Abstract
Pro-sociality, i.e., the preference for outcomes that produce benefits for other individuals, is ubiquitous in humans. Recently, cross-species comparisons of social behavior have offered important new insights into the evolution of pro-sociality. Here, we present a rodent analog of the Pro-social Choice Task that controls strategic components, de-confounds other-regarding choice motives from the animals' natural tendencies to maximize own food access and directly tests the effect of social context on choice allocation. We trained pairs of rats—an actor and a partner rat—in a double T-maze task where actors decided between two alternatives only differing in the reward delivered to the partner. The “own reward” choice yielded a reward only accessible to the actor whereas the “both reward” choice produced an additional reward for a partner (partner condition) or an inanimate toy (toy Condition), located in an adjacent compartment. We found that actors chose “both reward” at levels above chance and more often in the partner than in the toy condition. Moreover, we show that this choice pattern adapts to the current social context and that the observed behavior is stable over time.
Highlights
Classic economic theory posits that decisions should be exclusively motivated by self-interest, and decisions makers should disregard other individuals’ needs (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1994; Fehr and Schmidt, 2006)
At the group level, rats’ preferences for Both Reward (BR) or Own Reward (OR) compartments were significantly different from chance, and, further, whether their preferences differed between partner and toy conditions
CHOICE PREFERENCES ARE STABLE OVER TIME AND FASTER RE-ACQUIRED AFTER REPETITION To investigate whether the individual choice allocation pattern was stable over time, we tested the second batch of rats for seven sessions per condition, and re-tested them in a repetition phase of three sessions per condition, repeatedly and successively alternating between partner and toy conditions (Figure 2B)
Summary
Classic economic theory posits that decisions should be exclusively motivated by self-interest, and decisions makers should disregard other individuals’ needs (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1994; Fehr and Schmidt, 2006). People are adept in detecting and responding to unfairness (Sanfey et al, 2003) and inequity (Sanfey, 2007), and engage in costly behaviors to punish social norm-violation and enforce social norm compliance (De Quervain et al, 2004) Such behaviors are not just restricted to humans but can be found throughout the animal world, from social choice in our close primate relatives (Burkart et al, 2007; Yamamoto et al, 2009; Cronin et al, 2010; Horner et al, 2011) to the eusocial communities of the ants (Nowbahari et al, 2009). Rats often develop in social groups (Whishaw and Kolb, 2005), have clear hierarchical
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