ArticleScientific reports2017
Working dogs cooperate among one another by generalised reciprocity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reward expectation drives dogs' choices in a prosocial test.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Evidence of direct and indirect reciprocity in network-structured economic games.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Dogs understand the role of a human partner in a cooperative task.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Do pet dogs reciprocate the receipt of food from familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics?Ethology : formerly Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie · 2024Article
- Article
- Factors Contributing to Successful Spontaneous Dog-Human Cooperation.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Evidence suggesting that reindeer mothers allonurse according to the direct reciprocity and generalized reciprocity decision rules.PloS one · 2023Article
- Rats show direct reciprocity when interacting with multiple partners.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Reaching Out for Inaccessible Food Is a Potential Begging Signal in Cooperating Wild-Type Norway Rats,Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Article
- Reciprocity: Different behavioural strategies, cognitive mechanisms and psychological processes.Learning & behavior · 2019Review
- Wolves and dogs recruit human partners in the cooperative string-pulling task.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- A Shared Food Source Is Not Necessary to Elicit Inequity Aversion in Dogs.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Inequity aversion in dogs: a review.Learning & behavior · 2018Review
- Working dogs transfer different tasks in reciprocal cooperation.Biology letters · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cooperation by generalised reciprocity implies that individuals apply the decision rule "help anyone if helped by someone". This mechanism has been shown to generate evolutionarily stable levels of cooperation, but as yet it is unclear how widely this cooperation mechanism is applied among animals. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are highly social animals with considerable cognitive potential and the ability to differentiate between individual social partners. But although dogs can solve complex problems, they may use simple rules for behavioural decisions. Here we show that dogs trained in an instrumental cooperative task to provide food to a social partner help conspecifics more often after receiving help from a dog before. Remarkably, in so doing they show no distinction between partners that had helped them before and completely unfamiliar conspecifics. Apparently, dogs use the simple decision rule characterizing generalised reciprocity, although they are probably capable of using the more complex decision rule of direct reciprocity: "help someone who has helped you". However, generalized reciprocity involves lower information processing costs and is therefore a cheaper cooperation strategy. Our results imply that generalised reciprocity might be applied more commonly than direct reciprocity also in other mutually cooperating animals.
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