Abstract
Understanding and responding to an offspring’s nutritional, thermoregulatory, and safety needs are not optional actions for mammalian mothers. In mammalian communities, affective communication and pro-social acts support social cohesion, which in turn maximizes every individual’s chances of survival and reproductive success. Reflecting the value of social cohesion and affective communication to mammals of all ages and both sexes, pro-social behavior is observed in rodents as well as primates. Given a rat-appropriate challenge, adult rats help another in distress by liberating a trapped rat from a small restrainer tube. Rats perform this pro-social act day after day and at shorter and shorter latencies, acting consistently and intentionally. Helping behavior occurs even if social contact between the helper and the recipient of help is prevented, by having the trapped rat released into a separate space. This result demonstrates that the helper rat helps independent of earning an immediate social reward. As is true of modern humans, rats help strangers as well as familiars. In the case of rats, help is extended to individually unfamiliar rats but only if those rats are of a familiar type, even if the type is not the same as their own biological type. Remarkably, cohousing with a single rat of a different stock is enough to confer familiarity to all rats of that stock. The helping behavior test opens doors to empirical testing of findings in humans, such as the influence of bystanders on the likelihood of helping, to disambiguate cultural and biological influences on human social behavior.
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Mason, P. (2016). Helping Another in Distress: Lessons from Rats. In: Shackelford, T., Hansen, R. (eds) The Evolution of Morality. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19671-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19671-8_9
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