Helping a cagemate in need: empathy and pro-social behavior in rats

By I. Bartal, Jean Decety, P. Mason. Science, 2011

813 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rats free companions from restraint, apparently motivated by empathy to end their mate's distress. Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or object-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates even when social contact was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocolate contained within a second restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific’s distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior.

Subfields: Genetics, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9aa9413c51c984083d62d62bd2fedcc8dfd0edb

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Citations in the corpus

Prosocial behaviour in animals: the influence of social relationships, communication and rewards (2012, background): “In rats, Rattus norvegicus, prosociality has been reported in the form of releasing a trapped cagemate (Rice & Gainer 1962), and has persisted in conditions in which food was present and would have to be shared with the liberated individual (Ben-Ami Bartal et al. 2011).”
A lifespan perspective on attachment and care for others: Empathy, altruism, and prosocial behavior (2016, background): “For recent similar viewpoints about a biologically based predisposition toward caring for others, see Bartal, Decety, and Mason (2011), de Waal (2008), and Warneken and Tomasello (2006).”
Empathy from infancy to adolescence: An attachment perspective on the development of individual differences (2017, background): “In addition to sharing in others’ affective states, social psychologists have conceptualized empathy as involving feelings of tenderness and concern for others’ welfare that arise in response to witnessing their suffering (Batson, Fultz, & Schoenrade, 1987). Developmentalists, too, have viewed empat”
The neural pathways, development and functions of empathy (2015, background): “These pathways together with neuroendocrine mechanisms, and the behaviors they mediate are highly conserved across mammalian species, as exemplified by a growing body of work with rodents [7,8,9,10 ] (Figure 1).”
Empathy: Gender effects in brain and behavior (2014, background): “Another study in rats found that females, compared to males, were faster and more likely to release a trapped cagemate (Ben-Ami Bartal et al., 2011).”