Frans de Waal Books

In the early decades of the twentieth century, psychology was dominated by behaviorism—the doctrine that animals were black boxes driven by stimulus and response, their inner lives off-limits to serious science. Figures like B. F. Skinner revolutionized experimental control, but at the cost of strip...

From Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

As new tools emerged—video recordings, touch-screen tasks, statistical analyses—we could finally begin testing cognition across species. No longer constrained by the sterile boxes of behaviorism, we brought the lab to the field and the field to the lab. I’ve often said that animals reveal themselves...

From Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Before we can explore the emotional lives of animals, we must be clear about what we mean by emotion. Too often, scientists have dismissed talk of animal feelings as anthropomorphic, as if recognizing emotion in animals were a sentimental projection. But this caution, while well-intentioned, has als...

From Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves

To understand emotion, we must look backward—to the long evolutionary history that shaped its function. Emotions did not appear suddenly in humans; they are the result of millions of years of selection for survival in complex social systems. In a world where cooperation and alliance can mean the dif...

From Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves

Empathy begins with emotional contagion—the simplest form of shared feeling. If a baby cries and another baby starts crying too, we are witnessing the first spark of empathy. Among animals, such contagion is widespread. Rats freeze when their cage-mates receive shocks; elephants touch and trumpet ar...

From The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

Human culture often exalts self-interest, as though cooperation were a fragile afterthought. Yet in nature, every social system balances competition with the need for mutual restraint. Among chimpanzees, for instance, dominance does not come through endless violence. Alpha males maintain their posit...

From The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society