look like
empathy are there in lots of closely related species.

I guess the third important thing is that he is the only person out
there who is an expert on both the behavior of chimpanzees and a
closely related species called bonobos. You can't get two more
different species on earth. Chimpanzees are violent, stratified, and
male-dominated. They kill each other and cannibalize each other's
babies. They have something that looks like warfare. Meanwhile,
bonobos are female-dominated and have extremely low rates of
aggression. They solve every tension on earth with sex. The sound bite
is: "Chimps are from Mars, bonobos are from Venus." What you then deal
with is: Who is our closer relative? What's in our genes? What's
constantly emphasized is that we share approximately 98 percent of our
DNA with chimps. What de Waal hones in on is that we also share about
98 percent with bonobos. There is as much rationale in thinking that
the bonobo is our closest relative. There is not a leg to stand on
saying that we have a long evolutionary legacy built into us for
violence, stratification, or any of that mean, nasty stuff.

IC: How do primates reconcile, other than grooming each other?

I think that's about it. They are impressive and clever but, at some
point, they aren't human. Grooming is basically their range. Grooming
is the glue that holds a primate social group together. It's sort of
the equivalent of social gossiping. Everybody just sits around and
grooms each other. In a baboon group, if something scary happens such
as they've just stumbled into a lion, everybody scrambles. Once the
coast is clear, they all come down from the trees and sit in a close
group and groom each other for the next half hour. It's how they make
each other feel better.

IC: Does any of the research suggest to you that it is natural or
inborn that human beings apologize?

Again, it's sort of this punch line — we may be related to some
species that reconcile like crazy. And then we may be related to
species that don't do that. At the end of the day, we're not chimps,
and we're not bonobos, and we're not baboons. We're close relatives,
but we solved our own evolutionary problems. Given that, I would say
that, as a species, we have an equal tendency toward being affiliative
and reconciling and being miserable to each other. We are neither by
our intrinsic nature. What we are is just tremendously sensitive to
social context. It's not that, oh, we're inevitably like this or that.
If you construct the sort of world that facilitates violence, we are a
violent species. You construct a world where the context is one of
compassion and affiliation, and we do just fine in that direction. We
don't have an inevitable tilt towards either. In other words, what our
genetic legacy indicates is that, if you want to fix some of these
problems, they aren't going to be fixed on the genetic level — they
are going to be fixed on the environmental level.

IC: We human beings often hold grudges that make true reconciliation
difficult. Do other primates hold grudges?

Yes. They definitely do. Male baboons certainly do. Example: You get
two guys who get into a fight. Baboons have a whole ritualistic way of
saying, "That's it. I give up. You won." And the ritual shows that at
that point it's finished. Fight's over and you go back to doing what
you were doing. But what you'll see is that with certain guys, with
certain personalities, is that later that day, when it seems to be all
over, this guy encounters the guy who started the fight and they give
a relatively low-tension gesture to each other — basically, the first
guy sticks his rear end in the other guy's face, which is basically
saying, "Everything is cool. We're fine." According to the rules, the
other guy is supposed to sniff at his bottom. And it's here that one
of them slashes the other in the ass, totally breaking the rules. This
certainly looks like a grudge to me. It's not random who does it —
it's certain guys with certain personalities.

IC: What happens to these grudge-bearing baboons?

These are the guys who might be loosely defined as those lacking in
social intelligence. They are likely to slash one too many guys in the
rear. Or they establish a pattern of doing that so that other males
won't form coalitions with them. One of the sound bites is that in the
baboon world attaining high rank has everything to do with having big,
sharp canines and being as aggressive as hell, while maintaining high
rank has everything to do with social intelligence — which
provocations you avoid and impulse control. So those guys who bear
grudges aren't going to do well in the long run. They are less likely
to be able to stay in a high position. They are more likely to get
that horrible, crippling injury or just burn out because they have
burned lots of bridges along the way.

IC: Do primates ever apologize and change their ways?

That's very interesting. Every now and then you get a guy who goes
through some sort of utterly mysterious epiphany and transformation.
Once in a decade, you get a guy who's high-ranking because he's just
an SOB who has to remind everybody of his high rank about eleventy
times a day. And then something happens; he changes. He walks away
from it, and he typically lives a long and uninjured life, doing
affiliative stuff. But this is literally once a decade at best. You
get a bunch of baboonologists together, and everybody knew a guy like
this, and we talk about how much we loved him and how amazing he was.
We wonder where this change came from.

IC: Did you have a guy like that?

Yeah — a guy named Nat, Nathaniel, whom I kind of adored. I have his
picture on my wall. He was at the top of the hierarchy. He was not so
much a brutal alpha male, but he was a big, imposing, muscular guy who
just scared the willies out of everybody. And then one day, he just
picked up and walked away from it and spent the rest of his life
hanging out with females and playing with their babies. I don't know
what happened in his head, but he was wonderful.

IC: Did you ever meet a baboon you thought was just a lousy individual?

Over the years there were two guys who really stood out, and probably
reflected in that I didn't give either the nice Old Testament names
that I really liked. One of them I called Nebuchadnezzar, and he was a
complete creep. Every time anything upsetting in his world happened
(which was often because he wound up being rather low-ranking because
in his heart of hearts he was a coward), instead of picking on
somebody his own size he'd find an adult female to take it out on. All
he was about was giving ulcers to avoid getting them. He was a
horrible animal. The other was a guy Nick, who was one of those mean,
flinty, tough, leathery guys who wind up being very dominating. He
rose to the top of the hierarchy, and he did things like ignore
reconciliation signals at a point where any normal, decent baboon is
supposed to say, "It's over with, it's done, hooray, I won." Instead
he would attack when the other animal was giving a submission signal.
One of my favorite things he ever did, just in terms of how both
sophisticated he was while being a creep, was when I had to dart
another guy, Reuben, to anesthetize him because I needed to take blood
samples. Darting can be pretty complicated. These are wild animals and
they're going to go down in the middle of the field where you are
hoping that everybody else doesn't freak out and try to rip you apart
or, if he has lots of rivals, rip him apart. It's a pretty hairy
undertaking, and you try to do it in a circumstance where when he goes
down, you're going to get to him quickly. One day I darted Reuben, a
high-ranking guy, and the worst possible thing happened — he picked up
and ran down to this stream bed and passed out on the other side. I
had to drive five minutes around the stream to get to him. Just as I
rounded the bend, I spotted another baboon moving toward him very
quickly. It was Nick. One of the reasons darting a baboon is so hairy
is the fear that a rival might maul him during these vulnerable
minutes. And here was Nick, barreling down on the semi-conscious
Reuben. I was too far away to dart Nick. Then I saw Nick, slowly,
forcefully placing a hand on Reuben's shoulder and another on his
haunch. Then Nick gave a loud, triumphant vocalization we call a
wa-hoo call, so everyone in the troop can then twist around and look
at what happened. And he does this, and then he marches away. I
couldn't believe it. The SOB was taking credit for my darting. But, as
often happens to high-ranking guys, Nick eventually got a crippling
injury and went down in a hail of bullets and spent a small amount of
time as a low-ranking, very disliked guy in the troop before he picked
up and tried his fortunes elsewhere, and I never saw him again.

IC: One of the things I enjoyed in A Primate's Memoir is that the
characters, human and baboon, really came alive. I believe one
reviewer might have gone so far as to compare the baboons to
characters in Dickens! But is this an anthropomorphic way of viewing
them, and is it something scientists do?

It's certainly stuff they did eighty years ago, when it was a
descriptive science and a much more emotional than intellectual one.
And then as it turned into a real science, it became terribly
embarrassing to do anything like talk about your animals' emotions,
let alone your emotions in response to your animals, and there's no
way to avoid the fact that these are animals. Close relatives, can
have some similar feelings and evoke very strong ones in us. And some
of the trendiest and most scientific words in the business these days
are words like emotion or temperament when describing primate
personality. This is not anthropomorphizing. You know, you do a
certain amount of it just to make the ideas accessible, but it's real
science.

They're close relatives, and they are close relatives emotionally.
They are familiar, they can be anxious, depressed. They can be
incredibly nice to each other and in a way that some evolutionary bio
with a calculator and clipboard can turn into equations. But at the
end of the day, these are animals with emotional systems that are very
familiar.

IC: Does primate research have implications for married couples?

Yes. If nothing else, baboons are not great communicators and are
particularly lousy at expressing their feelings, except for rotten,
vile, aggressive ones. But to the extent that grooming is a surrogate
for communication, that's important. Reconciliation is very important.
In one of the sound bites — oh, a relationship is hard work — a
relationship among non-human primates, if you're going to have stable
reciprocity, that takes work too. You've got to be willing to be the
first one to do the reconciliative thing. I don't know if somewhere in
the head of a macaque is the notion, "I shouldn't be the first to
groom, because that's admitting I was the one at fault." That one's
not happening. But there is a certain equivalency in why it's hard to
take the first step. The very fact that it's hard shows that it is
worth it.