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.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
I think global warming is the gravest threat. With global warming, it's the product of a war between old energy - between the carbon cronies, who, by the way, could not stay in business in a true free market capitalism.
All things are parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with nature.
Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that (even as his pain increases with each loss) he comprehends - truly knows - that where there was a garden once, it can be again, or where there never was, there yet can be a garden.
Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them
The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
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