In the argument about whether dogs are likely to leave some of their dinner for a stray cat who might come into the house later to eat it (let alone whether the dog knows the cat is pregnant and is feeding her because she’s pregnant…), someone linked to this interesting research that seems to show that rats can do altruism.
In the new study, Mason, Bartal and University of Chicago colleague Jean Decetyplaced pairs of rats in Plexiglass pens. One rat was trapped in a cage in the middle of the pen, whereas the other rat was free to run around. Most free rats circled their imprisoned peer, gnawing at the cage and sticking their paws, noses and whiskers through any openings. After a week of trial and error, 23 of the 30 rats in the experiment learned to open the cage and free their peers by head-butting the cage door or leaning their full weight against the door until it tipped over. (The door could only be opened from the outside.) At first the rats were startled by the noise of the toppling door. Eventually, however, they stopped showing surprise, which suggests that they fully intended to push the door aside. Further, the rodents showed no interest in opening empty cages or in those containing toy rats, indicating that a break out was their genuine goal.
In this first set of experiments, most rats seemed quite willing to help their peers, but Mason wanted to give them a tougher test. She placed rats in a Plexiglass pen with two cages: in one was another rat, in the other was a pile of five milk chocolate chips—a favorite snack of these particular rodents. The unrestricted rats could easily have eaten the chocolate themselves before freeing their peers or been so distracted by the sweets that they would neglect their imprisoned friends. Instead, most of the rats opened both cages and shared in the chocolate chip feast.
That’s pretty cool.
Mason’s new study is one of the most recent in a series of experiments changing how scientists think about empathy and altruism in the animal kingdom. At first, most people agreed that true altruism was a uniquely human characteristic requiring an awareness of one’s actions as selfless. Now it seems that many animals have evolved instincts to help others, even at a cost to themselves, and that we inherited these same instincts. “The bottom line is that helping an individual in distress is part of our biology,” Mason says. “It’s not something that develops or doesn’t develop because of culture.”
It’s a mammal thing. Oxytocin. Caring.
In earlier work, McGill University psychologist Jeffrey Mogil and his colleagues showed that mice recognize their peers’ pain—what researchers call “emotional contagion”—and spend more time with suffering cage mates. His team also developed a scale to measure pain expressed on the faces of mice.
Mogil was impressed with Mason’s study, but had some questions about the findings. “This is surprising because it’s not clear what the motivation for the prosocial behavior is, although the prosocial behavior is clearly there,” says Mogil. Both Mogil and Mason point out that because trapped rats squeak out alarm calls now and then, which stress out any fellows that hear them, the rats opening the doors might be trying to silence their peers. Mason thinks the alarm calls aren’t frequent enough to motivate the rats, but Mogil is not so sure.
So it could be just “stop making that noise.” Or it could be freedom, freedom, freedom.
The rats of NIMH!!
That is pretty cool. Maybe even a better morality story than the dog food one 😉
Monster rat jumped out of the bin bag
The cat, Enok, had been acting strangely and guarding the dishwasher. When the family in Solna went to empty the garbage, they found out why: a 39.5 cm (15.5 inch) rat ran around on the kitchen floor. Enok fled. 13-year old Justus was afraid the rat would bite him in the toes. They set out a trap, which slammed shut but did not outright kill the beast.
The rat had probably climbed up a stick and came in through a vent.
“The bottom line is that helping an individual in distress is part of our biology,”
What’s this ‘our’ ? They’re rats. Somehow I doubt that if they’d broken into each other’s cages and ate each other the researchers would be announcing this as proof cannibalism is ingrained in human beings.
I’m very wary of anthropomorphising animals – especially when researchers are projecting highly abstract qualities like ’empathy’ or ‘altruism’ onto animals when there’s no indication they possess anything analogous to our ‘theory of mind’ or the first, second or third levels of intentionality necessary for anything approaching ’empathy’.
Rodents don’t see the world the way we do; they feel pain but they don’t see other creatures as beings with with feelings or intentions. They feed their young because their genes have programmed that behaviour into them; they flee from predators because their ancestors did. They don’t see each other as versions of themselves and they don’t see cats as creatures with malevolent intent.
They might act in ways which appear altruistic or empathetic but you could programme a basic computer simulation to do the same (perhaps using the ultimatum game we discussed here recently).
I think this study of chimps comes closer – but even here its necessary to ask whether ‘altruism’ is an appropriate word:
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/2/20130009.full
Considering it’s entirely possible that rats will become the dominant species following the latest great extinction, I find this to be strangely heartening news.
* resumes thick Southron accent *
Rat on!
/thick Southron accent
@3 Shatterface
Very sure of yourself with this statement, you seem to be. And yes, what you say here has been widely taught and believed for decades.
Yet whenever a philosopher says “the difference between humans and other animals is that humans possess quality X and other animals do not,” along comes a pesky experimenter who devises an experiment like this one that finds animals that do, in fact, possess quality X. There seems to have been quite a deluge of such experiments over the past decade. Communication, planning ahead, facial recognition, engineering, tool use — we seem to constantly be discovering new ways in which our attributes only differ from those of our cousins in degree, not kind. Given the amazing tide of recent discoveries, I’m somewhat surprised that you feel able to state your position with such confidence.
I’m not suggesting that there’s a clear division between animals and humans – I’m suggesting that there’s a continuum between humans and animals but dogs, chimps and dolphins are far more likely candidates for having ”empathy” than rats.
Anyway, Ophelia has published a follow-up to this so we might continue the debate there?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2014/03/theory-of-attention/
And in another animal closely related rats and mice:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v308/n5955/abs/308181a0.html
Minor side note: it’s not entirely a mammal thing, but also a social animal with biggish brain thing. Crows, pigeons, and parrots show some prosocial behaviors people didn’t expect of them till they looked.
One of the saddest things I ever saw was a galah, a type of Australian parrot, desperate to help its mate which had been hit by a car. The whole flock was there, making a huge racket, but that one bird ran into the road and stood between the rushing cars with its dying mate.
I know that’s an anecdote and not data, but there’s no universe in which you can explain that with some form of personal benefit motive.
That story is a lot more interesting than the dog one partly, of course, by virtue of its being true. We should be wary of speculating about the rats’ motivations or making direct analogies to similar traits in other animals, but I think it’s still quite far from Shaun’s alleged actions.
Shaun had to somehow work out that the cat was in need of food and to reason that by leaving some of his food, he could help the cat. And he had to want to help the cat in that particular way. And he had to anticipate the cat coming back the next day. This seems like quite advanced reasoning to me, especially the time gap between the leaving of the food and the ‘reward’ of the cat’s eating it. No such reasoning is necessarily required for a rat to free another before eating. And to say that the rats then ‘shared’ the food is a bit of a leap: it could easily be instead that the imperative – whatever it was – to free the other rat was stronger than the imperative to eat.
Animals that are willing to help others (of their species, at least) are more likely to survive. Animals that help others to their own detriment will not. Once such a characteristic appears, I suspect it reaches a maximally beneficial point within a few generations.
I would be very surprised to find a social animal that is not altruistic.
Oxytocin may be a mammal thing, but not caring, that’s human. We are the animal that takes care of other animals even without the chemical reward. The same with altruism. The altruist isn’t the person who instinctively does something to help another despite risk or harm to herself, it is the person who decides to exchange her harm for another’s benefit. That doesn’t happen anywhere else in the animal kingdom as far as I can see.
The episode of Nature last night had a very interesting study of altrism like behavior in plants. It turns out there is a lot of chemical signaling going on that simulates altruism in many ways. There is also a much more complex relationship amongst plants and their predators/pollinators. I’ll try to remember to look for a link later, but it was really fascinating.
No. It’s not that simple.
@11 latsot:
“Shaun had to somehow work out that the cat was in need of food and to reason that by leaving some of his food, he could help the cat.”
There’s no reason to presume the dog was aware of any need. The simplest presumption (assuming the story is accurate in base details) is that the dog liked the presence of the cat, and wanted to encourage it to remain present, and knowing “Food is good, I like food, neat fuzzy thing will like food, too” decided to make the environment encouraging for the cat to stay. Very little need to be presumed about the dog’s reasoning power for it to decide the cat might like having food left for it. The real questions would resolve around the dog’s motivation for doing so. Short of developing psychic powers, those questions would be hard to answer. I would have little trouble believing the dog was leaving food to encourage rabbits or other herbivores it had taken an interest in to stay, not understanding that they wouldn’t be much interested in dog food.
@12 Gregory in Seattle:
“Animals that are willing to help others (of their species, at least) are more likely to survive. Animals that help others to their own detriment will not. Once such a characteristic appears, I suspect it reaches a maximally beneficial point within a few generations.”
But there are degrees of detriment. The dog leaving the food out isn’t a significant detriment. And, also, he’s not a population, but an individual dog, whose genes have been screwed up by millenia of human breeding. Dogs now regard something as undoglike as humans as “Part of my pack” That they might randomly start including other animals as “part of my pack” doesn’t seem unlikely.
@13 Celegans:
“Oxytocin may be a mammal thing, but not caring, that’s human.”
You assume they are two different things. : – )
“We are the animal that takes care of other animals even without the chemical reward.”
No, we’re the species who gives itself the chemical reward most broadly for the most irrelevant acts of kindness. What makes you think you aren’t getting the chemical reward? I certainly feel the oxytocin high when I help a lizard or spider out of the house and back into the wild where it belongs. If you’re not getting your chemical reward, wow…
“The same with altruism. The altruist isn’t the person who instinctively does something to help another despite risk or harm to herself, it is the person who decides to exchange her harm for another’s benefit. That doesn’t happen anywhere else in the animal kingdom as far as I can see.”
There are so many assumptions in that I don’t know how to start unpacking them all. But there are enough anecdotes about animals displaying something like kindness to other animals (intra and extra-specificly) that I can’t see you’re statement being supportable. Humans may be best at altruism, but we’re hardly the only species capable of reacting with concern to another’s suffering.
Are you serious? That is a very impressive piece of reasoning. It is one I very much doubt dogs are capable ot.
In what way? Food sharing is already part of the dog’s repertoire of behaviors. They do it with pack mates and especially offspring. All it needs is for the dog to somehow (mis)identify the cat with some pre-existing social construct.
@suttkus
But we’re not talking about sharing food in that way. I’ve seen dogs sharing food with cats many times, providing that they were both eating from the same bowl at the same time, or one or the other was eating food that happened to be left over. But I’ve also seen the same dog eating all its food and all of the cat’s food too.
What we’re talking about in this case is a deliberate decision by the dog to LEAVE some food for the cat. That’s different to sharing from the same bowl at the same time or not minding (assuming the dog is capable of noticing) that a cat has finished off it’s leftovers while it wasn’t there. It’s different to parents handing their offspring a portion of the available food.
The dog has to realise that it must limit its consumption specifically so that a cat can come along later and finish it off. Even understanding that delay seems quite a leap for a dog. If the cat were right there at the same time, I don’t have the slightest problem believing that the food might be shared, but I don’t buy the idea of the dog deciding to leave some food so that the cat can eat it later. These are very different things and I don’t see how the latter is a slightly subverted part of normal canine behaviour.