ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that humans frequently empathize (though exactly how often they do so is a matter of some controversy – see e.g. Hatfield & Rapson, 1994; Hoffman, 2000; Prinz, 2011). There is also increasingly little doubt that other species do so, too: in particular, chimpanzees have been shown to display empathetic reactions (see e.g. de Waal, 2008), and something similar seems to hold for dogs (Custance & Mayer, 2012), dolphins (Frohoff, 2013), and elephants (Hakeem et al., 2009; Plotnik et al., 2006). These facts raise the question of why the ability to empathize evolved: what evolutionary pressures brought it about that the ability to empathize spread through a number of different populations of organism? In what follows, I provide a partial answer to this question.
