- A study, carried out by researchers from Paris and Montpellier, shows for which species humans have the most (and the least) compassion and empathy.
- If ticks are not popular, great apes are the ones that touch us the most.
Human nature is cruel: the fate of certain animals affects us more than others. A strange study, carried out by researchers from Paris and Montpellier, was interested in this disturbing phenomenon. Aurélien Mirallès and Guillaume Lecointre, of the Natural History Museum of Paris, and Michel Raymond, of the Institute of Sciences of Evolution of Montpellier, have established a cartography, published in the journal Nature (read here), which classifies the species according to the tenderness that humans have for them.
The researchers subjected 3,500 internet users to a merciless exercise, during which pairs of photographs of living organisms, animals or plants, were drawn at random. Each time, they had to choose where their preference was going between a gorilla and a beetle, a lemur and a spider or a sea anemone and a toad. The researchers were able to define thanks to the results obtained the degree of empathy, that is to say the understanding of the emotions of the other, and compassion, the ability to understand the distress and to want to remedy it, that the subjects experience vis-à-vis species.
Ticks are not fantastic
And sorry ticks, but you are not (at all) popular: these little mites that feed on blood are the animals for which humans have the least compassion. "The tick, it is not simply that one is indifferent to it, it is downright that one hates it, one almost wishes his death", analyzes Aurélien Mirallès.
Not surprisingly, the cactus, the fungus and the jellyfish are also among the organisms that humans have the least desire to save. On the scale of empathy, the people who contributed to this study had trouble understanding, again without suspense, the emotions of seaweed or scallop.
The further the species are from us, the less their fate challenges us
Conversely, "the orangutan is the species that has the highest score in both areas", continues the researcher. Behind this great monkey, we find in the classification of "favorite animals" the chimpanzee or the gorilla. "These are species that are related to us, we unconsciously perceive them as a little human, we have positive behaviors towards them," notes Aurélien Mirallès.
Thus, the more distant living beings are from us in the tree of evolution, the less their fate challenges us. A little lower in the ranking, we find bears, foxes and belugas. "In Europe, a German study recently showed that the populations of insects fell, it is truly catastrophic, and yet it moves us less, because they are organisms for which we have neither empathy nor compassion", notes the searcher. On the other hand, photos of distressed koalas, which abound on social networks, are making donations for Australia. “Koalas do not have such a high score, however,” says Aurélien Mirallès. They are logically where they should have been. Ah yes, humans have also been tested: those interviewed indicated that they had less empathy for humans than for orangutans.
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