Abstract
Prosociality is defined as a voluntary, typically low-cost behaviour that benefits another individual. Social tolerance has been proposed as a potential driver for its evolution, both on the proximate and on the ultimate level. Parrots are an interesting species to study such other-regarding behaviours, given that they are highly social and stand out in terms of relative brain size and cognitive capacity. We tested eight African grey parrots in a dyadic prosocial choice test. They faced a choice between two different tokens, a prosocial (actor and partner rewarded) and a selfish (only actor rewarded) one. We found that the birds did not behave prosocially when one subject remained in the actor role; however, when roles were alternated, the birds’ prosocial choices increased. The birds also seemed to reciprocate their partner's choices, given that a contingency between choices was observed. If the food provisioned to the partner was of higher quality than that the actor obtained, actors increased their willingness to provide food to their partner. Nonetheless, the control conditions suggest that the parrots did not fully understand the task's contingencies. In sum, African grey parrots show the potential for prosociality and reciprocity; however, considering their lack of understanding of the contingencies of the particular tasks used in this study, the underlying motivation for the observed behaviour remains to be addressed by future studies, in order to elucidate the phylogenetic distribution of prosociality further.
Highlights
Prosociality is defined as a voluntary, typically low-cost behaviour that benefits another individual
In line with our predictions, we found that African grey parrots exhibited a prosocial tendency towards affiliative partners in a prosocial choice task (PCT), such tendency appeared to vary between individuals
This may have indicated that some individuals understood the task better than others; at the group level, 12 the birds did not seem to distinguish between control conditions, in which they could or could not access rewards delivered to both compartments; indicating that most, if not all of them, were having problems in understanding the task contingencies
Summary
Prosociality is defined as a voluntary, typically low-cost behaviour that benefits another individual. The basic principle of the PCT requires subjects to choose between two options of different value, namely either an option (a token or a bar) that rewards both actor and partner (prosocial choice: 1/1) or an option that results in food only for the actor (selfish choice: 1/0) [26,27]. Such a paradigm allows the subjects to reward their partner without a supplementary cost for themselves. As PCT has been used in various species such as rats [26], dogs [28] and birds [29], it, is a valuable task to be adopted for providing further comparative data
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