Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:28 — 94.6MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More

Dr. Frans de Waal, a two-time TED Speaker, twelve-time author, biologist, and ethologist spent the majority of his life studying primate behavior and social interactions. In our oddly fascinating conversation, he debunks commonly held beliefs we hold about our closest relatives and draws interesting parallels in our leadership practices.

Who knew we were so similar in the way we operate and lead? Could that be due to the fact that we share 99% of the same DNA?

Named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most influential people today, Frans published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and is currently a Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University.

Tune in to learn about the striking leadership similarities between humans and primates:

• • • Leadership practices that date back millions of years
    • Leadership principles that govern primates and humans
    • How cultural norms influence behaviors
    • How female and male leadership differ in the primate world
    • The role of alpha males and characteristic traits of successful leaders

Connect with Frans de Waal:

• Website
• TED Talk

* * *

Full Transcription:

Frans de Waal: Another thing that people think is what animals do must be instinctive and what humans do is based on whatever; culture, education, things like that. I think that’s an enormous simplification because animals, of course, also have cultures. They transfer knowledge and habits to each other. A chimpanzee is adult when they’re 16 or something, so they have an enormous amount of time in which to learn how to live their life and do things. I would say in the primates, things are – the balance between, let’s say, what is learned and what is cultural and what is natural or instinctive is very similar to our species.

Tanya: That’s Frans de Waal, two-time TED speaker, 12-time author, biologist, and ethologist that, through his research, draws fascinating parallels between primates and humans, In his TED talk titled Moral Behaviors in Animals, which has been viewed by millions of people, he shares groundbreaking research that debunks preconceptions we have long-believed to be true about animals and our proximity to them. Named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people today, Frans has published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and is currently a professor of primate behavior in the department of psychology at Emory University.

Frans, what drove you to studying primates and where did your love for primates, or for animals really, start?

Frans de Waal: Well, I’ve always been, as a child already, been interested in animals. At that time, it was small animals and usually fish or salamanders or something. The primates itself, that was secondary. That came much later when I was a student. Of course, I had no primates around in the Netherlands at the time.

Tanya: What really prompted your interest to start really diving into the behaviors of primates. At what point did that happen in your life?

Frans de Waal: Well, I went to study biology and I was very disappointed. I went to study biology because I was interested in animals and then all the animals I saw were already dead and I had to dissect them. It was very much focused on anatomy and on systematic of plants and things like that, and biochemistry, which we now call molecular biology. Those were the subjects that I was dealing with and I was really disappointed. I started working in a psychology lab, just over the summer to earn some money. They had two chimpanzees, which is unusual of course. In a way, it’s ridiculous for a psychology lab to have two chimps sitting around, among the offices basically. That was really fun and that got me interested in the primates. Then I moved to another university where I could do, finally, animal behavior and I started working with birds and with rats. The birds actually were wild birds, so I worked in the field a little bit with those birds. That’s how I got involved in animal behavior.

Tanya: That’s so interesting. Out of curiosity, the office of psychology was that animal psychology or human psychology?

Frans de Waal: No, this was the most ridiculous thing. It was a big building for human psychology and on the top floor they had, among the offices, a room in which they had put a cage with two chimpanzees. The chimpanzees very often escaped and ran around and people got scared of them because they’re, of course, potentially dangerous. I played with those chimps and I got really interested – their intelligence was so extremely obvious, I got interested in that.

Tanya: That is so unusual. I don’t think I’ve ever heard about that. This is just a very deep curiosity of mine. What do you know about how being around animals influences human beings or positively impacts kids?

Frans de Waal: Yes, I think all children are interested in animals, and of course, they sleep with stuffed animals and they see movies that have talking animals. I think all children are interested. I’m always curious why about half the people, when they become adolescent and adult, lose that interest because there’s a lot of people who don’t want to be compared with animals and feel that it’s insulting to call them animals. All children have this fondness of animals and are really interested in them and feel connected with them, and actually better connected with them than most adults.

We did one time research a zoo, where we looked at public reactions to the animals, and we notice that, for example, if the chimpanzees had a huge fight that was really serious, the kids got very upset and they watched it and they stared at it. Many of the adults would be laughing; they thought it was funny that they were playing. The kids had a better perception of what was going on among the chimps, I think, than the adults.

Tanya: Anecdotally, my family – I have three kids, two identical twins of two and one that’s three. We’re part of this – we have a membership to this – I live in New York City, so not a whole lot of animals around. We’re part of this membership, where we got to go to a small petting zoo that take tremendous care of their animals. You can only go for a limited amount of time and I’ve just so loved seeing my children around the animals and the compassion that they have for them and feed them and care for them. I don’t have a lot of data around how this really impacts them per sé but I can see that it is a very lovely experience for them.

Frans de Waal: Kids connect in a natural way with animals. They don’t feel superior to animals like many adults do. We are humans and they are animals. Kids don’t think they’re unnecessarily better or more or less intelligent than animals, so they connect in a very natural way. It’s only later on that people develop these attitudes that, for me, are very puzzling, where you put yourself above them and put yourself separate from them.

Tanya: Yes that’s is puzzling. I wonder how and when each – not everybody’s like that but how we develop that. Having spent most of your life – you’re a 12-time author, you’re a professor, you’re a 2-time TED speaker, your achievements are really wide. What would you say are the two things or the biggest things, doesn’t have to be two, that you’re most proud of?

Frans de Waal: In my work, I was the first to talk about empathy in animals. Not empathy of us for animals but empathy responses among animals. For example, now we have all this research on empathy by dogs or by rats or by primates. In the 1990s, I was the first to say that animals empathized with the feelings and the emotions of others and there was an enormous amount of resistance at the time. People really didn’t want to hear this because in general, people like to hear things about animals that are dark and negative, like animals kill each other and they’re nasty to each other. They try to be dominant over each other. That kind of stories people like to hear but as soon as you say they – they also can be friends with each other or they can empathize with each other or they help each other sometimes, that was the thing in the 1990s that people didn’t like to hear, especially in the sciences, but also outside.

I had to fight to get this whole concept through and now, we are at the point where we really believe that all mammals, maybe also beyond the mammals, but certainly all mammals have empathy responses, which are regulated in a way – we think it relates to maternal behavior and that’s why females have [actually] more of it than males in general. It’s regulated by the same systems across the board in all these species. That’s an idea that has really taken hold now, to the point that if you say now that, let’s say, an elephant has empathy for another elephant, people will say, yeah, of course they do, but that was controversial at the time.

Tanya: That’s amazing. You really pioneered that whole development of empathy, which is incredible. What would be a second one – sorry, before I forget. You also wrote a whole book on that, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. When did you publish that?

Frans de Waal: That was shortly after. I think that was probably 2005 or something, 2009. Another thing that I did is I wrote Chimpanzee Politics. That’s the first book that I wrote and I just had my PhD, I think, when I published it. That got an enormous amount of attention, also here in Washington because Newt Gingrich, Republican, brought it to the attention of the freshman Republicans, that all of them had to read Chimpanzee Politics. That was about power structure and coalition formation. Basically, male chimpanzees – more of the males than the females do that. People were really fascinated by that because it was the first time that they read that you have alpha males for example. The term alpha male became fashionable after that. You have alpha males who try to reach the top position by making friends with others and so on, so there was a very political – very Machiavellian-type story.

Tanya: How much of the primates’ behavior emulates human behavior?

Frans de Waal: Well emulates makes it sound as if they copy it from us. I think the similarities between human behavior and animal behavior are due to shared ancestry. We share ancestors with the chimpanzee and these ancestors probably did the same thing. They had probably male power structures, where coalition formation was very important. Yes, we have all these things in common. Certainly, more basic things, something like empathy or cooperation in general, those go back much further, not just even to primates; you find that in all sorts of animals.

Tanya: Actually in your TED talk titled, Moral Behavior in Animals, you define empathy as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I thought that was interesting. One of the things that I have been speaking of with some of the other guests that have been on the podcast, including neuroscientists and other experts, is the noticeable decrease in our society of empathy. What are your thoughts on that?

Frans de Waal: I’m not sure that I believe that kind of data because personally I don’t notice the decrease in empathy so much. I know that people complain about all the use of social media and all the staring at cell phones and things like that that people do. You know, social media, we call it social media, they are social. People are interacting on these media. They have shifted their interactions and maybe also their empathy responses from direct ones that you do around the table, so to speak, to more indirect ones that you do over your phone or over your computer. I’m not sure that all the use of social media and attention to is has led to a decrease of empathy but people seem to claim that, yeah.

Tanya: Yes, there’s certainly claims of that and studies of it. Actually, when I was getting ready to chat with you, I saw a study that said something to the effect of a 40% decrease in empathy. That especially is prevalent in younger generations, starting from millennials and below. I don’t know –

Frans de Waal: The older generation always complains about the younger generation. They’re always stupid or behind or insensitive. Actually, at the moment I look at the younger generation as our only hope because the older generation of my generation, we have messed up the whole world. I look at the younger people as the ones who are maybe going to save us. Yeah, people always complain about them.

Tanya: Hopefully, we can certainly make some progress because our planet, our environment certainly needs saving, unquestionably.

Frans de Waal: Yeah, and who are the ones who are most motivated to do that? You can see that at the moment it’s the younger generation. It’s not the baby boomers who are doing to do that.

Tanya: Yeah, and in my case for example, something happened when I had kids where my motivation to really get up to speed on what is happening in the world with the climate change and everything, I was kicked into high gear when my children were born. Something about leaving our planet in a better state than when we leave it, is important to me, and having spoken to a lot of people, to them as well. Yes, I would agree with that.

Thinking about empathy and everything that you have learned about that through our fellow primates, what do you see is the connection between empathy and leadership?

Frans de Waal: That’s an interesting one. Normally in a group of chimpanzees, the most empathic individuals are usually females. They’re the ones who – for example, a typical empathic response would be called consolation. Someone has lost a fight or someone has fallen out of a tree is very upset, who is going to go over to embrace them and kiss them and groom them? That’s usually the females. The one exception in that regard is the alpha male. The alpha male is the most empathic male usually. He’s the one who provides reassurance to a lot of individuals, who also breaks up fights and protects the weaker parties very often, in that situation. The alpha male is the, sort of, consoler in chief.

I always find it interesting that in human society, that’s very often the case too. If there’s a hurricane or if there’s an earthquake, it is the Pope or the President or some high ranking individual who goes there and tries to reassure everyone. That’s a role that is, sort of, woven into the alpha male role. People always things that alpha males are bullies who beat up everybody, and they exist; there are alpha male bullies also in humans. There are alpha males who don’t do any of these nice things and basically terrify everybody, but the typical alpha males that I’ve known are peacemakers and unifiers and consolers and have a very positive role. That’s also what makes them, often popular. If they are like that, then they become popular leaders and they sometimes stay in power for very long because the group keeps them in power. The group will support them if they are challenged by somebody else, which always happens on occasion. If the alpha male is popular, then the whole group is going to support them and usually then they stay just where they are.

Tanya: How long do typical alpha males stay in power?

Frans de Waal: In chimpanzees, that would be for or five years, but there are alpha males who have stayed in power for 12 years, alpha males that are really popular. The ones who are bullies, they often end badly in the sense that as soon as there’s a challenge, of course the others are going to help the challenger usually. They’re sometimes driven out of the group or attacked by the other group.

Tanya: That’s so interesting and so many parallels we can draw here in the business world of leadership. Of that alpha male or that group of alpha males that stayed in power for such a long time, what was unique about them? Why do you think that their tenure was extended?

Frans de Waal: Well, I think the alpha males who keep the peace, who are good at interrupting fights and protecting the underdog and consoling the parties afterwards, that’s the sort of alpha male that will stay in power long because the group will support them. Alpha males who are bullies and everyone is terrified of them, they’re just waiting for the occasion that someone challenges them, a younger male challenges them. Then the whole group thinks, well that’s a good occasion to help the young male and then the position is usually ended that way.

In the wild, we now know because when I was a student, I saw a horrible case of a high ranking male who was killed by other males. At the time since I work in captivity, this was at a large zoo colony people said, well, what do you expect that happens at the zoo. Now, we know at least a dozen cases in the wild where alpha males have been terminated by the group, basically, in a horrible way. I think that happens mostly to alpha males who are bullies. Alpha males who terrorize everybody, who cannot control their aggression and do not bring peace to the group, they are the ones who then, if the occasion arises, they get punished or expelled by the group.

When they get expelled, that has also happened in the field, they get driven out of the group and they have a very difficult existence then because they cannot join another group. In chimpanzees, the groups are hostile between each other and so the ex-alpha male has then to live in the boundary areas between groups, which is a very dangerous place to live in.

Tanya: Wow! That sounds so familiar to some of the dynamics in our society, frankly. I’m wondering, having studied really the psychology and the inner workings of animals for so long, primates, what has been your biggest lessons on how to live and what have you learned from them?

Frans de Waal: You mean my own life?

Tanya: Hm-mm.

Frans de Waal: I myself, even though I like to watch all this primate behavior, I’m not very active in the power politics myself. I’m, of course, a professor at a big psychology department and so we have faculty meetings with all these big professors, talk with each other and there’s power politics going on there but I’m usually staying out of all this. I’m more an observer than a participant. I do think I have a better idea of what’s going on usually because I pick up details of behavior so easily. I may have a better grip of what is going on but I don’t use that information to further my own position, so to speak.

Tanya: What are some of the biggest lessons that primates have talked you about life and living in general?

Frans de Waal: Oh, I think we are an intensely social species, and maybe I don’t need to tell anyone that because everyone realizes how sociable we are. It is true that, for example, in the American culture, there’s a lot of emphasis on individualism and autonomy, which maybe relates to the history of conquering the West. The cowboy on the horse with his guns and everything, the independent, autonomous hero of the tale. That’s an ideal that lives in this particular culture but I’m from a very different country, the Netherlands, which is a very small place, very crowded, overcrowded country. Not militaristic at all and very much focused on what we call consensus building. We try to get along because we have to get along, since it is such a crowded place, so that’s a very different culture.

I think that also is the reason, maybe, why I was so interested in conflict resolution and reconciliation behavior and empathy responses in my animals at a time when everyone was studying competition and winning and losing and all of these things. That has, fortunately, changed now. We have a much broader view of animal behavior and also of human behavior. All this focus that we used to have on selfishness and competition and winning and losing has made place for more interesting cooperation in our societies and in animal societies.

Tanya: Well, I certainly see the rhetoric in the business world going towards collaboration and cooperation, and we, as of us versus I-type conversations, that makes perfect sense that that also would be seen in the animals and in the primates. You mentioned something about conflict resolution. I just wrote an article about that. I’m very curious, how do primates resolve conflicts?

Frans de Waal: Well, the first thing is when I was a student, I discovered reconciliation behavior in the chimpanzees, and this happened because I saw big fight in the colony that I studied. A couple of hours later, I saw two chimpanzees embrace and kiss and the whole group got vey excited by it and everyone was hooting and interested in it. I was very puzzled. I thought, what is the big deal, what’s going on here. Until much later, I realized that the two individuals who had kissed and embraced were the same individuals who had had the fight a couple of hours before. That’s when I realized that these chimps maybe reconcile after fights.

We started studying it and, yes, they systematically do that and now we know actually for lots of species, it’s not just the chimpanzees, it’s lots of primate species and many social animals like, let’s say, dolphins and elephants and wolves, they all have reconciliations after fights, which means that they have conflicting interests which lead to confrontation. The relationship remains very valuable to them and the cooperation that they derive from it is valuable to them, and so they have to repair the relationship. We now have this whole field of conflict resolution studies in animals and I think there’s not a social animal that doesn’t do it. That’s one way they resolve conflict.

Then sometimes you have more complex ways, where individuals mediate. For example, in chimpanzees you may have a fight between two males. The males are unable to reconcile, they just keep staring at each other and they don’t really do anything. Then an adult female, usually an older female, will step in and bring the parties together. It’s usually not done by males because as soon as one of the males approaches one of these contestants, it starts to look like he’s taking sides and so the males cannot really interfere. It’s not done by younger females because they are often the cause of these fights and they may make things, actually, worse instead of better. It’s an older female with a lot of authority who steps in. Sometimes, these females they move the males actually literally together. They grab the arm of a male and they drag him towards the other male and they sit sometimes between them for a couple of minutes before they disappear, so the females mediate. That’s a complex form of conflict resolution that sometimes occurs.

Tanya: Wow that’s amazing. I did not think that they – our lovely primates here would have that level of sophistication and ability to do that. One thing that you mentioned, you said that they have, on the first answer, a systematic way of resolving conflict. Do they resolve conflict 100% of the time, every time that it occurs?

Frans de Waal: No because sometimes they have conflict with individuals they don’t care about. If my biggest enemy insults me, I’m not going to bother with that, but if my best friend says something and we have a conflict, then yes. I won’t give up that friendship so easily. Reconciliation is typical of relationships that we call valuable, so it’s called the valuable relationship hypothesis, which has been tested also experimentally on animals. The more value there is in the relationship, the more you will see conflict resolution. The less value there is the less you see it.

For example, in chimpanzees, the males are more conciliatory than the females. That may sound counterintuitive because people always think the females are so peaceful and so on. Females have major conflicts sometimes and they are very bad at reconciling them, whereas the males, they take it easier in a way. They will have a fight and a conflict and then a couple of hours later, they are grooming each other and they are sitting together and they are playing together and they get completely over it, it seems.

I’m [partially] very familiar with this. I’m from a family of six boys and so I think I was prepared to see these things. Yeah, the females have fewer conflicts because they avoid conflict at all cost with their best friends and their kin, their family. The females have a certain small group of individuals that they avoid conflicts with, but if they have a conflict with one of their rivals, one of the females they don’t care about, they’re not going to reconcile. They keep grudges for a long time with those.

Tanya: Well that sounds very familiar too. It’s really fascinating to see our history from an animalistic standpoint and our apple didn’t fall so far from the tree, so to speak!

Frans de Waal: Chimps are, of course, also our closest relatives. Chimps and bonobos, we haven’t talked about bonobos yet, but they are our two closest relatives. They are so close to us that some biologists have argued that we should put all of them in the same genus. We have a special genus for ourselves, which is homo; we are homo sapiens. The homo genus is our genus but people have argued that we are so close to chimps and bonobos that we actually all belong in one genus.

Tanya: What’s your philosophy on that?

Frans de Waal: Well, I will let humans keep their own [29:30] if they like it so much. I know it’s a bit of an ego question for our species I think, but taxonomically speaking, if you would find two bird species that are genetically as close as humans are to chimps, we would obviously put them in the same genus. We would not worry about that.

Tanya: Wow, that’s interesting. For you, what are some of the biggest misconceptions on top of this whole empathy thing that you really rolled out in the ‘90s? What are some of the misconceptions that you’ve constantly bumped up against that people are just so misinformed about?

Frans de Waal: One of them is related to gender is that people saying that in the primates you have a few dominant males who own the females. Sort of the boss, but more than a boss, he’s also the owner, so the patriarchal society so-to-speak. There are a few primates who are like that, but not our closest relatives. In the primates, the females are pretty autonomous in most primates in the sense that they have their own life, and they do their own things, and they collect their own food. They’re not owned by anybody. They have to deal sometimes with aggressive males, that’s for sure. They may want to avoid those sometimes, but they’re not owned by anybody.

Then you have species, like the bonobo, which is equally close to us as the chimpanzee where actually the females dominate the males, at least most females dominate most males. People have a misconception as far as the gender roles are concerned. They have all – I think [31:14] from certain baboon studies where they have decided that males own the females, but in our closest relatives, that’s not the case.

Tanya: In baboons, is that true that males own the females?

Frans de Waal: There is a species of baboon, it’s called the hamadryas baboon, which is the sacred baboon that the Egyptians have in their temples and everything. That baboon is a bit like that. The male collects females, and keeps them close, and punishes them if they leave them. Yes, so those males have what they call a harem group. That’s very unusual. That particular baboon is very – and the males are also twice the size of females, which is really not the case in our society, or in the case of chimps and bonobos.

Tanya: That’s one. It’s really the gender roles in chimps and bonobos. What else have you noticed as just a real misinformation?

Frans de Waal: Another thing that people think is that what animals do must be instinctive, and what humans do is based on whatever, culture, education, things like that. I think that’s an enormous simplification because animals, of course, also have cultures. They transfer knowledge to each other and habits to each other. A chimpanzee is adult when they’re 16 or something. They have an enormous amount of time in which to learn how to live their life and do things.

I would say in the primates, things are – the balance between, let’s say, what is learned, and what is cultural, and what is natural or instinctive, is very similar to our species. People sometimes look at what chimpanzees do, or what bonobos do, must be instinctive compared to what we do. It’s all based on the same principles. We are a mix of biology and culture. I think the same is true in other primates.

Tanya: That’s very interesting. What are some of the cutting-edge theories, right now, that you’re working on or that you’ve seen around?

Frans de Waal: One of the main areas of research at the moment is cultural traditions. I think that for the last 20 years, people have been documenting how different groups of the same species may have very different behavior just as in humans. Let’s say, Italians have very different behavior from the Chinese. We call that cultural differences. We call it in the primates also cultural differences. You eat different foods. You prepare it in a different way and so on. These differences we find also.

For example, if you take a group of monkeys, let’s say, out of captivity, and you throw them in the forest, they’re probably not going to survive. Many people have tried these things, these release programs. They’re very unsuccessful partly because these monkeys don’t know what the predators are, so they run into dangers that they don’t know; partly they don’t know how to find their food, which foods to eat, which ones are poisonous and so on.

They are very dependent on transmitted knowledge. If you take them from captivity and throw them in the forest, they don’t have that knowledge, and so they cannot survive. People don’t always realize to what extent other animals, like monkeys, but this applies to many species, I think, how other animals are dependent on a set of cultural knowledge that’s basically around.

Tanya: How is their cultural knowledge distinctive? Is it geographic based, like humans, or how do you even see that?

Frans de Waal: It’s different from group to group. You may have one group of chimpanzees in Africa, which cracks nuts with stones and eats these nuts. Then you have another group that has the same stones and the same nuts available, but they ignore them, and they don’t do anything with them. That is based on a knowledge difference.

One group, somebody has discovered that you can eat these things and how to open them. you get an accumulation of knowledge. Now we see these differences. In the old days, we saw that all members of a particular species would behave in the same way, but now we have all these people documenting the regional variation and behavior.

Tanya: In other words, in the same region you could have two different groups that behave very differently.

Frans de Waal: They’re usually in separate regions. In all the primate groups, there is migration. The migrants, of course, bring knowledge. If you have, let’s say, two groups of chimpanzees who live side-by-side. One doesn’t know that you can eat certain nuts. They get a migrant out from another group who will show them, basically, what you can eat. The adjacent groups – and the same is true, of course, in humans. We have a lot of migration within society going on. The adjacent groups, they bring knowledge to each other.

Tanya: In what form is knowledge passed down? Is there some type of genetic pass down, or it’s from watching, and seeing, and observing?

Frans de Waal: It’s mostly from observation. Knowledge is not something you get genetically unless – there are certain techniques, like hunting techniques, that may be instinctive. The knowledge comes from watching other individuals do certain things. The youngsters, for example, always watch their mother. What is their mother eating? They will always taste what she’s eating. That’s how they get a lot of their knowledge.

Tanya: The reason I said this is because I’ve had several anecdotal conversations with people in my network where, for example, one of my daughter’s best friends, who’s also three, without seeing her father do that ever, started to enjoy eating salt. She would just put salt on the table, and literally put her finger in it and eat the salt. Her father used to do that when he was young, never did that as an adult.

Somehow, that habit got passed down to his daughter. When she did that, they were shocked that that happened. That’s why I asked is it something that is passed down from genetically, or I don’t know, energetically, or however it is passed down. We’ve seen some of that happening in humans.

Frans de Waal: Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if the taste of certain things is genetic in the sense that our families who have a different taste than other families, so-to-speak. Not based on observation, but just on their genetic background. The behavior, itself, of putting salt on the table and eating it like that, I think I would find it unlikely that that’s passed down genetically. I think there must be an element of observation in there.

Tanya: Yeah, no, absolutely, and I’m just looking at this, my notes. You said alpha males, in your alpha male talk, sex is secondary to food?

Frans de Waal: Yeah, well that’s typical of – in biology, of course, we always think this way is that what drives evolution is reproduction. If you don’t reproduce, if you don’t have offspring, you’re not in the evolutionary game. Only the individuals who reproduce are in the evolutionary game. Males can enhance their reproduction by mating with a lot of females and fertilizing them. They’re very sexed focused in their behavior because that’s what a successful male does.

Females are much more food oriented. For females, their reproductive success is not based on mating with a lot of males because they still get the same number of offspring regardless of how many males they mate with. The females don’t enhance their reproduction by doing a lot of mating, but they can enhance their reproduction by securing good food.

Having good food on the table is important if you have offspring. The females are much more food oriented. In the primate group, the typical competition among males is over females. The typical competition among females is over food. The males don’t particularly care about food. If there’s a female in estrus, meaning that she is sexually attractive at that point, the males are all looking at that female. They may completely forget to eat. They may skip food for three days, or something like that.

Tanya: This is going to sound like a really funny question, but do animals make climaxing a priority?

Frans de Waal: There are some studies on orgasm in the primates. For males, we always assume that they have orgasms because they ejaculate. For females, for a long time, people didn’t think that they needed it, or that they were not interested in it, but now we have a lot of studies. If you look, for example, at bonobos during sex, it’s clear that the females, they squeal, and they have facial expressions. I’m sure they’re very excited.

There must be something going on, which I would think is orgasm. I do think female primates can have orgasms. Whether that’s a priority, well, I’m not sure what you mean by that. Is that you mean they would skip partners who don’t give them orgasms or something like that? Is that what you mean?

Tanya: Yeah, for example, if they have one that’s better than the other, they might tend to repeat.

Frans de Waal: Yeah, it’s very well possible. The primates also masturbate, and females – for males, that’s of course well known. Females also masturbate. Why would you masturbate as a female primate if you don’t have some pleasure associated with it? That would make no sense at all. I’m sure they have intense sexual pleasures.

Tanya: Wow, a lot more similarities than I ever imagined. This is brilliant. What do you think that we did not cover now that we should? Anything that we didn’t talk about that we should?

Frans de Waal: We didn’t talk about female leadership.

Tanya: Oh, good one, okay.

Frans de Waal: My last book, which is called Mama’s Last Hug, is about a female chimpanzee whose name is Mama. Mama was an alpha female in a chimpanzee colony who was alpha female for 40 years.

Tanya: Is that the longest documented alpha female?

Frans de Waal: Maybe. The females usually don’t change position as much as the males. The males are always competing. As soon as one male gets old or weak, other males will take over his position. The females, since their rank order is mostly based on personality and age, there’s much less reason to compete over that because you cannot change your personality and age so much. Mama was alpha female until she was almost dead. She died at 59. I always find it interesting that she was such an important figure because the chimpanzees are always described as male-dominated. They are. Typically, the males are dominant over the females.

That whole colony, which was 25 chimps, was run, basically, by the oldest male and the oldest female. Mama was the oldest female, and then there was an older male. Physically, she was not dominant over the adult males, but socially she had a lot more to say in the colony than they did. I think that’s the situation that we humans also can understand. We don’t usually rank people in the company, so-to-speak, based on their physical abilities. We rank them on other criteria, like who makes the decisions. If you do that, you get Mama as a very important figure in that chimpanzee colony.

Female leadership is even more developed, I would say, in the bonobo because in the bonobo the alpha individual may be a female. Actually, I don’t know any bonobo society in the world, or in captivity, where the top individual is not a female. They are typically led by a female, so female leadership is a very interesting topic. In my talk on the alpha male, I didn’t say much about it, but I think it’s a topic that needs to be explored.

Tanya: What do you think is interesting about female leadership? How is it different? How does that manifest?

Frans de Waal: It is not different in the sense – people sometimes think that the female leader must be gentler, and nicer, and stuff like that. I’m not sure that for the female primates I could say that. A female who’s at the top, like let’s say in the bonobo group, may be very firm. She may not be frequently aggressive, but she may punish individuals who don’t obey, so-to-speak. That’s the only way to be dominant is to be firm. It is not necessarily a gentler form of dominance. I don’t know if it is really substantially different.

We did a study one time on human behavior. We did a study in operating rooms in the hospital where I looked at the teamwork of the surgeon and his team, so-to-speak. We did 200 surgeries where we looked at what people were doing. We had expected that would find some leadership differences between female surgeons and male surgeons because nowadays we have both of them and actually almost 50-50. We looked at that and we found extremely little difference between the leadership style of the male and the female surgeons.

We did find one interesting thing is that the more mixed the team is in the operating room, the more cooperation you’ll get. If you have only men or only women, it doesn’t work so well. If you have a more mixed team, it works better. Interesting finding that we have.

Tanya: Does that emulate what you also observed in the primates?

Frans de Waal: One thing that was similar to what we find in the primates is that if you have a female surgeon with a mostly male team, there is a high level of cooperation. If you have a male surgeon with a mostly female team, there’s a high level of cooperation. The problems in the team start when you have, let’s say, a female surgeon with a lot of women in the room, or a male surgeon with a lot of men in the room. That’s where you have the problems.

That’s very similar to in the primates. The alpha individual needs to prove himself or herself towards their own gender. They don’t particularly care about the other gender. A man needs to prove herself against other men. A woman needs to prove herself against other women. In that sense we found that the operating room is a microcosm of primate society in the sense that you get the same dynamics going on.

Tanya: Wow, that is very interesting. By the way, it makes sense. We work with executive leadership, and as you know there’s not a ton of women at the top. What you said, which is females having to prove themselves to other females, oftentimes the toughest ones, or the toughest competition is female to female, not the other way around. That’s interesting.

Frans de Waal: Oh yeah, you should never underestimate female competition. People sometimes think that females would get along, and they’re fine, and peaceful, and stuff like that. In all the primates, there’s an enormous amount of female to female competition. The females have their own hierarchy for that reason. They have their own rank order because this is such an important issue for them.

It’s not necessarily much nicer than what the males do in terms of competition, even though the males – in the primates, the males often have weaponry. They have big canine teeth, which makes the competition more dangerous. When males compete, it is potentially more dangerous than when females do.

Tanya: Is it unusual to have, for example, females lead like we see in bonobos, or is that actually the division of leadership is really quite equal?

Frans de Waal: In most primate systems, males who dominate females physically. What the bonobos do is a bit unusual in that it is based on female cooperation in the sense that the female bonobo is not bigger than a male. The female bonobo is actually smaller than a male. The females are very cooperative. There’s a very high level of solidarity among the females. That’s how they achieve dominance over the males. Yeah, that’s a bit of an unusual situation, but I would say in most of the primates the males may be physically dominant. That doesn’t necessarily make them the central figures of the society.

In many monkeys, the society is basically a female network of kinship relationships. The females are very close together. The males float in and out so-to-speak. They’re not necessarily a prominent part of the group. It depends on what you want to call dominance. If you mean physical abilities, that’s one thing, but if you mean who takes the social decisions, and who is most important in social life, it’s basically that the males are dominant.

Tanya: Interesting, last question, what has been one finding that really surprised you?

Frans de Waal: I think when I found that chimpanzees reconcile after fights, that was maybe the most surprising thing for me. All the books, and everything that I read until that day as a student, were about how aggression drives individuals apart. Aggression is dispersive mechanism.

Conflict is socially negative. Conflict only can lead to winning and losing. No one was talking about how damaging conflict can be to the society, and how animals and humans have ways of dealing with that damage. For me, that was maybe the most surprising thing because nothing had prepared me for the idea that the primates would try to overcome conflict and try to reduce it.

Tanya: Yes, and hopefully we as a society can get much better at that too. We’re all in training, I guess. Franz, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today and for sharing your really cutting-edge knowledge and your life’s work with us. It’s fascinating to drop parallels between what you’ve discovered of our primates and animals in general and where we are at, human beings as a society.

Frans de Waal: Yeah, thank you, and you’re welcome. That was a great interview.

Tanya: Thank you.

Announcer: Unmessable is recorded in the heart of New York City. A special thanks to all the team involved in producing the show. Visit tanyaprive.com/unmessable to find a transcript of this episode. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.