I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.
Interpretation
The quote observes how mood can spread among groups of primates, illustrating a form of social synchronization.
Frans De Waal highlights the phenomenon of mood contagion observed in primate groups, where individuals collectively experience similar emotions and behaviors, such as playfulness or sleepiness. This synchronization is not only fascinating but serves an important function in their social dynamics, enabling coordinated activities and enhancing group cohesion.
In practice
During a team-building retreat, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of collective morale and teamwork.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.
Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'
Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than _x000D_ bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.
Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
I've found that there is always some beauty left -- in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.
Of all wonders, this is among the greatest, that some fresh waters close by the sea spring forth as out of pipes: for the nature of the waters also ceaseth not from miraculous properties.
I have thought that wild flowers might be the alphabet of angels, — whereby they write on hills and fields mysterious truths, which it is not given our fallen nature to understand.
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