Bonobos and Empathy

This article written by Elaina Zachos discusses how bonobos have emotions similar to ours. In fact, bonobos seem to be able to feel empathy for members of their group, but also towards strangers. This text mentions two experiments that were made on this species to lead to this conclusion. The first one being about yawns. Bonobos were shown videos of different apes yawning, some they knew and others they didn’t. Whether the bonobos knew who was in the video or not, they would yawn in response (Zachos). The second experiment shows that bonobos are likely to help strangers even if they don’t…