Killer Empathy

Summary

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Radiolab: "Killer Empathy"

Release Date: February 7, 2012
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich
Producer and Contributor: Lulu Miller
Guests: Jeff Lockwood (Entomologist & Professor), Tamara Carboni

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Episode Overview

This episode, "Killer Empathy", explores the slippery and sometimes perilous territory of empathy—what happens when we try to understand or relate to creatures radically different from ourselves, and the limits (and dangers) of putting ourselves in the place of “the other.” The story uses Jeff Lockwood's research into aggressive crickets, his mentorship under Dr. LaFarge, and their tragic aftermath, as a bridge to examine the boundaries between scientific objectivity, human emotion, and the possibility—and impossibility—of empathy for both animals and people who commit violence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Encounters with Alien Creatures: The Gorilla Crickets

• Jeff Lockwood introduces his research subject: the gorilla crickets—“the Hulk Hogan of crickets” (01:47)—noted for being extremely aggressive, powerful, and unlike other insects.

  • They needed to be kept apart: “If you put them together, they would… fight to the death.” (02:05)
  • When handled, they bit so fiercely they would draw blood—so Lockwood resorted to chilling them to subdue them for study (02:35).

• Over time, Lockwood noticed behaviors that felt familiar:

  • Nest-building and recognition of self through pheromones:
    “They secrete a pheromone, a chemical, and each cricket is able to self identify its own odor…they had a kind of capacity to recognize self.” (03:49–04:04)
  • He began to see them as less "other," thinking: “Perhaps these little guys were more like me than many other insects that I had worked with.” (04:39–04:44)

2. The Shattering Limit of Empathy: Self-Consumption

• A graphic moment redefines Lockwood's ability to empathize:
  • Lockwood accidentally injures a cricket, rupturing its abdomen:
    “I felt guilt…and then…what really struck me was what he did next, which was curl his head downward toward his abdomen… and began consuming his own…consuming the viscera that was oozing out of his body. And so he was literally cannibalizing himself.” (05:24–06:11)
  • This act was “unimaginable” for Lockwood, breaking the spell of affinity he’d developed for the crickets.

3. Scientist’s Struggle: Empathy vs. Objectivity

• Lockwood recalls his mentor Dr. LaFarge, who drilled home the importance of scientific objectivity and resisting anthropomorphism:
  • “His job in the classroom was to make us good objective observers.” (07:28)
  • “Don’t put the creature in your box. It doesn’t want to be there.” (08:30)
  • There's a "moral danger almost, to sort of not allow the organism to be what it is." (08:35)
  • Respect for the subject is paradoxically attained through objectivity, not empathy.

4. When Empathy Runs Aground: Human Violence

• The narrative pivots to a traumatic experience involving Dr. LaFarge’s murder during a mugging in New Orleans, as recounted by Tamara Carboni:

  • “He said, close your eyes. And in the process of closing my eyes, I saw the gun.” (10:00–11:01)
  • “I just watched him die.” (12:13–12:24)

• The murderer was never caught, and both Tamara and Lockwood struggle to “make sense” of this violence.

  • Tamara: “I can't relate to this person. I can't imagine doing violence to another human being or killing them. I can't relate to that at all.” (15:18–15:35)
  • When asked if understanding is possible, her Vietnam-veteran boss told her: “You’ll never understand this.” (15:45–16:03)

5. Trying to Understand the Unimaginable: The Limits of Empathy

• Lockwood attempts to take LaFarge’s hyper-objective vantage, viewing violence as a biological “baseline strategy”—not monstrous, but animal (13:52–14:17).

  • “Violence is the baseline strategy for most encounters between and indeed within species.” (13:52)
  • “If we just stop there, then it’s to say that it’s somehow unnatural or inhuman. In fact… it’s profoundly human.” (16:10–16:22)
  • Nevertheless, Jeff admits “the essay itself kind of falls short… it just isn’t sufficient.” (16:32)

• Ultimately, Lockwood confides:

  • “I…can say that I understand another being’s eating its own, leaking entrails at a level that I can’t understand one of my fellow beings pulling the trigger and killing a man that I love.” (16:51–17:37)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the crickets:

  • “It's sort of like the Hulk Hogan of crickets.” – Jeff Lockwood (01:47)
  • “If you put them together, they would…fight to the death.” – Jeff Lockwood (02:05)
  • “They secrete a pheromone…and each cricket is able to self identify its own odor.” – Jeff Lockwood (03:49)

• On the pain of empathy’s limits:

  • “He was literally cannibalizing himself.” – Jeff Lockwood (06:11)
  • “Don’t put the creature in your box. It doesn’t want to be there.” – Dr. LaFarge (as quoted by Lockwood, 08:30)
  • “There’s a moral danger almost…to not allow the organism to be what it is.” – Jeff Lockwood (08:35)

• On violence and trying to make sense of it:

  • “Violence is the baseline strategy for most encounters between and indeed within species.” – Jeff Lockwood (13:52)
  • “You’ll never understand this.” – Tamara’s boss (16:03)
  • “I can say that I understand another being’s eating its own, leaking entrails at a level that I can’t understand one of my fellow beings pulling the trigger and killing a man that I love.” – Jeff Lockwood (16:51–17:37)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:34–02:35: The aggressive, almost alien nature of gorilla crickets introduced; Lockwood’s struggles handling them
• 03:27–04:13: Nests, pheromones, and emergent signs of insect “self”
• 05:06–06:11: The cricket’s self-cannibalism, Lockwood’s visceral reaction
• 06:26–08:35: Objectivity as a scientific/moral principle ('don’t put the creature in your box')
• 09:36–12:24: Tamara Carboni recounts the murder of Dr. LaFarge
• 13:03–16:32: Attempts at rationalizing the violence, empathy's failure, and reflections from both Jeff and Tamara
• 16:51–17:37: Lockwood’s poignant conclusion about empathy’s limits

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Thematic Summary

"Killer Empathy" deftly explores how close we may come to understanding radically different beings—from predatory insects to people who commit violent acts—and where our understanding must ultimately stop. The episode interrogates not just the boundaries of empathy but its moral hazards, the seduction of anthropomorphism, and the cold clarity—yet also the comfortlessness—of scientific objectivity. Through these stories, the show asks: Can true empathy cross the gulf between profoundly different ways of being? What does it mean when we try, and fail, to understand?

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For listeners seeking contemplation on science, morality, violence, and the limits of understanding—this episode is as unsettling as it is thought-provoking.

Transcript

[Jeff Lockwood]

Introducing Fidelity Trader Plus. With customizable tools and charts you can access across all your devices, Try our most powerful trading platform [e-mail] TraderPlus investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, llc. Member nyse, sipc.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, wait, you're listening.

[Tamara Carboni]

Okay.

[Jeff Lockwood]

All right.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Jeff Lockwood]

All right.

[Radiolab Narrator]

You're listening to Radiolab, Radio Lab shorts.

[Jeff Lockwood]

From WNYC.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And npr.

[Jad Abumrad]

Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Jeff Lockwood]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab, the podcast. And today on the podcast. Well, first we've got a story from our old producer of ours, Lulu Miller. She's not old. She just has been with us and now is at school. Right, Exactly. She's actually kind of young. Chronologically. She's not old, she's old to us. She's an old soul. In any case, this is a story about some of the sticky issues that result when you try and empathize with another being. Yeah, it's a very different story than one we've ever told. It started for Lulu when she spoke with them. Well, she'll handle the introductions.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Can you introduce yourself?

[Jeff Lockwood]

Award winning author, fantastic husband.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Dad of the Year.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Dad of the year. No. I'm Jeff Lockwood. I'm a professor at the University of Wyoming.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Jeff is an entomologist.

[Jad Abumrad]

You mean like a bug guy?

[Radiolab Narrator]

He's a bug guy. And mostly he studies crickets and grasshoppers. And this story involves a kind of cricket that's, well, different. The gorillas.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Yeah, the gorilla critics. Yeah.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And are they related to katydids?

[Jeff Lockwood]

The way to think of a gorilla Critiddid is like a cricket on steroids.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Okay.

[Jeff Lockwood]

It's sort of like the Hulk Hogan of crickets.

[Radiolab Narrator]

First of all, he says they're a little bulkier than your average cricket.

[Jeff Lockwood]

And they tend to have very strong jaws. Very strong jaws.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And mandibles that are really sharp, sort.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Of like a serrated knife.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And most of all, they're vicious.

[Jeff Lockwood]

They all had to be caged separately. If you put them together, they would.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Fight to the death.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Yeah.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Wow.

[Jeff Lockwood]

And so when I would go in.

[Radiolab Narrator]

In the mornings and reach into one of their cages, as soon as they saw him coming, they'd fly into this rage.

[Jeff Lockwood]

It's really sort of a showstopper. They'll sort of rear up on their.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Hind leg, beat their abdomens on the ground, flare out their wings, and then clamp onto his fingers, they would draw blood. Wow.

[Jeff Lockwood]

So I used this, this glass probe on the big boy. At least until the point at which he snapped off the end of the glass rod. Holy moly. So I ended up with, actually there were two that were very large. I would just take their cage when I went in and pop it in the refrigerator and go get a cup of coffee. And within 15 minutes, because insects are cold blooded, they would be anesthetized by the cold and I could lift them out.

[Radiolab Narrator]

That's cheating.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Well, that was my solution for them. The little guys I could manage, the big ones, a little bit of chill in the morning is all it took.

[Radiolab Narrator]

So the point is, these creatures were completely alien to him. There's like nothing about them he can relate to. But over time, the more he studied them, the more he started noticing things that made them seem way less foreign.

[Jeff Lockwood]

See, I kept these in these, for.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Example, as soon as he'd put one into a new cage, it would make itself a little nest.

[Jeff Lockwood]

And once it has that little nest.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Built, that's home in a very real way. Because by moving them around to different.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Cages, he soon realized that they could differentiate their nests.

[Radiolab Narrator]

They can actually tell the difference between their nest and another.

[Jad Abumrad]

And how do they do that?

[Jeff Lockwood]

They secrete a pheromone, a chemical, and each cricket is able to self identify its own odor.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Whoa.

[Jeff Lockwood]

It gave me the sense, and I think there's something to this, that they had a kind of capacity to recognize self.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Oh, interesting.

[Jeff Lockwood]

We don't see that much in insects, but they had what appears to be a capacity to say, this is mine.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And then he began to think differently about that crazy rage too. Because if you think about it, here's this creature, it's completely vulnerable to attack.

[Jeff Lockwood]

They really don't have a very good defense for themselves. They don't excrete nasty chemicals, they don't sting, and it can't fly, so it's not going to go flying away either.

[Radiolab Narrator]

So maybe that rage is their only strategy.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Which again drew me into thinking that I understood them.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Perhaps these little guys were more like.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Me than many other insects that I had worked with.

[Radiolab Narrator]

So he grew to really like them. But then one day, I'd been working.

[Jeff Lockwood]

With this particular gorilla, critid, trying to.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Move him from one cage to another.

[Jeff Lockwood]

And he was agitated and had decided to go on the offensive, which involved trying to come out of the cage. So he was scrambling up the side.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Of the cage and to keep him from getting out, Jeff slammed the lid.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Down as he was just at the.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Edge and caught him between the lid and the edge of the cage.

[Jeff Lockwood]

And I quickly lifted the lid up and he fell back into the cage. And I looked down at him and what had happened was I had ruptured his abdomen.

[Radiolab Narrator]

A split right down his belly.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Jeez. And some of the viscera and kind of globule of yellow fat was leaking out, oozing out of his body. I. I felt guilt. And then, of course, I. I felt sorry for an animal. But what really struck me was what he did next, which was curl his head downward toward his abdomen, pause for a moment, and then began consuming his own. Consuming the viscera that was oozing out of his body. And so he was literally cannibalizing himself.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow, that is disgusting.

[Jeff Lockwood]

It was horrifying. I had sort of felt like I had come to know them then this, this was just so out of the imaginable.

[Radiolab Narrator]

But the instant that word popped into his mind, unimaginable. He had this sort of Pavlovian reflex. And he thought of this guy, an old professor of his, Dr. LaFarge. LaFarge.

[Jeff Lockwood]

He was one of my mentors at Louisiana State University.

[Jad Abumrad]

You said this was a teacher of his?

[Radiolab Narrator]

Yep. Insect behavior.

[Jeff Lockwood]

He was one of the younger faculty members when I was there. Mid 30s, slight of build, but incredibly intense.

[Radiolab Narrator]

He's kind of an expert in animal violence. And, and the thing he harped on over and over, the thing he was trying to pound into their brains was.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Objectivity to separate one's emotions and interests from the object of study. And he had these wire rimmed glasses. And I remember if he would ask.

[Radiolab Narrator]

You a question like, why does the gorilla critid do its crazy war dance?

[Jeff Lockwood]

And you tried sort of reading in will intention mental states, maybe because it's.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Angry or scared, he would just drop.

[Jeff Lockwood]

His chin and look over the top.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And tear you apart.

[Jeff Lockwood]

His job in the classroom was to make us good objective observers.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And Jeff, Jeff stayed in touch with him over the years.

[Jeff Lockwood]

I wanted to be good at this.

[Radiolab Narrator]

As he set up his own lab.

[Jeff Lockwood]

You know, I had a stake in earning his respect.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And so that day, as he's watching the gorilla critid consume its own guts, he's thinking, okay, what would Lafarge see in this?

[Jeff Lockwood]

So my sense through my research is that what this gorilla critid had done was perhaps to have detected the odor of its own fats. It sort of drew the conclusion that this must be something good to eat without sort of grasping that it was its own self. The smell of its own fat triggered a feeding behavior that. That's highly adaptive, you know, to feed on fat. Fats are very hard to get hold of out in the world.

[Jad Abumrad]

And.

[Jeff Lockwood]

And so when you smell fats, it's, you know, it's like us and donuts, right?

[Radiolab Narrator]

Yeah, go for it.

[Jeff Lockwood]

It triggers feeding. Yeah, it triggers feeding.

[Jad Abumrad]

So clearly these things don't quite have a sense of self.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Right. So maybe they're not just like me.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Which was always Lafarge's point. Don't put the creature in your box. It doesn't want to be there.

[Jeff Lockwood]

It's sort of a moral danger almost, to sort of not allow the organism to be what it is. It's almost to sort of possess it or to own it. And to really treat the insects sort of with a. With a deep respect. Right. Is oddly enough, to treat them objectively. You know, he was one of the professors who actually engendered a kind of good fear. And he was the kind of person who you. Who you wanted to please.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Is that better?

[Tamara Carboni]

A little louder?

[Radiolab Narrator]

Yeah, a tiny bit.

[Tamara Carboni]

Is that okay?

[Radiolab Narrator]

Oh, that's great.

[Tamara Carboni]

Great.

[Radiolab Narrator]

But then, years later, something happened that challenged Jeff's ability to do this, to be the kind of scientist that Lafarge wanted him to be. We're recording over here, and there's really only one person who can tell us this part of the story. Will you introduce yourself?

[Tamara Carboni]

Okay. My name is Tamara Carboni.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Tamara is actually not a scientist. She worked for the Louisiana State Museum, and back in 1989, she and Dr. Lafage, whose first name is also Jeff, were working together on this termite problem. The termites were getting really bad in the French Quarter, and it was her job to preserve the historic homes, and Jeff was studying the termites.

[Tamara Carboni]

I never imagined that I would be fascinated by termites, but I was. So he made it fascinating. Yeah, fascinating.

[Radiolab Narrator]

But then one night in July, July 25, they met for dinner to talk about how the project was going, and.

[Tamara Carboni]

We were walking home. Well, he was walking me to my house around 10, 10:30 at night. And I think it must have been raining or there was a threat of rain because. Because Jeff was carrying an umbrella. And I could hear footsteps behind us, very determined sounding footsteps. And we got to a corner across from my house, and at that point, this person came around us in front of us, and he said, close your eyes. And in the process of closing my eyes, I saw the gun.

[Radiolab Narrator]

So she closed her eyes, and a second later, she felt a tug on her purse.

[Tamara Carboni]

I could feel him take hold of the straps, and I was not going to resist. And as I felt him do that, I could hear Jeff say, don't do.

[Radiolab Narrator]

That at that instant.

[Tamara Carboni]

I don't remember the shot at all. You know, I. I felt Jeff move. And I guess at that point, I opened my eyes. This guy had already run, Never took my purse. I saw Jeff running toward my house, and I just ran after him. I had no idea he was shot. But he got onto the porch and he collapsed on his back. And at that point, he was gushing blood. And I was trying to get Jeff to understand that help was coming. And I kept saying, you're gonna be okay. They're on their way.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And did he say anything?

[Tamara Carboni]

He couldn't talk. He just. He had this kind of stare. And I just watched him die.

[Jeff Lockwood]

The news came by a phone call. And it just seemed, you know, it was one of those classic unreal moments. Something about this, you know, must be wrong. It wasn't Dr. Lafarge. He wasn't really killed. It seemed particularly hard to grasp.

[Tamara Carboni]

You know, one minute I'm with this vital person, and the next minute, he's dead.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Sadness, anguish, confusion.

[Tamara Carboni]

It was hysterical, crying. I was in shock.

[Jeff Lockwood]

They never found his killer, never found.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Out anything about him, who he was, why he would do this.

[Jeff Lockwood]

It was just this seemingly senseless act.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And that's how Jeff understood it for years, that it was senseless. But over time, something odd started to happen. Lafarge started appearing in his brain, telling him that that word wasn't good enough. And he began to ask himself again.

[Jeff Lockwood]

How would Dr. Lafarge want me to think about this?

[Radiolab Narrator]

How would he think about his own death? Okay, so I wonder if you do have the essay with you. So he writes an essay. Will you read the last four paragraphs of. Of the essay?

[Jeff Lockwood]

I will. 1, 2, 3, 4. Right. The year after I left Louisiana and came to Wyoming as a freshly minted PhD.

[Radiolab Narrator]

The first thing he does is he takes Lafarge's attitude on violence.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Violence is the baseline strategy for most encounters between and indeed within species.

[Radiolab Narrator]

That it's not some evil, outlying thing, but instead a baseline strategy for all animals. And in that light, he looks at the actions of that night sort of dispassionately. First he figures this kid was probably mugging them because he was poor, hopeless, poor, angry, scared.

[Jeff Lockwood]

The woman became tangled in the strap.

[Radiolab Narrator]

Dr. Lafarge, having his own instinctual reaction, stepped between them, said, don't hurt her.

[Jeff Lockwood]

You can have the purse. I can picture him doing this.

[Radiolab Narrator]

But perhaps that action itself scared the kid.

[Jeff Lockwood]

The young man drew a gun and fired point blank.

[Radiolab Narrator]

I showed the essay to Tamara.

[Tamara Carboni]

Yeah, well, no, that's not. I Mean, I don't think. And I don't know if he stepped forward or not. You know, again, my eyes were closed. I could feel some kind of movement. I certainly don't think he stepped between. There wasn't enough space for him to step between us.

[Radiolab Narrator]

For Tamara, who's been over the event a million times in her head, doesn't add up so easily. First of all, when Dr. Lafarge spoke.

[Tamara Carboni]

To the kid, it wasn't exactly a command. It was more like, don't do that. It was like, don't be an idiot. Don't do that.

[Radiolab Narrator]

It wasn't really threatening. It was more like, look, logically, let's not do this. And while she gets that the kid might have been scared and had not been intending to shoot, if he never.

[Tamara Carboni]

Ever could imagine himself shooting somebody, he wouldn't have had a loaded gun. I can't relate to this person. I can't imagine doing violence to another human being or killing them. I can't relate to that at all.

[Radiolab Narrator]

And over the years, her friends and family, co workers, tried all different kinds of ways to help her make sense of it. Nothing really helped.

[Tamara Carboni]

But there was someone that I worked with, my boss, actually, who had been in Vietnam, and he took me aside and he said, you know, you'll never understand this.

[Radiolab Narrator]

You're not going to understand it. Yeah, like, don't even try.

[Tamara Carboni]

I don't think there's any sense to be made out of it.

[Jeff Lockwood]

If we just stop there, then it's to say that it's somehow unnatural or inhuman. In fact, in a weird kind of way, it's profoundly human.

[Tamara Carboni]

There's no way I can understand it.

[Radiolab Narrator]

In the end, the essay itself kind of falls short, and Jeff admits that.

[Jeff Lockwood]

It just isn't sufficient.

[Radiolab Narrator]

But he says there is a way of understanding this event. He just hasn't gotten there yet. But it is out there. Yeah, it has to be.

[Jeff Lockwood]

And Dr. LaFarge would have, I think, said this as well.

[Radiolab Narrator]

But for the moment, I think I.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Can say that I understand another being's eating its own, leaking entrails at a level that I can't understand one of my fellow beings pulling the trigger and. And killing a man that I love.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks to Lulu Miller and to Jeff Lockwood. His original essay first appeared in Orion Magazine. It's called the Nature of Violence. Definitely worth a read. Yeah, see, I. I'm of the school that says that you can't really make.

[Jeff Lockwood]

Sense of it, violence like that.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is just a hint of the danger of living in a profoundly disordered world, but looks. But I think I'm of the school, though, that you have to try to make sense, even if there's no sense to be made.

[Jeff Lockwood]

This is Matt Pritchard, a Radiolab listener in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

[Jad Abumrad]

More information about [e-mail].

[Jeff Lockwood]

Cool. I think that's it. Thank.

[Radiolab Narrator]

You.