Humans may have evolved to experience far greater pain, malaise and suffering than the rest of the animal kingdom, due to their intense sociality giving them a reasonable chance of receiving help.
From the paper:
Several years ago, we proposed the idea that pain, and sickness behaviour had become systematically increased in humans compared with our primate relatives, because human intense sociality allowed that we could ask for help and have a reasonable chance of receiving it. We called this hypothesis ‘the pain of altruism’ [68]. This idea derives from, but is a substantive extension of Wall’s account of the placebo response [43]. Starting from human childbirth as an example (but applying the idea to all kinds of trauma and illness), we hypothesized that labour pains are more painful in humans so that we might get help, an ‘obligatory midwifery’ which most other primates avoid and which improves survival in human childbirth substantially ([67]; see also [69]). Additionally, labour pains do not arise from tissue damage, but rather predict possible tissue damage and a considerable chance of death. Pain and the duration of recovery after trauma are extended, because humans may expect to be provisioned and protected during such periods. The vigour and duration of immune responses after infection, with attendant malaise, are also increased. Noisy expression of pain and malaise, coupled with an unusual responsivity to such requests, was thought to be an adaptation.
We noted that similar effects might have been established in domesticated animals and pets, and addressed issues of ‘honest signalling’ that this kind of petition for help raised. No implication that no other primate ever supplied or asked for help from any other was intended, nor any claim that animals do not feel pain. Rather, animals would experience pain to the degree it was functional, to escape trauma and minimize movement after trauma, insofar as possible.
If the evolutionary logic here is right, I’d naively also expect non-human animals to suffer more to the extent they’re (a) more social, and (b) better at communicating specific, achievable needs and desires.
There are reasons the logic might not generalize, though. Humans have fine-grained language that lets us express very complicated propositions about our internal states. That puts a lot of pressure on individual humans to have a totally ironclad, consistent “story” they can express to others. I’d expect there to be a lot more evolutionary pressure to actually experience suffering, since a human will be better at spotting holes in the narratives of a human who fakes it (compared to, e.g., a bonobo trying to detect whether another bonobo is really in that much pain).
It seems like there should be an arms race across many social species to give increasingly costly signals of distress, up until the costs outweigh the amount of help they can hope to get. But if you don’t have the language to actually express concrete propositions like “Bob took care of me the last time I got sick, six months ago, and he can attest that I had a hard time walking that time too”, then those costly signals might be mostly or entirely things like “shriek louder in response to percept X”, rather than things like “internally represent a hard-to-endure pain-state so I can more convincingly stick to a verbal narrative going forward about how hard-to-endure this was”.
Rolf Degen, summarizing part of Barbara Finlay’s “The neuroscience of vision and pain”:
From the paper:
Finlay’s original article on the topic: “The pain of altruism”.
[Epistemic status: Thinking out loud]
If the evolutionary logic here is right, I’d naively also expect non-human animals to suffer more to the extent they’re (a) more social, and (b) better at communicating specific, achievable needs and desires.
There are reasons the logic might not generalize, though. Humans have fine-grained language that lets us express very complicated propositions about our internal states. That puts a lot of pressure on individual humans to have a totally ironclad, consistent “story” they can express to others. I’d expect there to be a lot more evolutionary pressure to actually experience suffering, since a human will be better at spotting holes in the narratives of a human who fakes it (compared to, e.g., a bonobo trying to detect whether another bonobo is really in that much pain).
It seems like there should be an arms race across many social species to give increasingly costly signals of distress, up until the costs outweigh the amount of help they can hope to get. But if you don’t have the language to actually express concrete propositions like “Bob took care of me the last time I got sick, six months ago, and he can attest that I had a hard time walking that time too”, then those costly signals might be mostly or entirely things like “shriek louder in response to percept X”, rather than things like “internally represent a hard-to-endure pain-state so I can more convincingly stick to a verbal narrative going forward about how hard-to-endure this was”.