In a world racing toward smarter machines, empathy speakers and authors Rob Volpe and Maria Ross get curious in this limited subseries about what only humans can feel, do, and be — and why that’s our greatest competitive advantage. Enjoy this limited subseries here on The Empathy Edge.
Morality, Conscience, Storytelling & Community
Where does our sense of right and wrong actually come from? Maria and Rob trace the roots of human morality across three sources: evolutionary wiring that hardwired empathy for group survival, cultural transmission passed down through family and community, and the personal reflection that continues to shape our ethics well into adulthood. They look to Frans de Waal’s research on chimps and bonobos, and to highly social species like wolves, crows, and honeybees, who enforce unwritten norms on the group. But a key distinction: animals register unfairness, while humans ruminate in moral anguish over it.
By the end of the conversation, they find themselves less certain than when they started about whether humanity could ever agree on even three to five truly universal moral principles, and invite their listeners to contact us with their opinions.
To access the episode transcript, please scroll down below.
“That’s where our empathy work lies – how do you bridge that gap between your different potentially moral or ethical codes?” — Maria Ross
Episode References:
- Frans de Waal on morality in primates, Primates and Philosophers
- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: righteousmind.com
- Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle
- Coller Doolittle Prize for interspecies communication: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/
- The Ezra Klein Show: Chris Rufo Thinks the Right Can Control This. I Don’t: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chris-rufo-thinks-the-right-can-control-this-i-dont/id1548604447?i=1000774824710
- Sara Konrath, University of Michigan study on empathy in college students: news.umich.edu/empathy-college-students-don-t-have-as-much-as-they-used-to
About Maria Ross:
Maria Ross is a speaker, author, empathy strategist, and host of The Empathy Edge podcast, now in its sixth year. She believes cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™, and has spent decades helping leaders balance empathy with accountability to drive better results, stronger teams, and lasting impact. She is the author of four books, including the award-winning The Empathy Dilemma, a Forbes.com contributor on Workplace Empathy, and creator of two LinkedIn Learning empathy courses.
About Rob Volpe:
Rob Volpe is the Founder/CEO of Empathy Activist and the creator of The 5 Steps to Empathy, which he chronicles in his award-winning book Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation at a Time. He is a recognized thought leader, speaker, and consultant in the improvement of communication and collaboration in organizations of all sizes in all industries.
Connect with Rob Volpe:
Website: robvolpe.expert
Book: Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rmvolpe
Facebook: facebook.com/EmpathyActivist
Instagram: instagram.com/empathy_activist
Connect with Maria:
Get Maria’s books: Red-Slice.com/books
Hire Maria to speak: Red-Slice.com/Speaker-Maria-Ross
Take the LinkedIn Learning Courses! Leading with Empathy and Balancing Empathy, Accountability, and Results as a Leader
LinkedIn: Maria Ross
Instagram: @redslicemaria
Facebook: Red Slice
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Maria Ross 00:04
Welcome to the Empathy Edge podcast, the show that proves why cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. I’m your host Maria Ross. I’m a speaker, author, mom, facilitator, and empathy advocate, and here you’ll meet trailblazing leaders and executives, authors and experts who embrace empathy to achieve radical success. We discuss all facets of empathy, from trends and research to the future of work to how to heal societal divisions and collaborate more effectively. Our goal is to redefine success and prove that empathy isn’t just good for society. It’s great for business. Welcome back to another episode of the Empathy Edge, our special subseries on what does it mean to be human. A conversation between myself and the fantastic empathy activist, author, speaker, researcher Rob Volpe. Rob, welcome once again.
Rob Volpe 01:00
Hello, Maria. Hello, everybody. everybody! Excited to be here.
Maria Ross 01:04
Yeah, and today we’re going to talk a little bit about morality and ethics, right and wrong, and is that just a uniquely human trait, or is it across different life forms? And also, how does it happen for us as humans? Which kind of plays right into our sweet spot of empathy for you and I, but I have to digress for a second because just coming to this recording with you, you know, we were both a little bit late coming to the recording, and I was late because I knew there were some things I wanted to do before we started recording, but then I got caught up in other tasks before I got to the thing I wanted to do, and I call it my frittering away time. And it occurred to me, like, is that kind of a human trait? Is are we the only ones that fritter, and you know, are we the only species that has to tell our teenager to get up off the couch, right, and do the thing that they’re supposed to do, or do squirrels have to deal with that when they’re storing nuts for the winner. Like, hey, Larry, let’s get a move on. You know, it
Rob Volpe 02:06
sounds like a really good literary novel, The Lazy Squirrel, by Maria Ross. Next
Maria Ross 02:14
one, next one. Yeah, published by Page Two. Yeah,
Rob Volpe 02:17
exactly. Jesse, what do you think? Let us know for listeners that don’t know. Jesse is our publisher at Page Two that we watch. She’s
Maria Ross 02:25
amazing, Jesse and Trina.
Rob Volpe 02:27
So fascinating that so it’s kind of the you’re frittering away, but you’re doing things right. Like,
Maria Ross 02:35
but they’re like a little bit wasteful. They’re things that again, like speaking of the squirrel, you’re just like, hey, look, a squirrel. I have to do this one thing, right? And all of a sudden, time passes, and we talked about time previously. Of just like, all of a sudden, you’re like, where did the time go, right? And so, I was wondering if the ability to waste time and fritter on unproductive tasks that might have to be an episode for the future. Of is that what it means to be human?
Rob Volpe 03:03
I’m listen to or watch Maria and Rob faff about
Maria Ross 03:08
fritter about frittering fritter
Rob Volpe 03:11
faff dawdle all the things. I’m one of those people, and I think I think it was Adam Grant who talked about this at some point, and I felt seen. I’m one of those people that will try to get something done. Like if we have to leave, like I just gotta like deal with this photo.
Maria Ross 03:30
One last thing.
Rob Volpe 03:31
There’s one last thing. Let me just do. Let me hang these clothes up. Let me move this around, and then let me get that one last email out, and then we’re good.
Maria Ross 03:39
Yeah.
Rob Volpe 03:40
And God bless my husband Charles, but he’s gotten used to that habit of mine, and he just patiently waits downstairs, probably cursing under his breath. But
Maria Ross 03:54
same, same, same,
Rob Volpe 03:56
same.
Maria Ross 03:56
Paul’s like, if you tell me one more, it’s just going to take me a second, one more time. I
Rob Volpe 04:03
mean, in this sort of time distortion, like one second is five minutes. Yeah, when I was younger, really good friend of mine, Melissa. She and I used to go to the movies all the time. We lived in L.A. back then, and I would always be like five. He would say, “Oh, let’s meet at you know 230, and I’d be there at like 235 right? Plenty of time before the movie, but she was like, “I waste so much time waiting for you.
Maria Ross 04:32
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 04:33
and so I try, I do try, and I I’ve never missed a flight, so I do have some. So something’s going
Maria Ross 04:40
right there,
Rob Volpe 04:40
but then there’s the other side of that elasticity of the time, and then I have heard stories of you know, and they they talk about gay time and you know where oh gays are always late. Like that’s like I
Maria Ross 04:56
was like, what is that? Which
Rob Volpe 04:58
is a stereotype. I have some. Gay friends that are very prompt, but there was just always this thing like gays are always like 40-five minutes late to whatever you know. Dinner’s at seven; they’ll be there at eight.
Maria Ross 05:09
Yeah, yeah,
Rob Volpe 05:10
and you just kind of learn to roll with it. But there is, and in that point, there is this, and I’m I am mindful of the respect of other people’s time, and there is a feeling of if I’m the one that’s sitting there waiting for you, you are not respecting me, and I am sensitive to it. But there’s, I hate using the word “but” because I feel like whenever I use the, I’m really mindful of using the word “but” because then I feel like it negates the other person, and it’s like, but
Maria Ross 05:40
and yet,
Rob Volpe 05:41
and yet, oh, I love that. However, is what has been my go-to, and yet, there’s something in my wiring about like one more thing, one more thing, getting getting one more thing done. I was running into this morning as we were running a few minutes late. I was experiencing mental time travel, which we talked about in the last episode, episodic stuff. I was thinking about an email that I had gotten from a colleague, and then I went flashed back to earlier emails, maybe emails from a client that whatever, and then was jumping forward to and even projecting into, I’m gonna be, you know. Uh huh. When really, it’s all it’s fine. It’s like finding. It’s finding time to have a meeting, and
Maria Ross 06:28
yeah.
Rob Volpe 06:29
So it’s so not a big thing. But it was as I was showering and getting ready, it just was taking over, and I noticed. I was like, “Ooh, I’m mentally time traveling right now.”
Maria Ross 06:39
So you noticed it. That’s great. Well, yeah. So anyway, put a pin in it. Let’s talk about the ability to factor.
Rob Volpe 06:45
The Ethical dilemma of being frittering.
Maria Ross 06:48
Yeah. So today we want to explore this core question of like, how do we as humans develop a moral sense, and is it biological, social, or something else entirely? And again, is that we got answers around ethics and morals when we did our informal survey for other people on what does it mean to be human? Things like you’re able to know right from wrong, you’re able to show empathy, you’re able to feel guilty about something. So maybe we should start with just sort of how do we even get our ethics as human beings, right? How do we build these ethical codes? And I did a little bit of research on this, and it turns out there’s a variety of ways that we get our ethics. It’s evolutionary foundations, right? So, and you and I both know this: humans are hardwired for empathy. It’s how our species has survived and evolved, how we have, you know, survived in groups. It’s just as I always say in my talks. Some of us, for some of us, the muscle has atrophied, and for some of us, it’s very strong. Right? There’s also cultural transmission. Right? What we learn from our parents, what we learn from our our tribe. You know, our cultural norms, our values, and then there’s also personal reflection, and I find this one really interesting because, sort of, as you leave your nest, being a child to an adult, it’s your own personal reflections and growth journey that starts to shape your ethics and your morals.
Rob Volpe 08:14
Yeah, yes.
Maria Ross 08:15
As you start doing work on yourself, and as you start experiencing the world, as we start evaluating our different experiences, so what do you think about all that? Is that well? Number one, do you agree with those things? Are we leaving anything out of how people, how humans form their ethics? And two, are we the only creatures that do that?
Rob Volpe 08:35
I don’t disagree with the three kind of buckets. It makes sense. There’s some hardwired ethical behaviors
Maria Ross 08:44
for survival,
Rob Volpe 08:45
for survival and supporting the group, and don’t you know, don’t eat your brother.
Maria Ross 08:51
For some groups, yeah, exactly.
Rob Volpe 08:56
Well, that’s true. And how hungry are you? But then, yeah, what are the societal norms that start to get established? And I really think about the familial group, and and even within empathy, I’m rewriting the introduction to my book as we’re going into a paperback version this fall. Tell me more about that. Solving the empathy crisis one conversation at a time. Available wherever you buy books, but as I’m rewriting it, I am talking about some of the factors that go into our ability to have empathy and how, you know, you mentioned it’s a muscle. I talk about it as there’s so many analogies that are so appropriate. It’s a muscle. I talk about it now as a superpower, and it’s this neglected superpower, and we need to have our superpower demonstrated and modeled by the caregivers and nurturers and role models in our life. And I think ethics is the same thing. We’re teaching people how to be little humans and little adults, and then they kind of grow up. But then you go out. On your own, and you-I mean, you know-it’s kind of the the situation of you meet the parents of you know a bad crime happens, and you meet the parents, and you’re like, “How did that happen?
Maria Ross 10:15
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 10:15
like, okay, the morals and ethics of this criminal or accused criminal are so completely different from this adult. Like something happened, yeah. And I think that is that personal. In adulthood, we do have choices. There are probably external forces as well, and how we’re reacting to those forces is making a difference.
Maria Ross 10:38
Well, and I and I find it interesting that you know are we the only species that has different groups with different cultural norms and ethics? For example, think of all the circles you operate in, right? And for everyone listening, right, you’ve got your family’s code and your family’s ethics. You have the moral code or ethics, maybe of your neighborhood and your neighbors and your community, you may have a completely different code of ethics and morality stance within your workplace. Right? We talk about workplace culture, and that I feel like that’s such a uniquely human thing because I don’t think you know ferrets or birds shape shift depending on where they are. They sort of have a species wide or a a clan wide ethic that doesn’t shift based on what they’re doing in the given day that they’re in or who they’re around.
Rob Volpe 11:34
Don’t eat your brother. Yeah, yeah, but yeah. But are we like? I feel like we’re standards.
Maria Ross 11:38
Yes, but we go into different environments where the codes change, and I think that’s where many of us as humans have misalignment.
Rob Volpe 11:46
Well, and just to thought drift on this, how is that different or similar to? So there’s there’s pack behavior or a flock. You remember mentioning birds? There’s a flock of birds, and they know. Oh, we’re all migrating, and we’re doing this, and we’re moving this way or that way. Like, how much of that is instinctual versus? I mean, it’s not unethical. Well, they’re not making it.
Maria Ross 12:12
You’re saying there might not be judgment there, right?
Rob Volpe 12:15
Yeah, they’re just instinctive. Oh, that’s a good description or distinction. There’s not judgment that’s instinct for birds to go fly together, but the maybe is it an ethical consideration to stay together as a flock, or is that still instinct?
Maria Ross 12:33
Well, I did a little research on that too about if other species have ethical codes the way that humans do, and the results were that they don’t necessarily have codified ethics or things of that nature. You know, they don’t have a Plato and a Socrates and and a Bible and all those kinds of things, right? A Quran, but they said that highly social species do enforce unwritten social norms such as fairness, cooperation, and hierarchy, and those who repeatedly violate those rules often face ostracism, aggression, or permanent exile to maintain group cohesion. And the examples were like chimpanzees and baboons, wolves, crows and ravens. And this one was interesting: honeybees and ants. So yeah, but I think to your question, that might just be an instinctual biological imperative of if you act this way, we may not survive.
Rob Volpe 13:27
Right, right, exactly. Like everybody, everybody has to pull their weight, so to
Maria Ross 13:32
speak. I love this. It said this in here. In the speaking of what I was talking about earlier about the lazy squirrel, it did say for honeybees and ants that, in quotes, cheaters or slackers who disrupt the harmony of the hive are aggressively removed or blocked from entering.
Rob Volpe 13:48
That is wild. Cheaters or slackers, the cheating honeybee. No, bro,
Maria Ross 13:55
you’re not coming in. You’re not coming in now. We’ve had it with you.
Rob Volpe 13:59
Slacker ants: A tale of a tale of spinsters’ crimes from the comfort of their their hive. Their hive. I
Maria Ross 14:10
love it. I love it. But yeah, like to your point, I don’t know that that’s a moral code. That may just be a a survival instinct.
Rob Volpe 14:18
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think similarly, you had shared about like wolves, and again, you got to participate in the hunt. You’ve got there’s a code of conduct of what’s expected, but that that sort of the idea of a code of conduct, you’ve got to pull your own weight, which I think it falls as a code of conduct that would be something that’s an ethical behavioral group influenced behavior rather than instinct, you know, because the lazy wolf or the frittering wolf might be like, oh wait, one more thing. I’ll join that hunt.
Maria Ross 15:02
I just got to finish this email.
Rob Volpe 15:06
I’m influencing on TikTok right now, and I’ve just got to get one more thing done. I gotta.
Maria Ross 15:10
I just my people need me. Yeah, I was gonna say something to that, and it just completely went out of my head because you made me laugh with this idea of having the email, the one last email to send, but I mean, I think it’s this. But oh, I know what it was. So let’s go back in time to like let’s go back millennia, right? And we’re saying that these are sort of ingrained, instinctual social norms within these groups.
Rob Volpe 15:35
Yes.
Maria Ross 15:36
How did they start?
Rob Volpe 15:38
For survival of the group is the first thing that comes to my mind. Yeah,
Maria Ross 15:42
but no one, no one implicitly or explicitly stated it, right? So to your point, is it about modeling and ostracization? I don’t know what the
Rob Volpe 15:52
did somebody get pissed off because that you know that lazy Neanderthal just won’t participate in the hunt, and we got wooly mammoths to kill, and it takes all of us to pull down the wooly mammoth. But we didn’t, and now I got impaled by the horn, and I’m not happy.
Maria Ross 16:10
Well, because humans set these standards before they could, they had speech.
Rob Volpe 16:14
Yes, that’s fascinating.
Maria Ross 16:16
It had to be modeling. It had to be cause and effect
Rob Volpe 16:20
before we had signal, and before we really had storytelling,
Maria Ross 16:23
yes, is is
Rob Volpe 16:24
the the thinking. We don’t have the stories from back then to know for sure, but that that’s the thinking about it in the way that it it has developed over time. So yeah, I would think it’s about it’s an evolutionary. There’s an evolutionary factor, survival of the fittest Darwinian sort of thing where the group is not going to survive if the group isn’t all contributing and playing their part, which you see to play out today in teams. Like what happens when at work when you’ve got somebody that’s not pulling their weight, or you’re in the neighborhood, the people down the street have the ugly yard because they’ve not tended to it, and you know you you want to throw them out, you can’t, but you’d love to like throw them out, or but you ostracize them, perhaps.
Maria Ross 17:13
Yes, and you know what’s you just sparked something for me. You know what’s interesting about that? That’s uniquely human is that humans have to explicitly state things at times, right? That’s why you have homeowners associations.
Rob Volpe 17:25
We need mechanisms.
Maria Ross 17:27
We need to have mechanisms, and we need to have things told and written down. And like, hey, we’re all agreeing to this. We almost humans have evolved to the point that they need the clarity because we are so diverse. I mean, if you even think about social norms from state to state in the United States, or from country to country across the world, right? And then various socio-economic groups within those cultures. There’s different ethics. There’s different norms. There’s different values, and so we evolved to such diversity that there became a need to codify for us versus like the birds or the squirrels. They don’t have a document, right? They don’t have a like a discussion about this. They don’t have the great philosophers writing this stuff down and telling these stories. We started to need that as human beings, and I wonder why.
Rob Volpe 18:17
Well, I think it became easier to get everybody aligned, but also to pass on the traditions of it. Actually, probably did become much easier to survive when you weren’t relying on, oh, did father tell son, mother tell daughter, mother tell son, whatever the dynamic of how to do something or a way to behave or the most effective way we’ve learned to kill the saber-toothed tiger is, you know, this
Maria Ross 18:45
is X, yeah,
Rob Volpe 18:46
and so the storytelling helps tell the tale,
Maria Ross 18:51
right?
Rob Volpe 18:52
Drawings, you know, drawings on the cave wall, and who is that person that was like, this this burnt piece of wood in the gate is going to be, or I presume that’s what they started with. I wonder if they even was like, ooh, a berry, and look at how that stains my fingers. What happens if,
Maria Ross 19:11
yeah,
Rob Volpe 19:12
stains the wall?
Maria Ross 19:13
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 19:13
but that was early storytelling, right? And that’s that’s evolved into how we communicate. It’s evolved into how we keep people organized and in the the right sort of ethical behaviors of society, and then that’s also always changing and evolving. And we see that in our in our time as people of a certain age, and also when you think back to our parents’ generation, for sure.
Maria Ross 19:40
Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that’s where religious texts are all story based, no matter what religion. It’s all based on parables and stories, and give you know. And it’s great. Like corporate communications could learn a thing or two from the way religious texts are formatted because it’s about stories. I remember when I was doing my brand strategy. Work with clients, and we would talk about values and mission and vision. And part of what I would encourage them to do is collect the stories. Collect the stories, like what are the famous stories that everybody tells in support of these values that you hold dear. Document the stories, pass those on. That’s how you keep your DNA as you grow and as you scale, right? And so we figured out as humans somewhere along the way that that was going to be useful to us to be able to pass that down. But you also sparked another thing that kind of goes back to my: we have such diversity within the human species of how what we think is right and wrong, like this is why we have debate, this is why we have conflict, this is why we have discourse, right? And that you know you can look at the way think the quote unquote way things are done, right? Like parenting, as an example, there’s so many different schools of thought for how to be a good parent, for how to be you know have raise healthy children, and we have at least in the in you know Western culture, we’ve kind of come to this agreement of well, you know, your way, my way might not be your way,
Rob Volpe 21:12
right? But I’m sure I’m going to make some snarky comments about the behavior. Well, yeah, that’s a whole
Maria Ross 21:17
separate thing. But yeah, but I mean, I find that interesting that there’s no uniformity within our species because of the the complex diversity of people’s experiences. Yeah, we’re
Rob Volpe 21:30
not a small enclave living in a cave. I think if you found there must be a study out there somewhere about this, but I think if you were to look at small pockets of communities; they are probably more assimilated and parenting in the same way. They have the same ethics and local morals as everyone else in the group, and that’s because it’s really small. Hold that thought. Domino is in rare form today. One of the things I always question with empathy, even related to that idea of like the small communities, I often talk about globalization and how that has affected our ability to have empathy. And so, as I look at even Susan Conrath’s landmark University of Michigan study from way back 1516, years ago that found that 40% decline in college students of the ability to find or see the point of view of their peers. It’s like, well, is it really that that the empathy has declined, or is that our exposure to different views of ways of thinking and behaving has actually expanded as our world has gotten smaller through you know travel through TV through all social
Maria Ross 22:51
media yeah technology
Rob Volpe 22:53
that maybe our ability to have empathy hasn’t changed but the people that we are asked to have empathy with has differed, and I often talk about, especially like emotional empathy. There’s more of a barrier for people to get into an emotional space than a cognitive place because
Maria Ross 23:13
not everybody’s wired that way.
Rob Volpe 23:14
Not everybody was wired that way, but who are you more likely wired with? The people lived in the cave with you, and I used to talk about. I used to use the analogy of like it’s like when you were in the cave and everybody in the cave had the same values and morals behaviors. But when the cave down the road came over, they had a totally and were like, “Hey, we want to cut all those trees down and try something we’re calling farming.
Maria Ross 23:35
Right.
Rob Volpe 23:36
And you’re like, “What? Right. And you have to there. And there’s dissonance there, and you have to overcome all the steps, all the barriers to empathy using the five steps in order to reach some sort of alignment and go. Oh yeah, farming would make it a lot easier to gather. Yeah, if we grew it all right there. But the
Maria Ross 23:53
fact that we as humans even needed empathy to see another point of view is uniquely human to me because you don’t have other species needing to see another bird or another fox’s point of view in order to coexist, right? It was. It’s not that drastically different.
Rob Volpe 24:13
Yeah. Well. Yeah. Like the, and I think the last episode I was talking about the savanna quite a lot when I’m at a lot of friends hunting, and you know we were
Maria Ross 24:22
on a Lion King kick. I don’t know what that was about. Yeah,
Rob Volpe 24:25
we were. I will not sing Hakuna Matata, but as you don’t see the lions, you know, staring at the herd of antelope gazelle, whatever, and one of the lions go, I’m feeling like zebra today, but like going off in another direction. Yeah, that’s not how that works. And there’s not
Maria Ross 24:44
another lion going. Tell me about that. Tell me more. Why are you feeling zebra today? What
Rob Volpe 24:49
is it? What is it about today that makes you curious for zebra? How do you prepare the zebra? Where do you start when you eat the zebra? Is
Maria Ross 24:59
it? Oh my gosh, I would love if you talk a little bit about the research you found from Dewall about, and I don’t know, I don’t know if I ever pronouncing his name correctly, DeWal, I believe it is D E W A A L.
Rob Volpe 25:12
Yes,
Maria Ross 25:13
looking at the building blocks of morality.
Rob Volpe 25:16
Yes, so when you think about morality, when you think about so morals, ethics. When I’ve the way I understand ethics and morals, ethics are the things that society sort of infuses and requires of us. Morals are the personal choices that we’re making.
Maria Ross 25:36
Oh, okay.
Rob Volpe 25:37
And he DeWalt in his research found that they’re these like yeah they’re these building blocks are these parts that you’ve got in order to build a moral system you’ve got to have empathy makes sense you’ve got to have a sense of fairness that’s where narcissists and people on the antisocial disorder sociopath a psychopath they get in trouble they don’t have a sense of fairness it’s all about me and what I want. They need to have a sense of cooperation as well, and all three of those things. I think actually all three of those things are very closely linked, but I like that he’s broken those apart, and that helps create, as he called it, a moral system. And kind of to your point, even about my tangent on the zebra zebra preferences of select lionesses in the savanna. It what doesn’t what he he was finding what he wasn’t seeing in other primates was a reflexive layer. So that asking why is something wrong. So feeling guilty rather than just feeling the consequence of something. So it’s this idea of the concept of a moral self that can fail on its own. So there’s this like behavioral moral distinction. So like chimps can register unfairness, but they don’t seem to lie awake at night in moral anguish. They’re not like we do. I couldn’t
Maria Ross 27:08
sleep last night because I was upset about the way I might have treated somebody, or that something was unfair at work, or you know all the things. Yeah,
Rob Volpe 27:15
all the things. How did that conversation could have gone better? Worrying about the conversation I’m going to have, which see the last episode four about our sense of self, future dreaming, hope, and all of that. That anxiety kind of comes along with
Maria Ross 27:31
it, right? Right. Well, and also I saw that you found that chimps and bonobos exhibit generosity, gratitude, justice, grief, forgiveness, consolation, and friendships, and friendship, which many people and a few people in our survey even mentioned some of these previously were attributed solely to humans.
Rob Volpe 27:54
Yeah,
Maria Ross 27:55
right.
Rob Volpe 27:55
Yeah, there was there was something I read about how like apes will mourn. I think when we were talking about death and we were talking about the whale pushing its calf, dead calf, around for quite a while, apes apparently will mourn and return to the death. I think maybe was inferring the sight of the death of a loved one or part of how. Yeah, like a year later, like yeah, it’s not there. It’s it’s object permanence, or you know, where it’s like, oh, if I see it, it exists, but if it disappears, it’s gone.
Maria Ross 28:32
Right,
Rob Volpe 28:33
which is something that toddlers go through when parents like go away. Whoa, whoa, what happened? Understanding, oh, they’re going to come back. Like they, they apes have clearly gotten beyond that stage where they understand this thing is actually like it’s died. It is gone.
Maria Ross 28:49
Wow!
Rob Volpe 28:49
They recognize that.
Maria Ross 28:51
I was because I was going to say like from the grief and mourning perspective, like the fact that we have rituals around our dead, and we remember, we revisit, we go back, and then you just shared that story, and I’m like, okay, so that’s not uniquely human either, necessarily.
Rob Volpe 29:07
Not necessarily. Yeah, we have rituals that we’ve developed around it
Maria Ross 29:13
yeah
Rob Volpe 29:13
but, the you know, I mean, it’s hard. Shiva in the Jewish community looks very different than Shiva with you know, or that idea of mourning the dead over the course of a year in another community,
Maria Ross 29:26
right?
Rob Volpe 29:26
And they’re not communicating with us in English or another spoken language that we understand at this point,
Maria Ross 29:32
right?
Rob Volpe 29:33
Oh, speaking of that, there is a. Have you heard about the Doolittle Prize out of Berkeley?
Maria Ross 29:38
No, sure.
Rob Volpe 29:39
Okay, so there, I’m always like, ooh, half of the information.
Maria Ross 29:47
As my husband says to me, “Good story, Maria.
Rob Volpe 29:50
There is a wealthy individual that funded a research prize. I think it’s out of Berkeley, and it’s like the Doolittle. Prize and it is about communication with understanding communication with animals and other living species.
Maria Ross 30:09
Yes. So what’s interesting is that sorry, I just found this. Someone was awarded this for using artificial intelligence and machine learning to decode the vocabulary of zebra finches.
Rob Volpe 30:23
Yes,
Maria Ross 30:24
for two-way interspecies communication. That’s what the prize was. It’s the Collar Doolittle Prize, is what it’s called.
Rob Volpe 30:30
The $10 million grand prize is interspecies communication. Wow. The bigger one, or the then the lesser prize. This is a lesser one. Annual basis is like, ooh, we’ve decoded the way zebra finches. I forget what it was they were communicating about, but it deciphered all these different calls that they were making and the ways that those calls were coming out and what it was actually saying.
Maria Ross 30:56
Wow!
Rob Volpe 30:57
And you know, I so as I’m saying that, I’m going, but wait, Rob. What about the chimpanzee that knows how to press the button? And like we’ve seen that kind of rudimentary communication, but the issue there is it’s not we’re making the chimpanzee communicate in a form of English.
Maria Ross 31:14
Got it.
Rob Volpe 31:14
A language that we understand versus truly bridging that
Maria Ross 31:19
right
Rob Volpe 31:20
talk to the animals as Doctor Dolittle.
Maria Ross 31:23
Well, and that begs the question of if they if they do have this language, if other species have this language, then maybe eventually they will start articulating their moral codes and their ethics right to each other. Maybe they will evolve to the point that, like, oh, the clan that communicated these rules to their young survived versus this other one that didn’t, right? Oh, we all need to start doing that.
Rob Volpe 31:52
Well, yes, the the dog that ends up actively communicating where the human understands, oh, Fido wants to sit at the table for this and this reason. Fido is going to get propagated, like they’re going to, you know, make Fido the super dad of all dogs for the next, you know, period of years.
Maria Ross 32:15
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 32:16
and yeah, so talking to animals and communicating, and they do have things that we’re not aware of,
Maria Ross 32:24
right? And that’s why they might, they may be communicating moral codes to each other. We don’t know, like you know what I mean?
Rob Volpe 32:32
Yeah, like the moral values of that’s interesting.
Maria Ross 32:36
Like you shouldn’t have taken Roger’s fish. It’s a bad thing to do for the group.
Rob Volpe 32:43
Yeah, yeah. Well, and yeah, that’s interesting. So, like, I’ve got three cats. They’re all very different. If we get upset with one of them for bad behavior that doesn’t fit our ethical, like the the like the ethics
Maria Ross 33:01
of your home, yeah. Yeah, let me
Rob Volpe 33:02
just say it. My cats are 15, so all of them-they’re siblings from the same litter. So, Domino likes she. I think she’s got some wires crossed. She poops outside of the litter box, always near the litter box, but never in the very rarely in the litter box. So that’s a thing, and we’ve gotten upset with her. This has been going on for two years now, so we have gotten upset with her, scolded her, done you know whatever we could. Her siblings don’t seem to register that she’s you know like they’re not in trouble, so they don’t care.
Maria Ross 33:37
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 33:38
it’s like yeah, whatever. This doesn’t affect me. Yeah, so I don’t see that they’re you know following her, going, “Hey, get in there! Come on, you know what’s going to happen.
Maria Ross 33:47
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 33:48
don’t mess this up. We got we got a good thing going.
Maria Ross 33:51
Right, right. I want to switch gears for a second because you found some information from Jonathan Height. Hyde, if I’m pronouncing that well.
Rob Volpe 34:01
Hate. It’s not hate, but it’s hype.
Maria Ross 34:03
Hype, hate. H a i d t. We’ll put his link in the show notes.
Rob Volpe 34:07
Author of the Anxious Generation, current bestseller. He’s a psychologist. Done a lot of work looking into moral development, moral compasses, and and how we develop those. Most recently, the Anxious Generation is looking at. It’s kind of he’s done a meta-analysis of a lot of the studies around. Yeah,
Maria Ross 34:28
I can’t. I couldn’t. I couldn’t finish his book. It was too dark and gloomy for me. I couldn’t, as a mom, I couldn’t do it. Yeah,
Rob Volpe 34:38
I could see that. I could see that. I haven’t read the book. I’ve listened to. I’ve read shorter pieces that he’s written. He and Scott Galloway are friends, so he’s been on his podcast a few times. I’ve listened to those conversations, and I get what’s going on.
Maria Ross 34:52
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 34:52
but anyway, what he was finding was that we have five found. Foundations to build this moral compass, yeah, to program in our moral compass, I guess. And there, it’s interesting. So they are paired foundations. So
Maria Ross 35:13
okay,
Rob Volpe 35:14
care and so it’s almost like there’s little spectrums.
Maria Ross 35:17
Okay,
Rob Volpe 35:17
care and harm is one. Fairness and cheating is another. Loyalty betrayal is the third. Authority subversion is the fourth, and then sanctity degradation is the fifth. And so, within each one of those, different cultures, political orientations, subgroups weigh these things differently on that spectrum: fairness versus cheating, for example, and that explains how two different groups can believe they’re acting morally, while the other group is like, “What are you doing?
Maria Ross 35:56
That’s that was my point earlier about you’ve got all this diversity and you’re being immoral. No, we’re being moral. You’re being immoral because we have different codes.
Rob Volpe 36:07
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We we are somewhere in different places on that boundary, and you know, I guess some people would be okay with harm, but maybe that in their moral code. I guess it’s what are we talking about with harm versus care?
Maria Ross 36:23
I can give an example: the abortion debate.
Rob Volpe 36:27
Yes
Maria Ross 36:27
there are people who believe that they are on the care side because they are, you know, pro-choice, protecting the the life of the mother, and there are those who believe that that is on the harm side of taking an innocent life.
Rob Volpe 36:40
Yeah,
Maria Ross 36:40
and they both think they’re right morally.
Rob Volpe 36:43
That is true. So in their communities and their cultures, they are morally correct
Maria Ross 36:50
in their own circles that they choose to be in. Yes,
Rob Volpe 36:53
right. And then let’s then go back into DeWaal and the building blocks of morality. The you know, it is like where do where are you orienting your empathy, your sense of fairness, or your cooperation? And there’s a choice, and that’s morals are all about choices. There’s a choice that’s being made on which end of that debate, you are leaning for falling and advocating for, and yet empathy can actually like maybe we can talk. Yeah, well, that’s
Maria Ross 37:34
where our empathy work lies. Is like how do you bridge that gap between your different potentially moral or ethical codes,
Rob Volpe 37:42
right?
Maria Ross 37:42
And again, not walk away converted, because that’s not the point. It’s not about I’m going to convince you that my code is right and yours is wrong. I just want to better understand. I still don’t agree with you, but now I understand where you’re coming from. I understand why you think or feel the way you do,
Rob Volpe 37:57
right? And then we love to point out the sort of moral pretzels we tie ourselves in as we justify, well, I’m you know life of the mother over the child, but kill the criminals at death penalty, you know, right,
Maria Ross 38:17
right, the
Rob Volpe 38:18
contradictions because we do tend to put more moral weight on different things, and that’s where you know you get into like one issue voters. It’s like, what is that big weighty thing? I
Maria Ross 38:31
would have,
Rob Volpe 38:32
I would not be able to vote for someone that advocated for anything that would take away rights and protections to the LGBTQ community because I am part of that community and therefore it would be harming me.
Maria Ross 38:47
Right,
Rob Volpe 38:48
morally that is my number one, and then the rest of it has some degree of negotiation. Yes, yes, and yet I’m not totally a one-issue voter, but if it’s that issue,
Maria Ross 39:04
right,
Rob Volpe 39:04
I am
Maria Ross 39:05
right,
Rob Volpe 39:06
and that’s about my own sense of. I mean, that gets into morality, but it’s exactly
Maria Ross 39:11
yeah. Also,
Rob Volpe 39:12
I I view it as survival,
Maria Ross 39:15
yeah,
Rob Volpe 39:15
for myself.
Maria Ross 39:16
Uh huh. Yeah. Well, and I think,
Rob Volpe 39:18
and that’s the thing that people don’t then appreciate, and I know this is different. Well, it’s not really different. Well, we’ll come back to abortion in a second. That’s what I don’t think people always appreciate. And as I’ve had conversations in my last newsletter, I was talking about my experience with at the retired men’s association of Greenwich, and I was approached. I’m sure this happens to you as well. Where it’s like, how do I talk to my family member who, you know, my son who has Trump derangement syndrome? So he’s a member of the far left, and he was just absolutely out of his mind about and upset, out of his mind in an upset emotional way about the things that are going on with the Trump administration. And this gentleman was the dad was taking it from a very kind of rational, logical place of like, well, shouldn’t Iran not have nuclear weapons? And you know, it’s like, okay, well, wait a minute. But what I suggested to him, I was like, well, if your your son is coming at it from an emotional place. You need to reframe your conversation because you’ve got to help unpack and understand his emotions and what is bothering him about all of this, so that you can listen, and then maybe you can find common ground and help. Maybe you’re going to see a different point of view. Maybe he’s going to see a different point of view, and you’ll at least come to a place of respect for each other’s perspective, but to kind of defuse that, and and so related to the gay argument for me, it’s an emotional thing because it is about me as a human and my right to exist. Where somebody who’s has a different perspective, it doesn’t matter to them. It’s it’s like me regulating whether you can wear blue shirts or not. You know, so yeah, you have a thought.
Maria Ross 41:09
No, I was I’m I’m just kind of trying to get back to this morals and ethics thing versus just purely political, and I’m wondering if I believe, and you tell me if you agree with this statement that we as humans do have a fundamental shared moral code about some things, right?
Rob Volpe 41:28
Yes. I’m not
Maria Ross 41:29
saying people don’t break those norms or break those rules, but we fundamentally, all as humans, no matter where we live, fundamentally believe that murder is wrong. Yes. Like you go to your neighbor and you shoot them, or you kill, you knife them, or whatever, right? And I think in most cultures, and again, it doesn’t mean we follow these morals or ethics all the time. But like, but if you asked the average person in many different places, right? Murder is wrong, lying is wrong, right? Being distrustful, you know, all of these things. There’s a few shared moral codes across the human species. Do you believe that’s true?
Rob Volpe 42:10
I would like to believe. I mean, I think I think they are. I’m not sure. At some level, it absolutely is. I don’t want to. You know, again, I think you have to. Roughly 10% of the population is on that antisocial disorder spectrum, extreme narcissism, sociopath, psychopath. So you got to take that out because they’re not in the same sort of moral consideration set. But then the rest of us, yes, there are there is probably a general space in the. I mean, maybe it’s like five things, but we all maybe well, and it’s probably all in in hates the building blocks or the five foundations.
Maria Ross 42:51
Yeah,
Rob Volpe 42:51
but how far do we end up going? And you know, is it individual versus societal versus the way that that gets played out in our choice for government and leaders. Where if we’re living in a place where we do have a choice,
Maria Ross 43:07
yeah, yeah.
Rob Volpe 43:09
But there’s so okay. So what would those five? Well, that’s what
Maria Ross 43:12
I’m. I’m like, I’m wondering if you could get the entire world to collaborate on a mission articulation exercise or a moral? Could we all agree to at least three to five things?
Rob Volpe 43:25
I have a right to exist, and not just me, Rob. I think every individual has a right to exist. Is that? I don’t
Maria Ross 43:33
know that every human believes that. If you look at some of the war-torn areas, if you look at the Middle East, if you look at terrorism, if you look at,
Rob Volpe 43:42
but that the every individual in that war torn area believes that they have their own right to exist. I
Maria Ross 43:48
believe everyone thinks they have their own right to exist.
Rob Volpe 43:51
Right. Yeah. You definitely agree. Yeah. Do not think that others have the right to exist.
Maria Ross 43:56
Yeah.
Rob Volpe 43:57
So. So I don’t know if that’s one.
Maria Ross 43:59
And you know, maybe I’m even wrong about the murder thing. Like maybe un to some people, it might be well. Like, did the person wrong me? Then murder’s okay,
Rob Volpe 44:08
right? Right.
Maria Ross 44:09
But maybe it’s unfair murder. Like that people can all agree on.
Rob Volpe 44:13
Well, yeah. the The idea of vigilante justice versus just like kind of going sanctity of life, yeah. Sanctity of life, right? And which then gets into the abortion thing,
Maria Ross 44:26
exactly. This
Rob Volpe 44:27
life, and so this is
Maria Ross 44:28
an interesting thought experiment because I don’t know that we do have three to five common ones across every human, every culture or community in the world.
Rob Volpe 44:39
I was just Ezra Klein has a new episode of his podcast out as the day that we’re recording this, and he interviews Chris Ruffo, who is a conservative slash far right thinker, writer, journalist. I’m using air quotes. He’s a. I think he’s a journalist. He he’s one of his claims to fame right now is he was the one that really pushed the advocating of getting rid of DEI and the government and the Trump administration picked him up on it and away we went and here we are right but as one of the other things that he did his publication or group did a story about the Somali fraud in Minnesota, and wrote some stories. Wasn’t
Maria Ross 45:31
that an alleged, or there was some element of truth to that?
Rob Volpe 45:35
There’s some element of alleged in terms of like how big it is, and is it going back to fund terrorism? They’re not totally sure. It’s all murky. But then Ezra Klein was pointing out how that led to the outrage about Minnesota and ICE coming in. Renee Good and Alex Preddy get murdered by ICE, and then we have all of that that issue, and what Ezra Klein points out at the by the end of the interview, he’s like, okay, so you’re against fraud over here, but let’s talk about and it had come up a couple different times. They were talking about it in the sense of virtue, which I think is really around the morals and ethics in which you live by. You’re against fraud over here, but you’re not really calling out the fraud that’s happening within the Trump administration with the crypto, with the deals and investments by foreigners,
Maria Ross 46:31
with the mobile company, with all the yeah, all
Rob Volpe 46:34
the self dealing that’s going on, and you know why is that? And they, Ezra Klein explores it more than Chris Rufo openly admits to it, but it’s the idea that Trump’s a strongman, and therefore, you if you disagree with the strongman, you get booted out because you’re not following then the new ethics and morals of that administration. And they point out that, and so it’s just an example of you can be against something over here, but you know it’s the the both siderism. You’re against it here in this case, but you’re not over here. And if people could be honest with themselves, if they can see that in those times that that happens, and then just ask themselves why, what is that, where is that coming from? Because those are moral decisions that people are making,
Maria Ross 47:24
right?
Rob Volpe 47:24
You know, is it because the Somalis are from Africa, they’re immigrants, they’re black, so is that a racist thing? Is it something else? Is it then why not over here on on the other side,
Maria Ross 47:36
right? And again, this is complicated. I know I keep. I’m the one that keeps doing this. Like again, very uniquely human to even be thinking about the negotiation of that that we spend cycles on in our own heads,
Rob Volpe 47:50
yeah, and hearts
Maria Ross 47:51
on that code, rather than it’s like, yep, we all agree to this,
Rob Volpe 47:55
yes. And so,
Maria Ross 47:56
like, even just talking through this with you, of like, because I think I always did think, oh, at least overall humanity can agree on a few things. I’m actually a little discouraged by our thought experiment because I don’t know that we can.
Rob Volpe 48:10
I would love for people to you know in the comments reach out to us on the socials, email us, whatever, connect with us, and just let us know like what are the three things you think all humans might you know, humans around the world might agree to in terms
Maria Ross 48:25
of morals and ethics. Yeah,
Rob Volpe 48:26
thank you. In terms of morals and ethics, and I want to just touch on the this idea of how we go about changing minds because storytelling is actually really important in this. But there’s also the idea then of, and it actually relates to everything that we were just talking about. But Peter Singer has a book from 1981 called “The Expanding Circle, and the idea is that the moral logic doesn’t change, but the scope of who it applies to is what expands. So he his argument is that altruism begins as genetically based to protect one’s kin and community members, but that it’s a consciously chosen ethic with an expanding circle of moral concern, and that human ethics cannot be explained by biology alone, as we’ve been talking about. I think, but it’s our capacity for reasoning that makes moral progress possible. And so, when I think about the arc of the gay community, just to go back to that, and the way that we’ve become more accepted, it is in that idea of, and it’s using story to help people see and connect and understand to build empathy with, so that you can change hearts and minds, and bring more people. So morally, they are not opposed to. And you’ve seen that in the data, the acceptance of different communities. But I’ll keep going back to the queer community. The acceptance of the queer community in the general population that’s grown. The acceptance of gay marriage. Has also grown recently. It’s taken a little dip amongst Republicans, but it’s still generally the majority of the population. I remember 30 years ago when I was involved in the beginnings of that fight that that was not the case, and it was a lot of changing hearts and minds. So it was that expansion of who people were morally concerned about.
Maria Ross 50:20
I think it it echoes that quote of the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
Rob Volpe 50:26
I love that,
Maria Ross 50:27
and I love that quote. Well, this is such a great conversation. I love the what you pose to our listeners of letting us know what you think are the the common moral or ethical codes. What can we all agree on from every corner of the world, every pocket, every culture or community? Are there at least three to five common agreements we could have about what is moral, what is right, what is just? Let us know on Instagram. I neglect to tell you. Let us know on LinkedIn. You can find us both on LinkedIn. We have all the links in the show notes. But I’m on Instagram at Red Slice Maria Rob.
Rob Volpe 51:08
I am on Instagram at Empathy Activist. You can find us on YouTube, where you might be seeing this or listening. It’s not hard to find us. We are present. Look for Empathy Activist. Look for red slice, Maria. We are
Maria Ross 51:22
omnipresent, and again, like I’ve saying, like I’ve been saying throughout this whole series, this is not about us giving the answers. We’re just having the conversation and asking the provocative questions of what does it mean to be human. So, thanks, Rob, once again for a delightful conversation.
Rob Volpe 51:40
Maria, thank you. This has been amazing. Even without
Maria Ross 51:43
your coffee, you did so well today.
Rob Volpe 51:45
Even without coffee, we did so well. We’re recording this in the morning. I have a medical appointment this afternoon. I am not able to have coffee before that. I question my choice of timing for that appointment, but I’m just going to smile. I only got a few more hours to
Maria Ross 52:01
go. Great, and we have one more episode in this sub series left. No, yes. So we need to know what you guys think. So please, or you guys and gals, what you think about this topic and what you think about this sub series overall. Let us know. Reach out, and thank you for listening to another episode of the Empathy Edge podcast. If you like what you heard, you know what to do. Please rate, review, and share it with a friend or a colleague. And until next time, please remember that cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive. Stay well and be kind. For more on how to achieve radical success through empathy, visit theempathyedge.com. There you can listen to past episodes, access show notes and free resources, book me for a keynote or workshop, and sign up for our email list to get new episodes, insights, news, and events. Please follow me on Instagram at Red Slice Maria. Never forget, empathy is your superpower. Use it to make your work and the world a better place.
