The Fallacy of Empathy
Written by SM
We feel like we understand animals best when they show human-like behavior. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
It is 6am and I have to get ready for work. As I sip on my coffee, I watch our dog giving the heartiest of yawns and turning over to sleep for another eternity. I feel like we’re soul mates.
Who hasn’t had such a moment of deep empathy with an animal, almost to a point of seeing the world through their eyes? It is one of the most fascinating experiences in nature. And for me, as a behavioral biologist, it is the bane of my profession.
Discovering how and why animals behave helps us to understand our nature. Moreover, it caters to our curiosity about anything unknown and stimulates our creativity. However, we struggle with the question of how to measure animal behavior. We can translate some aspects of behavior into numbers – like how high does a dolphin jump or which tones are in the song of a nightingale – but these numbers never do justice to the real thing.
This is where we, as scientists, have to become storytellers. And this is where we are in danger of falsely imposing ourselves on animals. A recent example illustrates why this is problematic: researchers have found that a fish (the cleaner wrasse) can best the so-called mirror test, a test in which an animal has to exhibit a certain degree of self-recognition to pass it. This was huge news as only very few non-human animals such as great apes, bottlenose dolphins and elephants have passed this test before. Are small coral reef fish little geniuses like dolphins? Do we have to radically change our understanding of animal intelligence? If we make the mistake of putting ourselves in the position of the fish, we feel compelled to say yes! If we recognize ourself in the mirror, why shouldn’t we have a human-like understanding of ourself?
This sounds absurd. And it is. It is more likely that cleaner wrasses pass the test because they have evolved to focus on their visual perception which enables them to be extra-good fish cleaners. But, while nobody argues that cleaner wrasses have the same cognitive complexity as your neighbour (hopefully), these assumptions so far have not been questioned for all the other animals that passed the test that we judged in our human terms as “highly intelligent”. This example shows that we cannot infer such a huge concept as self-awareness from a simple test. And how we falsely value human-like behavior (recognition in a mirror) as intelligent.
It would be a huge step forward for us if we could accept that animals follow their own logic which works in a completely different way from ours. A new vocabulary that distinguishes animal behavior from human values is necessary to reach this goal. Here are a few suggestions: change “self-awareness” to “self-recognition” and “intelligence” to “complexity” or “adaptability” or “creativity” or whatever fits the specific case. This step of dissolving ourselves from animals is a hard one to make. It means that I have to accept that I’ll never truly understand the inner world of our flatshare dog. But it’s a step worth taking.
Good article. But who wrote it? Presumably you, Stefan?
Thank you, I’m glad that you like it! And good point, I added a small authorship line on the top of the article.