The Groupishness of Human Beings

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In a human society, is it always going to be the case that if you're of a different ethnicity, I will just tend to think of you as a member of the out group? What do you think the evidence from your field of study is about how easy it is to move those lines? If you're around somebody for a long enough time, they seem to be part of your pack. It can come to be very empathetic to them even if you're not biologically related to them. In the primates, the group is the individuals that you know, that you live with and that you know. There are no anonymous individuals that you consider part of your group.

Frans de Waal is a Dutch-American primatologist and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. He is the author of, among other books, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Frans de Waal discuss how primate empathy forms the basis for human morality; the precedent for diversity in human gender and gender roles that exists in non-human primates; and why, despite attempts to separate human behavior from human biology, you can’t have one without the other.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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