Rats Feel Each Other's Pain

sciencehabit writes "Empathy lets us feel another person's pain and drives us to help ease it. But is empathy a uniquely human trait? For decades researchers have debated whether nonhuman animals possess this attribute. Now a new study shows that rats will free a trapped cagemate in distress. The results mean that these rodents can be used to help determine the genetic and physiological underpinnings of empathy in people."

Comments

Misleading Headline

[mr1911]

I thought this was going to be an article about the current election cycle.

Re:Misleading Headline

[couchslug]

Politicians don't have empathy, they simulate it.

Re:Misleading Headline

[forkfail]

They all too often do have a feral pack protection instinct, though.

Re:Misleading Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't decide whether to mod this funny or insightful.

Re:Misleading Headline

[need4mospd]

I feel your pain bro.

"Empathy Tests"

[danbuter]

Hopefully, by empathy tests, they don't mean torture one rat and see how the others react.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's something only PETA would do.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[Trepidity]

There've been some milder studies vaguely like that in monkeys. In one such study, a monkey is given a cord that, if pulled, gives it some food. In the control group, that's all; in the experimental group, pulling the cord also shocks another monkey. They are much less willing to pull the "also shocks someone else" cord. That can be interpreted as a form of empathetic altruism, foregoing a reward to avoid harming someone else. A counter-argument is that it's not altruism so much as monkeys finding expressions of distress unpleasant, meaning they avoid pulling a cord that results in unpleasant sounds: a selfish behavior, because the real goal is to avoid hearing sounds they don't like. On the third hand, that counter-argument is hard to actually separate from "real" empathy, because one potential mechanism for (some kinds of) empathy is that we find it unpleasant to hear expressions of distress from others who are similar enough to us.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[Joce640k]

Does anybody seriously still believe that animals are just dumb, mindless beasts? I thought that way of thinking died out two centuries ago.

Instead of doing this experiment they could just ask somebody who's ever owned a pet. Or watch a few David Attenborough wildlife documentaries.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[codeAlDente]

Unfortunately yes. It's only been about half a century since there was active social debate in the US about whether people from other races were just dumb, mindless beasts.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[Sockatume]

The reason we know that animals are not just dumb, mindless beasts is because people have done research like this and confirmed experimentally that the presence of such emotions and other higher cognative abilities is real, and not just an anthropomorphising intepretation on the part of the observer. It's taught us a lot about where and how different behaviors arise, and led to all sorts of interesting questions. It's understood that not all animals have a "theory of mind", which is necessary to understand other creatures as having an equivalent perspective to their own. In what way does that influence their internal mental life? Are they natural solipsists? What would've happened if our branch of the evolutionary tree had never gained that ability?

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[Dan East]

Regarding your third hand, it implies that human empathy is only an instantaneous response to something occurring at that moment (I find this stimulus to be bothering, thus I will help this other person to make the stimulus go away). To me empathy is nagging unease or sadness because I know (or can vaguely imagine) what someone else is going through, even if I don't have a direct interaction with that person at all (IE merely being told "This happened to so and so the other day"). So in that context empathy has absolutely nothing to do with selfishness, because the selfish thing to do in that case (being already removed from the person in distress) is to ignore them entirely. In fact, empathy can be downright debilitating, especially when there's nothing that can be done for the person in need.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[RivenAleem]

I'm quite interested in the outcome of this test, at what point did the 'scientists' decide what they were doing was cruel to the animals and stop? How long did it take before any of the 'scientists' began to show some form of empathy for the monkeys?

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[martas]

I think there's a glaring hole in your argument -- you're assuming that the only stimuli that can be unpleasant in this sense are immediate auditory/visual ones of someone else suffering. If you expand that to include the knowledge that suffering is taking place as a sort of stimulus, then your argument seems to no longer hold.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[jdgeorge]

You've got this backwards. The point is that humans are basically just like other mammals, with very slight differences that are due to having relatively enormous brains.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[Dan East]

I'm suggesting that empathy is higher order than condition / response, and if you include something as high level as knowledge into that definition, I'm fine with that. To me, empathy is the knowledge that someone is suffering, which is to consider, imagine, or reflect on your own past experiences to glean some understanding of what someone else is enduring. That is quite different than a response to an annoying or disturbing stimuli.

I also suggest that at least to a significant extent, empathy is a choice. In order for it to be a choice it is not a condition / response. I see a cultural pattern where people are taught (likely in an indirect way, or due to some sort of caste system) to not show (or perhaps even not feel) empathy for others. A good example of this is the horrible story of Yue Yue, a 2 year old Chinese girl that was recently run over by two vehicles and literally stepped over and around by over a dozen people for several minutes before someone helped. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLde8f2zb1U (VERY disturbing video - watch at your own risk)

I've seen a strong pattern of this in other videos of trauma, car accidents, etc which leads me to believe the empathy is certainly something controllable, and likely affected by culture and society.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[codeAlDente]

1960 preceded the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In much of the south, blacks were considered the equivalent of beasts. The Catholic Church still abducted native Americans from their families and put them in Catholic schools, reasoning that their tribal culture did not meet the standards of rational thought. For a more academic viewpoint, check out the 1971 book The Pre-Columbian Mind, where a MD/historian Francisco Guerra weighs historical evidence to promote the viewpoint that people living in indigenous societies were indeed capable of rational thought. Or, maybe have a look into the Eugenics movement. http://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Weak-Eugenics-Americas/dp/0914153056/ref=sr_1_1 It's unwise to assume that the vast majority holds your intelligent, enlightened opinions.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[The Askylist]

My partner used to keep rats as pets. Despite not being keen on having the little critters sitting on my shoulder, they were interesting to observe when in their (large and well provisioned) cage.

At one time, when we had three males, and the eldest was ill and lethargic, the younger rats would fetch him food and huddle up to him to keep him warm. I never though of it as empathy, though - I assumed that it was a sort of hierarchical respect shown by juveniles to an elder.

They are amusing little creatures, and do show distinct personality traits, so I suppose empathy is not entirely unlikely.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[theshowmecanuck]

Elephants will do that to. But they had a hard time getting them in the little cages, never mind what they do to those little tiny mazes.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in a research lab for many years and did a lot of surgery and sac-ing (meaning sacrificing) using rats, mice and rabbits. Yeah, the remaining rats knew it was coming. It was painfully, painfully obvious. The rabbits and mice seemed more or less oblivious.

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[TheRaven64]

Not really. I don't know how you measure complexity in a brain, but dolphin brains appear to be very complex, for example. A huge amount of this complexity is devoted to creating a 3d model of the surroundings by interpreting the returns from sonar, but then a large amount of the complexity of the human brain is devoted to creating a 3d model of the surroundings by interpreting the inputs from two retinas.

The thing that appears to distinguish human brains is how little of their configuration is hereditary. Humans are born with less of their brain in its final configuration than other animals. Dolphins can swim already when they're born, but humans have to learn how to walk (and learn how to swim, how to talk, and so on). The human brain is actually a good example of the UNIX worse-is-better philosophy - it's just good enough that you can program it to do different things but doesn't start out able to do any of them. This turns out to be an evolutionary advantage, because it adapts more quickly to changing conditions than a brain whose configuration is more tightly controlled by heredity.

Really Misleading Headline

[dmmiller2k]

I thought this was going to be another article about investment bankers and the financial meltdown.

Just saying. John Corzine has been in the news recently.

Re:Really Misleading Headline

[forkfail]

Now you're just being insulting.

To rats, of course.

Not surprised

[milbournosphere]

The pet rats I've had have consistently showed intelligence, high social awareness, and genuine creativity when playing with me or their cage mates. It doesn't surprise me in the least that they would feel concern and/or empathy towards members of their social circle. These little creatures are much more complex than most people give them credit for...

Re:Not surprised

[Sockatume]

You don't need an experiment to figure it out, but you need an experiment to confirm it.

Re:Not surprised

[VortexCortex]

As a cyberneticist, I can tell you that not all humans take rats for granted...

After all: Brain cells are brain cells; Neural networks are neural networks; Intelligence is intelligence; Humans aren't really that special, even if you think they are, they won't be for long.

We've only really scratched the surface in our experimenting with Machine Intelligence interfacing with, and even enhancing Organic Intelligence, or vise versa. Not only this, but a mind machine interface creates the possibility for multi-mind beings -- One rat may have less intelligence than a human... but what about a million rat-mind collective?

This type of research is important, especially using non-human minds because through it we may find whether sympathy is an inherent trait in all life, including that of machine intelligences, hybrid organic intelligences, and even advanced alien intelligences.

I hope we do discover empathy and kindness to be universal truths. Talk about social awareness...

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. Not just towards cage mates, but to me as well. I had one in particular that seemed very empathetic when I was upset. I took them out at the same time every day and when I was having a bad day she would come over and crawl up my shirt, hop on my shoulder, and lay against my neck until free time was over. She 'loved' me in a way that most people attribute to higher mammals.

Anecdote: One particularly awful day I let them out and she did what she always does. Later in the evening, she actually escaped the cage (I had to put something over the door to keep her from getting out after that!) while I was laying on the couch. I didn't notice until she hopped onto my chest from the top of the couch. She snuggled there for quite a while before finally becoming restless and I took her back to her cage.

She lived to be over 6 years old (for rat owners, you know how short their lives are). I miss her very much. She was one of my first, and I've owned many since then. However, none have come close to her in personality!

Re:Not surprised

[Oligonicella]

This is sociology we're talking about. No scientific proofs available. Only bias confirmations.

The only evidence available from this experiment is that indeed, animals will help each other. The motivations remain unknown.

Any time you try to guess as to "why" an animal did something, it's not science.

interesting study, but not completely new

[Trepidity]

This study adds useful new information, but it's not the first finding of animals exhibiting what's sometimes called "directed altruism", helping another animal in response to what appears to be communication of emotional state. Even Darwin remarked that "many animals certainly sympathize with each other’s distress or
danger", though of course his evidence for that claim wasn't up to modern standards.

Here's an interesting review from 2008.

Unnecessarily complicated experiment

[HopefulIntern]

Could have just given the rats the Voight-Kampff test.

Re:Unnecessarily complicated experiment

[Guppy]

Could have just given the rats the Voight-Kampff test.

Yeah, they tried, but it didn't go too well.

Researcher: "You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, . You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, but you’re not helping. Why is that?
Rat: "Squeak?"

Researcher: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
Rat: "Squeeeeeeak!" *BITE*

rats have empathy?

[Anonymous Coward]

when you place an unconscious rat in a cage with conscious rats, the first thing they do is run over and eat the unconscious rats eyes out.

i know this from first hand experience. watching it happen, while doing research as an undergrad. i was horrified. the postdoc looked over and was like "oh yeah, that's why we always separate them after giving them an injection to give them time to wake up. did i forget to tell you that part?"

rats and other rodents also never act sick. ever. even if they have a broken leg or severe infection, they'll continue acting like normal rats, for fear (i assume?) that the second they show any kind of weakness, the other rats will gang up on them and eat them.

Re:rats have empathy?

[alvinrod]

That ascribes entirely too much emotion that may not exist.

If I had to guess the reasoning, it's because rats are prey for many other animals and having weak pack members or even weak rats around probably only encourages predators to congregate as the weak animals are a steady source of food. If the healthy rats dispose of the weak ones it might encourage predators to find easier sources for their meal. Therefore, the rats that ate other weaker rats tended to survive longer and procreate more, passing the behavior on to the next generation.

Not to say that this line of reasoning is correct, but it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Behaviors and traits that are harmful don't tend to stick around in the long run.

Re:In other news...

[Robert Zenz]

Good job rats! Cave Johnson...we're done here.

Cannibalism

[Dan East]

Rats engage in cannibalism. Perhaps rats seek out other rats in distress for this reason.

Hmmm...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This just in, rats morally superior to alarming percentage of humans...

Re:Idiot scientists with an anti-human agenda.

[Sockatume]

How many times do we see these comments, only to look into and see that these IMBECILE commenters haven't read the article and wouldn't know good science if it bit them in the ass?

Re:Idiot scientists with an anti-human agenda.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

How many times do we see these "studies", only too look into it and see that these IMBECILE scientists are equating correlation with causation and are anthromopormophising *constantly*, interpreting the rats actions as if they had uniquely human intentions. Also, just look at their sample size, that is way too small to actually understand what is happening in all the rats. Another worthless animal-rights-nazi inspired science article, thats all this is.

While we are riding the fallacy train, would it be worth pointing out that the phrase "interpreting rats actions as if they had uniquely human intentions." begs the question(in the original sense of the term) so damned hard that the question has filed for a restraining order and moved to a different state? By definition, only humans possess uniquely human intentions. All intentions possessed by at least one nonehuman, or not possessed by any humans, are not uniquely human. Therefore, a non human cannot have a uniquely human intention...

It is certainly possible that the study is flawed in terms of sample size or statistical power, and I would quibble that you would really need to observe rats enduring a personal cost of some kind to assist a conspecific in order to suggest that they feel empathy, rather than mere cooperation(giving somebody something you have no use for doesn't require empathy. Giving up something you want in order to alleviate somebody else's distress arguably does). However, if you are just going to declare empathy a "uniquely human intention", what's the point? Nonhumans couldn't possibly have it; but they could exhibit a behavioral structure that is game-theoretically identical to empathy in operation, which would still be an interesting result...

Re:Idiot scientists with an anti-human agenda.

[Sockatume]

Nonhumans couldn't possibly have it; but they could exhibit a behavioral structure that is game-theoretically identical to empathy in operation, which would still be an interesting result...

Behavioralism, which is the paradigm under which this study has been performed, would seem to argue that a behavior identical to an emotional response is that emotional response.

Motivation is a complicated emotion

[macwhizkid]

Behavioral experiments like this are relatively straightforward to plan and run. The hard part is to explain the result, and the reasons are not always what you'd expect on first glance, often due to confounding variables that you've inadvertently changed.

It's also worth noting that the news release throws in a quote about altruism, but the original paper's authors were careful not to go there.

For example, reading this carefully, it's clear that the rat frees its cagemate and then goes for the chocolate. It's not a binary choice between the two. Why does it do that? Perhaps it's hidden empathy/altruism circuitry. Or maybe the rat's just afraid of what its cagemate will do if it eats all the food and then the trapped rat gets out. Contrary to what most people think, domesticated rats are very much like domesticated dogs in terms of temperament... very social animals, usually with a playful temperament, but can also be very territorial and assertive. And territorial fighting usually occurs over shared, limited resources, like food. (I will say, chocolate is a good choice. Rats love chocolate. Some of our rats will eat 30 - 40 M&Ms in a half-hour experiment. Not bad for an animal weighing 300 grams.)

Maybe it is altruism or empathy. But true altruism is doing something good and expecting nothing in return, not a pain avoidance strategy.

Re:Motivation is a complicated emotion

[Sockatume]

maybe the rat's just afraid of what its cagemate will do if it eats all the food and then the trapped rat gets out.

That, in itself, would be an interesting result as it would require that the rat anticipate the other rat's reaction without prior experience of the situation. That's not believed to be a common ability in animals.

Military applications...

[Shark]

I can see how the military would be quite interested in this. If this helps them develop a drug that turns off empathy, they'll finally have soldiers that are willing to shoot on their own population when the shit really hits the fan.

Re:Military applications...

[GameboyRMH]

Already exists, it's called "money." Most of us just haven't received an effective dose to find out if it works on us.

No surprise at all.

[NerveGas]

Anyone who has rats can tell you that they're a whole lot more intelligent and advanced than the stereotype of rats would indicate.

But in more scientific terms, looking at other mammals, we find that... surprise, surprise... their brains are a lot like ours, and they have very similar capabilities, including emotions and feelings, as ours. They do not have them to the same extent as ours, but they do have them. Those are backed up by psychological observations, by anatomical/structural investigations, and by brain scans.

Re:"Empathy Tests=Torture"

[hoboroadie]

If you'd read the articles instead of just shoot from the hip, you'd know.

Yes, they torture one rat, if you define "trap the rat in a small clear tube long enough that they might pee from the mental stresses of discovering they're trapped" as torture.

If you'd read the other article, (Sorry, I couldn't read past the part where they mentioned painful chemical injections.) then you might, indeed, define this as torture. Or not. As I said, I didn't actually complete that.

Awesome BookTV interview on rats

[GodfatherofSoul]

Years ago I watched a crazy book signing on CSPAN by a layman who basically just sat and watched NYC rats and talked about their behavior. The great thing about it was his frantic "WTF has this guy been snorting?" enthusiasm about rats mixed with pretty insightful observations from a guy spending his nights sitting in trash-filled alley. If you ever catch it on one Saturday afternoon, give it a chance.

My favorite observation was his comments on societal memory. Even after major infrastructural or architectural changes to the city, rats still seemed to follow paths dictated by long-gone geographical features like rivers and hills. He also noted that humans do the same as well! When a prominent street corner building was razed and turned into a paved expanse, pedestrians would still circumnavigate the outline of the building.

Racism (Specism?)

[koan]

They prefer the term "Rodent American" not "rat".