Rodents have empathy?

Researchers did a follow up experiment to some earlier rat empathy studies and found that rats were willing to help other rats even to their own detriment, but only if they had some prior familiarity with the particular strain of rats, e.g. an albino rat being bunk mates with a black and white rat. If they didn't have any previous experience with that strain of rat, they would not help. Or according to the Washington Post: "The creatures aren’t born with an innate motivation to help rats of their own kind, but instead those with whom they are socially familiar."


The rat empathy thing is interesting because it suggests an evolutionary advantage to empathy, not necessarily a "humans are special snowflakes of the animal world" reason for empathy. The articles discussing the findings use an interesting choice of words that accords -- they call the rats actions "noble" and other such language. This helps explain to me a little more why the fetishism for empathy, that people are biologically pre-programmed not only to engage in empathetic acts, but that they are also pre-programmed to find those acts appealing in the same sort of way that they crave sugar or find others attractive or not based on their pheromones.

Another interesting idea is that with all of these studies with animals and empathy (see also prairie moles), the animals will not act with empathy unless they are familiar with either the particular animal in need (spoiler alert, but see for example Ser Jaime's actions in recent Game of Thrones episodes) or at least someone of the same breed. It's like what they say about gay people or mormon people or any other people that a lot of people often have a hard time understanding or being ok with -- you just have to know one or two of them personally in order to humanize them to your own self.

What implications does this have for sociopaths, if everyday sociopaths stay hidden forever? Will people never learn to show empathy to them?

Biological origins of empathy

Hopefully people aren't sick of reading about empathy by now, but I recently found this interesting Wall Street Journal article discussing how animals possibly feel (or don't feel) empathy, including humans.  First the article discusses recent studies on animals that suggested that animals have altruistic traits. Initially this animal altruism was claimed to be related to empathy, but it has since been downgraded to being merely "pro-social":


In one, scientists at the University of Chicago put two rats in an arena, one held by a restrainer, the other free. They found that the free rat learned to "intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate." They interpreted this result as "providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior."

In the other case, Drs. Hollis and Nowbahari themselves did a very similar experiment with ants. They found that ants were prepared to rescue fellow ants held in a nylon snare and showing obvious distress. Just like the rats, the hero ants would chew at the restraints (though not if the victims were anesthetized or from different colonies or species). Happy to describe such behavior as "pro-social," they did not go so far as to attribute empathy to the ants. There was no reason to think that the hero ants were motivated by a wish to alleviate the suffering of the victims. More likely, they possessed a self-interested instinct to help get a co-worker back to work.

How does this differ from humans? Humans would probably behave in similar ways if we put them in similar situations, but is the psychological motivation different?  Adam Smith seems to think so:

In his 1759 book the "Theory of the Moral Sentiments," philosopher Adam Smith argued that empathy (he called it sympathy) was motivated by the capacity to imagine being another person. "When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your grief, I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die; but I consider what I should suffer if I was really you; and I not only change circumstances, but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own. It is not, therefore, in the least selfish."

The article concludes that either we think that rats are capable of this Smithian imagination (which the author concludes is absurd), or we assume that animals must have different motivations than humans.  OR!!!!  And this was what I was thinking this whole time, but the author finally admits at the end a big OR to this whole thing is that maybe humans don't have the psychological motivations that they think they do. Maybe the humans are doing things for the same reasons as the rats: "Can we be so sure it is fellow-feeling rather than instinct that drives us to our virtuous as well as our vicious actions?"

If we are really the empathy equivalent of rats, maybe we invented empathy to give ourselves a nice story. In other words, maybe humans give a positive spin on their "choices" after the fact, the same way they do with free will (or should I say, free won't). I feel like I just discovered the necessary plot device to make the Matrix IV relevant.

Morality pill

My friend sent me a link to this NY Times op-ed titled "Are we ready for a morality pill?" with the instruction "let your followers discuss their impending extermination through pills."  Apart from the obvious Clockwork Orange implications, I thought this was the most controversial part


Why are some people prepared to risk their lives to help a stranger when others won’t even stop to dial an emergency number?


Scientists have been exploring questions like this for decades. In the 1960s and early ’70s, famous experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo suggested that most of us would, under specific circumstances, voluntarily do great harm to innocent people. During the same period, John Darley and C. Daniel Batson showed that even some seminary students on their way to give a lecture about the parable of the Good Samaritan would, if told that they were running late, walk past a stranger lying moaning beside the path. More recent research has told us a lot about what happens in the brain when people make moral decisions. But are we getting any closer to understanding what drives our moral behavior?


Researchers there took two rats who shared a cage and trapped one of them in a tube that could be opened only from the outside. The free rat usually tried to open the door, eventually succeeding. Even when the free rats could eat up all of a quantity of chocolate before freeing the trapped rat, they mostly preferred to free their cage-mate. The experimenters interpret their findings as demonstrating empathy in rats. But if that is the case, they have also demonstrated that individual rats vary, for only 23 of 30 rats freed their trapped companions.


The causes of the difference in their behavior must lie in the rats themselves. It seems plausible that humans, like rats, are spread along a continuum of readiness to help others. There has been considerable research on abnormal people, like psychopaths, but we need to know more about relatively stable differences (perhaps rooted in our genes) in the great majority of people as well.

Must it?  This may just be an issue of semantics, but I don't think that this is necessarily a question of morality (big surprise).  I think that the fact that there are some very moral people who sometimes do bad things (i.e. Milgram subjects or the Good Samaritan preachers) suggests that it is not really an issue of morality at all, but perhaps of attention.  Sometimes our attention is directed at a "good" behavior and we have an impulse to act. Sometimes we are distracted or our attention is never caught or there is not the impulse. Under my theory, generally moral people are on the lookout for moral things and are willing to act (unless they get distracted or get conflicting cues, like in an experimental setting trying to make them look amoral).  Is this too behavioralist?  Has that all been refuted since I took psychology at university?

And what about mental state?  One thing that most criminal laws and religions have in common is a distinction between a good/bad act and a good/bad mental state.  For instance, many religious people believe that if you do good things and don't have good intentions that is not moral and vice versa.  Similarly, many crimes require a particular bad intent or are mitigated by the lack of a bad intent.

I understand the rationale behind wanting to test morality by observing people's objective actions rather than subjective mental state (not just a "walk the talk" argument but an ease, consistency, and accuracy of measurement motivation), but I think (if my understanding of morality is at all accurate) that a person's level of morality is not merely a sum of a person's actions.  I hope that's not true, at least.