It’s not every day that a knight visits the campus.
Yesterday afternoon, though, Sir Frans de Waal, a psychologist specializing in primatology and cognitive development, was the featured speaker of “Prosocial Primates: Empathy in Animals and Humans,” the first lecture of the psychology department’s speaker series.
de Waal, a primate behavior professor at Georgia’s Emory University, was knighted in the Netherlands earlier this year. During the lecture — given in the Armory before about 60 people — he discussed the research behind his 2009 book, The Age of Empathy, which explores a collection of experiments and observations about how empathy comes naturally to some animals.
“It’s all part of scientific exchange where you relay your results to others and you hope that they will learn something from it and inspire their work,” de Waal said of his lecture.
Through this study of animals and their social behaviors, de Waal illustrated how animals — and, invariably, humans — are “preprogrammed to reach out,” which challenges a long-accepted notion that humans are selfish.
“When you consider animal psychology, you’re not just sitting down asking animals about their feelings,” said Juan Duque, a senior psychology major who attended the lecture. “Psychology doesn’t mean just helping people. Animal psychology and primate research is interesting.”
Joe Oppenheimer, a professor emeritus in the behavioral and social sciences college, has used de Waal’s research in his courses during the last 20 years and finds de Waal’s conclusions about animal empathy valuable.
“I’ve been involved in similar research about humans,” he said. “But it really goes in part to whether there is a natural ethics, to some degree, in species who are programmed to have a sense of right and wrong. … It’s not based on religion; it’s based on who you are genetically. We are mammals.”
The lecture series was organized by students in the psychology department’s colloquium committee. Graduate student Vanessa Medley chose de Waal as her speaker and made arrangements for him to come to the campus.
“I looked up some of the research he was doing and thought it was really interesting,” Medley said. “Part of what we look for in a speaker is someone whose research would go to all areas of psychology, so that it wouldn’t only be applicable to cognitive or just to social, so everyone could find a connection to the research that he’s doing.”
The series, according to human development professor Melanie Killen, is an effort to get students out of the classroom and more actively involved in learning.
“It’s important to raise the level of talks like this on campus,” Killen said. “[It] creates a scholar’s model, especially since we are a research university.”
Overall, Killen was impressed with de Waal’s presentation.
“It was a wonderful talk, and he is a compelling speaker,” she said. “It’s an important talk because it’s widespread across different discipline implications.”
de Waal’s research began in 1975 with a six-year project at the Netherlands’ Arnhem Zoo, the world’s largest captive colony of chimpanzees. He has since worked at other primate centers and published several books, including Chimpanzee Politics, Peacemaking Among Primates and Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. He was also named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2007 for his work in psychology.
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