ArticleScience advances2020
The bystander effect in rats.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impact of Aggression on Bystanders: Quadratic Post-Conflict Affiliation in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).American journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Do They Know What They Are Doing? Cognitive Aspects of Rescue Behaviour Directed by Workers of the Red Wood AntLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- In search of prosociality in rodents: A scoping review.PloS one · 2024Article
- Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- No preference for prosocial helping behavior in rats with concurrent social interaction opportunities.Learning & behavior · 2021Article
- An opinion on the interpretation of social release in rats.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Review
- Body language signals for rodent social communication.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2021Review
- A community context for aggression? Multi-species audience effects on territorial aggression in two species of Paridae.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Anybody watching? How others affect helpful actions.Learning & behavior · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To investigate whether the classic bystander effect is unique to humans, the effect of bystanders on rat helping was studied. In the presence of rats rendered incompetent to help through pharmacological treatment, rats were less likely to help due to a reduction in reinforcement rather than to a lack of initial interest. Only incompetent helpers of a strain familiar to the helper rat exerted a detrimental effect on helping; rats helped at near control levels in the presence of incompetent helpers from an unfamiliar strain. Duos and trios of potential helper rats helped at superadditive rates, demonstrating that rats act nonindependently with helping facilitated by the presence of competent-to-help bystanders. Furthermore, helping was facilitated in rats that had previously observed other rats' helping and were then tested individually. In sum, the influence of bystanders on helping behavior in rats features characteristics that closely resemble those observed in humans.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.