Anybody watching? How others affect helpful actions
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Anybody watching? How others affect helpful actions Manon K. Schweinfurth 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Summary A new study by Havlik et al. (Science Advances, 6(28), eabb4205, 2020) reveals that rats are less likely to help a conspecific in need in the presence of passive bystanders, but that they are more likely to help when there are active bystanders that engage in helping. This study highlights the social skills of rats and the role of bystanders on cooperation, raising a range of interesting questions that should be explored both theoretically and empirically. Keywords Norway rats . Cooperation . Help . Bystander effect
Introduction In contrast to their rather bad reputation, rats are extremely social and show a range of amicable behaviours as well as complex cognitive skills. In recent years, their eagerness to help and cooperate with conspecifics has been studied in more detail, revealing that rats are highly sensitive to the needs of other rats. For example, they help their conspecifics by donating food to them, grooming them at spots that are difficult to reach and freeing partners from traps. Especially over the past decade, rats have been tested in various paradigms to understand underlying psychological and evolutionary processes that can explain their high level of cooperation. Thus, rats turned into an important novel model organism for various research disciplines. A recent study by Havlik et al. (2020), published in Science Advances, adds to this knowledge by asking whether rats show the ‘bystander effect’, a phenomenon well established in Social Psychology that describes a reduction of help in the presence of passive bystanders (Fischer et al., 2011). For this, the authors created a rat in need (i.e. the victim) by locking it into a small trap. This individual could be freed by another rat (i.e. the subject) by opening the trap from outside. To assess their general willingness to help, subjects were tested alone with the victim. Over multiple days, subjects learned to open the trap to help the victim. In addition, the subjects faced the same situation when surrounded by bystanders that were either unable to help due to * Manon K. Schweinfurth [email protected] 1
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, KY16 9JP St Andrews, Scotland
a low dose of a sedative (passive bystanders) or able to help (active bystanders). The authors assessed how quickly subjects learned to help the trapped victim. In comparison to when tested alone, the subjects freed the victim less often when there was one passive bystander. Being surrounded by two passive bystanders further decreased the subject’s helping levels and thus the bystander effect was more pronounced. In stark contrast, when subjects were tested with active bystanders, who could help, the rat team showed higher helping levels than when the subjects were tested alone. As in the passive condition, the effect was stronger the more bystanders were present. One difficulty is to determine whether the chances that
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