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Rats free each other from cages (2011)
- grondilu 10y agoKind of related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iriBuIunNYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iriBuIunNYM
- fennecfoxen 10y ago... come now! I was expecting at least https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWhzy-lynu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWhzy-lynu4
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoActual paper: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1427 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1427 There is a correction issued for this paper, but the correction is paywalled so I can't tell whether it's substantive or a nitpick. Also, please put a (2011) in the title.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoSome recent research on the topic: Oberliessen et al., "Inequity aversion in rats" (2016) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347216000828 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347216... Decety et al., "Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour" (2016) http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1686/20150077 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1686/2015...
- throwitawayday 10y agoThe correction: “Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats” by I. B.-A. Bartal et al. (9 December 2011, p. 1427). On p. 1428, the last full paragraph of column 1 was incorrect. The paragraph should be replaced by this corrected text: “All female rats (6/6) and most male rats (17/24) in the trapped condition became door-openers. Female rats in the trapped condition opened the restrainer door at a shorter latency than males on days 7 to 12 (P < 0.01, MMA, Fig. 3A), consistent with suggestions that females are more empathic than males (7, 12, 13). Furthermore, female rats were also more active than males in the trapped condition (P < 0.001, ANOVA) but not in the empty condition (Fig. 3B).”
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoSo they used 30 rats in total?Any numbers on how statistically well-powered this was?
- dogma1138 10y ago30 rats are plenty if they selected them properly - different gene pools, different breeders etc...
- saalweachter 10y agoYou wouldn't necessarily care about genetic diversity for this sort of experiment. This experiment isn't trying to say "all animals" or "all rat species" exhibit this behavior; the interesting thing is that any animal does.
- tremon 10y agoFor me, the more important question is not whether all test subjects were genetically diverse: it's more important that the free rat and the caged rat are dissimilar. The situation would be vastly different if the rat pairs were related, since there is a genetically selfish motivation for caring for those within the same gene pool.
- jonlucc 10y agoThis becomes apparent when you try to co-house rats and mice. Litter mates are much less likely to fight.
- jonlucc 10y agoOdd to me is that they use 24 males and only 6 females. In my work (which is biology), we would usually use the same group size unless we had reason to know better. For example, there's a new-to-us model that we think might have differences between strains, sexes, and vendors. We ordered in 8 mice of each type to run a pilot.
- csomar 10y agoJust looked at the video. There is little evidence that the rat opened the cage to free his mate. My guess is that it opened the cage to check what's inside. Notice that as soon as the cage is opened it quickly entered inside even before his mate left it.
- gerbilly 10y agoThe researchers found that rats rarely opened empty cages, or cages containing a toy rat.
- smoyer 10y agoIf you were observing humans but couldn't interview them, could you say they were acting with empathy? There are all sorts of "acts" that appear to be empathy from the outside but end up being in both parties best interest. Even acts of heroism and selflessness end up helping to hold together our society but it's often hard to feel what the other is feeling. Even when I consciously try, I suspect my attempts at empathy fall short - but it's still important to try.
- ciokan 10y agoThat's probably because of the values and morals of our society mostly and not from a lack of empathy, heroism or selflessness. We inherit those values and pass them down to next generations. I think it's from the way we were raised and the way most of us raise our children. "If you do this, I will reward you with that"...this thing is from our childhood and sits at the root of mostly everything we do. There are exceptions that make the rule I'm sure of it but our ego always tells us "it's not purity", "they can't be better than us", "they have a plan" so it's hard to distinguish. My 2c.
- FeepingCreature 10y agoWhy do you think you feel empathy to begin with? It feels good because it helps on net. Your brain is a product of evolution; when something feels nice, there's usually a pragmatic reason for it.
- hiou 10y ago
- grecy 10y agoI feel certain that in the near future we will discover animals are a lot smarter and more emotionally developed than we currently realize, and future generations will look back on our treatment of them with disgust.
- hellofunk 10y agoI can highly recommend the book "Ravens in Winter" that shows just how complex and advanced the social structure is of these birds.
- kefka_p 10y agoWe've already demonstrated that some animals stand well above the capabilities we've historically attributed to them. While I don't share your enthusiasm for an improvement in human behavior as a consequence, I believe the nature of such intelligence is entirely too obvious to be ignored entirely. :)
- Aelinsaar 10y agoOur behavior will improve the instant that improvement doesn't represent an inconvenience for the average person. :|
- agumonkey 10y agoI have a weird metaphor. I grew up feeding on the 8bit period. A few years before I lost love for games. They grade objectively higher in most dimensions yet something isn't better. Resolutions aren't a defining variable. Old games limited in colors, dimensions, length, space etc etc still have the most important genes (gameplay?). This is how I feel about humans vs animals. They have the fundamental layers (fear, bond, game, space), we may have (I'm not qualified to claim more) a ridiculously larger upper brain that we use to reflect on this traits (we question emotions, etc), but in the end we don't have lots more than them.
- ekianjo 10y ago> I feel certain that in the near future we will discover animals are a lot smarter and more emotionally developed than we currently realize, and future generations will look back on our treatment of them with disgust. Replace animals by "slaves" or whatever human race we considered inferior in the past and you could write the same thing about a couple of hundred years ago. But the idea that humans are at the acme of evolution is going to be harder to kill.
- known 10y agoScary if they're so smart :)
- auganov 10y agoSort of off-topic but: What companies (or researchers?) [if any] are working on animal-related technologies? I.e. animal eeg, [non-decorative] animal wear, apps for animals etc. It deeply fascinates me but seems like it's somewhat unexplored in general. I only remember some company working on VR for animals.
- jonlucc 10y agoIn the research world, there are tons of machines aimed t measuring everything about rodents. There are implants that measure blood glucose levels every few minutes, treadmills that spit out every parameter about how a mouse walks, and MRIs and CTs just for rodents. These aren't exactly for the rodents, but they do exist.
- back_beyond 10y agoWhat are the benefits of developing such technology?
- internaut 10y agoYou remember Boxxy? From the Great 4chan Troll Wars? One side was trying to make her Queen and ... well, perhaps the less analysis the better. Boxxy aka Cathy Wayne has been at work for Animalist and does a review of a company called No More Woof. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUduoC7J6gA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUduoC7J6gA No More Woof. What a fantastic name for a startup. If the Internet was only created for one purpose and that purpose was talking pets, then it was all worth it. Technology!
- jpindar 10y agoThere are games for animals, and the animals certainly seem to enjoy them. https://youtu.be/la6vK6hI7rM https://youtu.be/la6vK6hI7rM
- mlvljr 10y agoSome communist rats you got there!
- jadbox 10y agoThis reminds me of the movie Secret of Nimh.
- pipio21 10y agoMy perception for watching the video is that the cage opener wants to mate with the rat inside once it is free. At least mount it. If there are from opposites sexes, there is certainly an egoistical reason for the rat to free the other. If they are not, rats are very sociable. They need close contact with other rats. It also looks like the opener rat is also very curious and wants to enter the cage too to know how it feels inside.
- adevine 10y agoThat was my perception as well: the rat immediately tried to mount the rat that had been trapped. My issue is not with the results of the study, but with interpretation. I think it's possible to explain the desire to free the other rat purely in selfish terms without any nods to altruistic or empathic behavior.
- MrBra 10y agoReproduction is not selfish. It's for species survival.
- placebo 10y agoThe rat doesn't know that...
- netcan 10y agoThe rat doesn't (necessarily) know it's selfless to free the other rather. He's acting on instinct. That's the question at hand:are these moral instincts, are they a shared trait with people's.
- chongli 10y agoWhat the heck does the term moral instincts mean? Are a snake's instincts immoral for driving it to eat the rat?
- 10y ago
- brunorsini 10y ago“In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running around inside wheels and conduction frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans.” RIP Douglas Adams.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoSide note: The Black Plague
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoMy understanding is Yersinia pestis is just as fatal to rats (and fleas) as it is to people.
- gweinberg 10y agoWere the imprisoned rats male or female? If I were a male rat, I would likely free an imprisoned female rat, but I'd probably think a male rat was being justly punished for his crimes.
- percept 10y agoLove it. Go rats.
- cLeEOGPw 10y agoAn interesting kind of empathy where the "emphatic" rat instantly tries to fuck rat it just released. And the article says "where the rat has nothing to gain". Might want to reevaluate that.
- projektir 10y ago> The idea that we should have moral compunctions about biological reality seems absurd to me Why? We seem to have plenty of moral compunctions about lots of other biological realities. Otherwise, why do anything at all? As humans, we have so far not acted in a manner that implies we're completely OK with biological realities. We keep trying to change them. Hopefully, it will continue this way. Most people agree that they do not want to suffer. That's what makes it evil. It's not a difficult concept.
- Amezarak 10y ago> Why? We seem to have plenty of moral compunctions about lots of other biological realities. Do we, in practice? Can you go into more detail? > Most people agree that they do not want to suffer. That's what makes it evil. It's not a difficult concept. Did we ask the animals too? Maybe the pig consensus is different. If most people agree they do not want to pay taxes, do taxes become evil? There is no objective reason to consider 'most people agree on x' as some kind of objective moral imperative. There is no moral quality to caring what people want. I don't think this is a very sound basis for an objective morality. EDIT: What I'm trying to get at is basically this. You're saying that eating meat (at least meat that necessitates the killing of animals) is morally wrong. You're saying this because you want to persuade me and the rest of your audience that eating meat is morally wrong. But you are not a moral authority; I consult my conscience, which feels entirely guilt-free about the subject, and my appetite, which feels a positive obligation to eat meat. You're simply trying to exploit a "hack" in my social animal brain, which is that if you tell me that something is wrong, you are telling me that other members of the human herd will judge me unfavorably and perhaps ostracize me or otherwise punish me. Some people, but not very many, will be swayed by your attempted brain-exploit. But I, again, observe that my conscious feels guilt-free, which is a very strong sign that the people I am surrounded by do not, in fact, disapprove of my eating meat, and also that the vast majority of people I know actually eat meat. So somewhere in my hindbrain, I realize that you are (from my perspective) lying to me, and it will make me instinctively resentful of you, because you have marked yourself as a member of The Other. So your 'moral' argument is, objectively, amoral; and for your purposes, actually counterproductive, useful only when a person is surrounded overwhelmingly by vegans and vegetarians, who will be able to enforce a shared social norm. You could, instead, if you want to try an intellectual tack, try to show how my personal interests are served by becoming a vegetarian, but you will have to discover some interests and values that strongly outweigh my predilection for eating meat. Or what you could do is abandon your moral arguments, temporarily, until a day when you're worried about punishing the wayward vegans rather than converting the meat-eaters. You want to make vegans cool, the social elite. You want to get into the media and fill as many TV shows and movies and podcasts and YouTube personalities with cool vegans. You want to make people want to be like you. While you're at it, make animals more important, anthropomorphize them as much as possible, try to generate as much empathy for animals as possible - to some degree, this is already being done. And then in a few decades, if you keep it up, most people will be vegetarians and you can then start talking about how killing animals for food is evil, and you can probably even pass a law to that effect. That'd be a way to get some moral feeling behind it.
- mudil 10y agoIt all goes down to the origins of morality. Politicians and clerics often repeat the mantra of religion and society creating a moral code for us, but observations and experiments with animals (and even plants) show that altruism, empathy, and cooperation spontaneously arise from the evolution. Excellent book on the subject is "The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates" by Frans de Waal.
- 4lejandrito 10y agoI find it odd that anyone able to cage rats for days in that cruel way is going to be able to identify any kind of empathy at all. How can you identify empathy if you don't even feel it? I guess this is how humans progress but I can't help feeling something wrong with it.
- ceejayoz 10y ago> How can you identify empathy if you don't even feel it? I can detect wind (including its strength and direction) outside my house even if I can't feel it.
- 4lejandrito 10y agoYou have a point but what I was trying to express is the irony of the experiment. To see if animals have empathy we basically torture them and see how they react... Call it empathy or whatever but I know I suffer under certain situations and can't see why a rat does not. They have 2 eyes and four limbs just like us maybe just a little bit less computing power.
- jboydyhacker 10y agoPlato defined consciousness using a test of whether something could understand the cause and effect of its actions. By that rule, a lot of animals would qualify as sentient- Rats/cats/dogs and virtually all critters.
- xg15 10y agoI found the counter-argument rather strange: > At issue is the definition of empathy. “This work is not evidence of empathy — defined as the ability to mentally put oneself into another being’s emotional shoes,” says Povinelli. “It’s good evidence for emotional contagion and that animals are motivated to coordinate their behaviour so that distress is reduced, but that is nothing new.” (Emphasis mine) How could this definition of empathy possibly be proven for non-humans? Or in fact, how could it be proven for anyone but yourself? Additionally, they present an alternate hypothesis to explain the findings: That the captive rat was somehow causing distress to the free rat and the free rat was solely motivated to reduce that distress without any concern for the other rat. While that's a valid hypothesis, it doesn't seem to hold the occam's razor test for me - especially as they admit themselves that they don't know what this distress-causing mechanism could be. (They suggest alarm calls or pheromones but couldn't find any yet)
- randcraw 10y agoHow to demonstrate empathy? Easy. Conduct experiments in which the caged rats undergo a range of living conditions from idyllic to neutral to outright torture. If the free rat favors freeing the tortured rat over the idyllic rat then it shows greater empathy.
- xg15 10y agoThat was, in (slightly) less horrible form, what they did. It's apparently still disputed that this shows empathy, however. For your experiment, you could counter-argue in the same way: Maybe the free rat was just particularly tired of the torture screams and that's why it freed that rat first...
- developer2 10y agoIf I was the outside rat, you damn well better believe the only reason I'm freeing the other rat from the idyllic environment is so I can get in there and enjoy some paradise for myself. :)
- chongli 10y agoIt can be demonstrated quite readily in humans, through media (literature, movies, TV). It happens all the time! If you've ever heard or uttered the phrase "I know exactly what the character is going through!" then you've witnessed it. It can't be proven in the sense of mathematical proofs, but then, nothing in reality can.
- justratsinacoat 10y ago>Did we ask the animals too? Maybe the pig consensus is different Most mammals react to painful stimuli (which we can provide a baseline for by testing it on other humans, whom you luckily consider to be reliable enough) with aversion and fear. We 'ask' this question of many animals quite frequently, and have throughout history. The answers are reliable and consistent. >If most people agree they do not want to pay taxes, do taxes become evil? There is no objective reason to consider 'most people agree on x' as some kind of objective moral imperative. There is no moral quality to caring what people want. I don't think this is a very sound basis for an objective morality starts to construct argument sees sophistry in re 'suffering' downthread Equivocating physical and emotional and social 'suffering'? Nope! As to your edit, your perspective on other people's perspective is familiar and disturbing. I think you should reexamine your eagerness to throw around the word 'objective', your penchant for jumping to conclusions regarding your interlocutors, and your self-described thresholds for othering members of your social circle. Or, because you're right and you know it, ignore the entirety of this post.
- Amezarak 10y ago> Equivocating physical and emotional and social 'suffering'? Nope! I was, but people also inflict physical suffering on themselves, from fasting to literal self-flagellation and mutilation. There have been people who offered themselves up for literal torture and sacrifice gladly. > and your self-described thresholds for othering members of your social circle. I was describing how people in general work, not 'othering members of my social circle.' People do not respond positively to being told something they do or like is evil. I don't think that is a controversial statement.
- justratsinacoat 10y ago>I was, but people also inflict physical suffering on themselves, from fasting to literal self-flagellation and mutilation. There have been people who offered themselves up for literal torture and sacrifice gladly This behaviour you describe is usually mediated by some kind of non-biological impulse -- like the 'certain' 'knowledge' that the Hairy Thunderer/Cosmic Muffin will reward this suffering in some future-/afterlife. Those impulses are all related to the pointless social factors that you decry. These people suffering is still an evil, even if they ultimately inspire something that outweighs the evil of their suffering (religious revolution, buying time/forgiveness for their loved ones, etc). Plus, you're still splitting hairs because it's not like these individuals are feeling pleasure or not anticipating pain uncomfortably. Next up, BDSM! >>>You're simply trying to exploit a "hack" in my social animal brain, which is that if you tell me that something is wrong, you are telling me that other members of the human herd will judge me unfavorably and perhaps ostracize me or otherwise punish me. Some people, but not very many, will be swayed by your attempted brain-exploit. But I, again, observe that my conscious feels guilt-free, which is a very strong sign that the people I am surrounded by do not, in fact, disapprove of my eating meat, and also that the vast majority of people I know actually eat meat. So somewhere in my hindbrain, I realize that you are (from my perspective) lying to me, and it will make me instinctively resentful of you, because you have marked yourself as a member of The Other You typed this, right? Then you typed: >> and your self-described thresholds for othering members of your social circle. >I was describing how people in general work, not 'othering members of my social circle.' People do not respond positively to being told something they do or like is evil. I don't think that is a controversial statement Is this how 'people in general work', or is this you Othering someone? Did your interlocutor turn out to be utilizing the technique you perceived him to be?
- tim333 10y agoSee also: Rats Remember Who's Nice to Them—and Return the Favor http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150224-rats-helping-social-behavior-science-animals-cooperation/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/02/150224-rats-...
- rurban 10y agoEverybody knows that for ages already. Rats (like other people-forming races, distinguishing themselves by odor: ants, bees, ...) are extremely social and extremely racist. They don't form a group, a pack, like wolves, where everyone knows each other, and they don't live in anonymous masses, like migratory birds, locusts or school of fish. E.g. Konrad Lorenz in "Das sogenannte Boese" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Aggression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Aggression) had a whole chapter on rats and why they developed this behavior, which is often misleadingly labelled ethically. Like here.