ArticleLearning & behavior2021
No preference for prosocial helping behavior in rats with concurrent social interaction opportunities.
Article in Learning & behavior, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Prosocial Helping Behavior: Conceptual Issues and Neural Mechanisms.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Exploring rodent prosociality: A conceptual framework.Translational neuroscience · 2025Review
- Norway rats recruit cooperation partners based on previous receipt of help while disregarding kinship.iScience · 2024Article
- Communication as a Tool for Exhibiting Prosocial Behavior in Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Do They Know What They Are Doing? Cognitive Aspects of Rescue Behaviour Directed by Workers of the Red Wood AntLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- No evidence tube entrapment distresses rodents in typical empathy tests.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- In search of prosociality in rodents: A scoping review.PloS one · 2024Article
- Social familiarity and reinforcement value: a behavioral-economic analysis of demand for social interaction with cagemate and non-cagemate female rats.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- An opinion on the interpretation of social release in rats.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Helping behavior tasks are proposed to assess prosocial or "empathic" behavior in rodents. This paradigm characterizes the behavior of subject animals presented with the opportunity to release a conspecific from a distressing situation. Previous studies found a preference in rats for releasing restrained or distressed conspecifics over other controls (e.g., empty restrainers or inanimate objects). An empathy account was offered to explain the observed behaviors, claiming subjects were motivated to reduce the distress of others based on a rodent homologue of empathy. An opposing account attributes all previous results to subjects seeking social contact. To dissociate these two accounts for helping behavior, we presented subject rats with three simultaneous choice alternatives: releasing a restrained conspecific, engaging a nonrestrained conspecific, or not socializing. Subjects showed an initial preference for socializing with the nonrestrained conspecific, and no preference for helping. This result contradicts the empathy account, but is consistent with the social-contact account of helping behavior.
Indexed as
Identifiers
33829419What 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.