Corry: What are we starting with this week?
Luke: A wee review. C: Yeah!
L: Apple supremacy.
C: This one is from last year. It says: “You just have to listen”.
It's five stars. This may be the world's best podcast,
and I'm 100% sure Corry reads my mind. Every time I'm thinking about something
interesting next week it's the topic of the podcast. Don't snooze, start listening.
L: Don't snooze. Don't you dare snooze.
C: It's a tough word to say, but wait, first hold on.
I just need to read…
L: Are you snoozing? C: I'm reading a mind.
I'm reading someone's mind right now, and I've got the topic for this week.
I've read their mind and I've taken the topic.
L: Let's start the show.
C: No, no, no, no, no.
We have a question to start first
Jamp: We always have a question.
C: Yeah, I forgot. It was a test, actually.
So the question this week is:
Are you an empath?
Let us know in the Youtube comments.
If you're listening on Spotify, or Apple, or anywhere else,
head to Youtube, get into the comments, and tell us are you an empath? Yes or No.
Start the show–
L: It's going to be an episode where you [ ] on the idea of people being empaths.
C: Let's start the show!
Hello and welcome to Sci Guys.
The show where we talk about the crazy, weird and wonderful stories from the science world.
I'm Corry and as always I'm joined by my co-host Jamp and Luke Cutforth.
L: Hello. J: Hi, howdy.
C: This week we're talking about rodent rescues.
L: Rodent rescues?
C: We often put human characteristics on animals, don't we?
Human emotions, human sort of actions.
We like to say. This dog is doing something: “Oh, the dog feels sorry for you”.
J: Anthropomorphization.
C: Yes. L: Yeah.
J: That word that I said flawlessly.
C: Yeah. Do you want to try it again?
J: Anthropomorphizing.
Anthropomorphizing.
C: Obviously, it's hard…
Sorry, that was really…
J: I came in less confident the second time.
C: Sometimes, it's really hard to tell when we're projecting onto animals
and when it's actually an animal doing a thing.
It's hard to tell what's going on inside the noggin of a little creature. So that's–
L: Usually very little, in my experience.
C: Not very little is going on in your noggin.
I disagree. Too much is going on your noggin if anything.
L: It's somewhere in between the two.
Or it fluctuates between those two extremes.
Too little or too much.
C: And that's the trick, actually. If you're watching this podcast,
which I would absolutely recommend.
I don't know I'm looking to the camera,
when I say I would recommend watching this podcast, but I'm gonna do it.
When you watch this podcast you get to see Luke spacing out,
and you have to decide whether it's because too much is going on or too little it’s going on…
Prosocial behavior and empathy.
Do either of you know what prosocial behavior and
empathy are? Can you give me a quick definition of either?
J: When you're a pro, being social.
L: Is it behavior that promotes a sort of group success?
C: Not quite. I mean that's kind of more–
J: Altruism. C: That's altruism, isn't it?
That's more kind of on the... Well, no.
How about I explain what they are, and then instead of saying
what they're not, it's probably a lot easier…
L: We could guess loads of times, and then you could say whether they're not those things,
and eventually, we'll find out what they are.
C: Why don't we change what the podcast is.
Screw this whole science thing. Let's get rid of that.
Let's just, for the rest of time, you say things,
and I'll tell you whether they are or not the thing that I'm thinking about.
L: Right. C: That's the podcast.
L: Sounds like a load of fun. C: That sounds like a lot of fun.
OK, let's start now.
What is prosocial behavior?
J: It's not antisocial behavior. C: That's right.
L: Is it social behavior, but you're really good, so you're a professional at it.
J: You get paid for it.
L: Yeah. J: That's really pro.
L: Is that right? C: It's not.
How about I just tell you what it is? I feel like this podcast has run its course–
L: Is it what we do when we are social media people, we do it as our job?
We're prosocial and our behavior is prosocial behavior?
C: Sure, OK.
Do you wanna know what the actual definition is?
J: Yes, please. L. So that's wrong?
J: Yes. C: Yes Luke, it’s wrong.
L: Should it be more clear.
C: Prosocial behavior. The definition I have sitting right in front of me,
and I'll quote it word for word is:
Any action that benefits another organism regardless of intent or motivation.
L: I feel like that's what I said, to begin with.
C: You said that it sort of increases the sort of…
I can't remember the exact word.
Basically, you said makes it better for the group. That's wrong.
L: Is it wrong? OK.
C: Yeah. That is wrong. L: OK
C: That's why I said that L: Cool.
It's any action that benefits another organism, regardless of intent or motivation.
When you say the group, that benefits everyone, it's just–
J: It could be anyone, other living thing.
C: Any organism. It doesn't need to be the same organism as you. For example–
J: Petting a dog on the head is prosocial behavior.
C: Yeah, for example, if I pet a dog on the head and the dog loved it, that's prosocial behavior.
J: Nice one.
C: Whether I'm doing it to get enjoyment from myself or not.
Whether I'm petting the dog in the head just out of the goodness of my heart,
or because I really love.
Gosh, I love petting them, dogs on their heads.
It's all prosocial behavior.
L: I have a specific question.
If you pet the dog on the head, and the dog enjoys it,
then the dog did enjoy it, but it doesn't benefit the organism in any way.
The organism isn't then more likely to survive, or more likely to reproduce,
because you passed it on the head, unless in some very weird roundabout
way it actually is because happiness makes it more bold or something.
C: I disagree in that…
OK, so for example. If I was to lock you in a room by yourself forever,
you'd probably get on fine, but if I was to lock a normal person on their own in a room forever,
they probably wouldn't enjoy it very much.
L: And then if you came in and you patted me on the head, then I'd be happy.
C: Yeah, they'd be happy…
And your fitness decreases, to an extent.
Your mental fitness decreases to an extent, when you're isolated.
When you don't have any social contact, and the same goes for dogs.
They're social animals, they need social contact, and pet them on the head.
It's really quite good for him.
L: That's really interesting, thank you. I'm gonna pat some dogs.
J: Yeah, moral of the story, go pet a dog.
L: Otherwise you're basically trapping them in a room on their own forever.
Is that the moral of the story?
If you don't pat dogs, you're putting them in isolation.
C: You know what? I'm going to move on because I don't want to touch that with a 10-foot pool.
J: They might feel like they're in isolation.
C: Some examples of prosocial behavior, and again, I'm just going to read this verbatim.
“Sharing, comforting, cooperating, helping, rescuing and donating”.
Those are all positive behaviors that help others, and again, I need to be clear.
Prosocial behavior is, basically, a sort of positive action to another organism,
an action that benefits another organism, and it doesn't matter what the intent is.
Whether it's a selfish intent, or whether it's a selfless intent.
Anything that is beneficial to another organism that one organism does,
that is prosocial behavior.
Altruism is something that's motivated by a sort of genuine desire to
benefit something else, or someone else.
That's altruism. When you're thinking they're:
“I want to help Luke out. I'm going to do this”.
L: Thank you. C: That's altruism.
L: Cool. J: Comes with the intent.
C: Yeah, and that's without any expectation of anything.
If I say: “You know what? Luke seems like Luke needs a phone,
and I'm just gonna give Luke a phone and then stop speaking to him forever”.
L: Oh, thank you. C: There you go…
Nothing to me, because I enjoy speaking to Luke. I like it.
Surprisingly, I do.
If I was to decide: “Here's the phone, and I'm going to stop seeing you forever”.
I'm not getting anything out of that.
If anything, I'm losing. L: I'm getting two things out of it.
C: Thanks Luke.
C: Maybe a bit nicer, maybe you want to be a bit nicer to the guy that's giving you a phone.
L: Well, you've not done it yet.
C: Well, maybe I won't do it at all. Maybe I'm not an altruistic person.
You understand what's going on here.
Prosocial behavior is just to behave to someone else.
And empathy.
Empathy is this sort of…
What do you think empathy is?
L: The ability to sort of create emotions
somebody else's feeling that you aren't necessarily feeling…
You could empathize with somebody's
loss, and you actually get a genuine feeling of loss, even though you haven't lost anything.
C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Empathy is this sort of, yes, simulated feeling of someone else, or basically feeling someone else's
feelings, and that is one of the things that motivates people towards prosocial behavior.
If I see Jamp looking all sad, because someone ate Jamp's plums,
and I would see Jamp and I'd have a lot of plums myself and I would feel bad,
and the only thing I could do to stop that bad feeling is to give Jamp some plums.
J: You have some plums? C: I actually do have plums downstairs.
L: So in that sense, you're actually, to a certain extent, selfishly motivated towards prosocial
behavior, by an empathy response, because actually you don't want to feel the bad thing.
C: Yeah, to an extent, yeah. Absolutely.
Or because you want to feel a good thing.
It can feel good to do something nice for someone else, and
there's a sort of empathetic thing there.
Because empathy doesn't necessarily need to be always negative.
Empathy could be a positive thing as well.
We understand what empathy is? We understand what prosocial behavior is?
L: Yep. C: Good.
So let's jump into the experiment.
Now, I've got this one experiment that you might have heard of.
It's been popping up on Twitter quite a bit, and it's to do with rats.
Do you have any guess what this experiment is?
L: Yes… Well, I did see a thing about, basically,
an experiment that was if a rat can help another rat get out of something?
C: Yeah, OK, cool.
Let's not go any further on that, because I've got the whole experiment laid out.
J: It's the whole episode. C: It's the whole episode.
There is nothing else to this…
Before you say another word!
This is an experiment.
The sort of title of the experiment, the title of the paper is:
“Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats.”
It was published in 2011 in Science…
It kind of talks about how human prosocial behavior is driven by empathy,
but it's unclear whether that is present in other animals, particularly mammals,
like non-human primates and other mammals.
Obviously, a rat model is something that's very easy to study.
We know a lot about rats compared to many other animals.
We can simulate a sort of depression in rats.
We can do a lot with rats.
They're very easy to work with, so we thought: “Why not look at rats?”
Essentially, the study was to look to see if a rat would want to help another rat out,
even if there was no benefit to itself.
If it would empathetically be driven to do something for another rat, which we'll get to it.
It's a little less cut and dry than you might think, but personally,
having had rats, I would say…
I'm on the fence.
L: Are they bastards? C: Yes, a little bit.
I mean, one literally yes, because their parents aren't married, and two…
L: You don't know that. J: You mean, some of them have married parents.
C: Well, I checked.
None of them have, I'm sure none of the rats have married parents, but they're still–
J: They’re all bastards. C: Exactly, yeah, absolutely.
It's just an ingrained thing about being, but also…
I mean, I guess the rats that I've had never had to want for anything, and so they had no reason
not to steal from each other and stand on each other's heads, and generally just be not there–
L: Just like us when we're not recording Sci Guys.
C: Absolutely. Stealing and standing, that's our thing.
But also if you picked one of them up and they didn't want to be picked up,
the other two would kind of come and see what was going on.
They'd be like: “Hey, don't do that,
maybe”, but again they're rats, they're tiny. There's nothing they can do.
J: Except flip you off, the tiny rat.
C: They can't even do that, their fingers are too small. You wouldn't even be able to see it…
So this is built on research. This study is built on research into rats and social contagion.
Essentially, this is a study called, I think
“Emotional reactions of rats to the pain of others” from 1959.
Essentially, they gave some rats electric shocks and wanted to see what happened
to the other rats, if they gave some rats electric shocks, specifically…
I'm pretty sure…
I think this is a study wherein they had rats press a sort of button or whatever to
get some snacks, and it also gave the other rats an electric shock.
Yeah, when you press the button.
L: God. There's some flipping psychopaths working in the science fields.
C: Obviously–
L: Let's set up a game where, but it's for science, it's for science,
but I'm going to feed one rat while I was torturing another one and let them see it.
C: Well, no you're not feeding the rat…
Sorry, you're not feeding or torturing the rat.
The rat gets to press its own button to shock another rat and feed itself.
And the idea is would they want to shock the other rat less.
Basically, rats…
Rats will shock other rats less.
And actually also, there are…
They also looked at signs of sort of “depression” in rats.
I think it was sort of like learned helplessness that sort of thing, and
there were lower signs of that in rats that were sort of shocking other rats, if that makes sense.
L: Hang on there was lower signs of depression…
C: No, sorry. There were lower…
Oh, wait hold on. Let me–
L: How do you kill depression? Electrocute your friends.
C: Rats basically, felt better when there weren't rats around them being shocked.
Now, there are some…
L: I also would feel better if there wasn't rats around me getting shocked.
C: Yeah, I know. A surprised rat, there's nothing worse than that. No.
Shocked. L: Yeah.
I understood the joke, I just didn't appreciate it.
J: Insensitive.
C: It was over.
L: Corry is quite enjoying torturing us, and maybe he'll get some food for himself too.
C: It was 63 years ago this study. Those rats would be long dead now anyway.
I don't think it matters how much they were shocked.
L: I don’t know man. That's pretty poor…
That's a pretty poor opinion you’ve got there.
L: [...]
so it doesn't matter.
C: I mean, in a hundred years or something I don't think it's worth:
“Oh, was Corry shocked by Luke?” Doesn't matter that much.
Shocked me, in a hundred years but I'm dead.
J: He'll also be dead.
C: Exactly, so I've got nothing to worry about.
That is the kind of the background of this.
They were trying to see if they're empathy in rats.
So they put rats together in pairs for two weeks, before they started testing.
You got them getting acclimated to each other, becoming little–
J: To make them friends before you make them shock each other.
L: Of course.
C: This isn't the shock experiment. This is the 2011 experiment.
J: This is a separate thing.
C: I mean, although, I hope they did make them friends because they shot each other.
One, for scientific integrity. Not because I want to see rat friends shock each other.
J: It makes it sadder.
C: It does make it a little sadder,
but it means the results are a little bit more robust, and that's all that matters.
J: It's not only the rat getting hurt it's also the friendship.
C: Jesus. Wow, you made the–
J: Many things died. C: The rats didn't die.
They were shocked, not like–
L: They did eventually, and you've made that clear.
J: It doesn't matter if they didn't die, Corry.
C: What I mean is that I'm fairly sure they did not die from the shocks in the experiment,
I can't say for certain, I'm just fairly sure.
In the 2011 experiment, the empathetic rat experiment.
They put the rats together for two weeks before they started the tests, and in each session,
they had a rat, and they put them in (and this is the free rat) they put the rat in
a sort of little space, a little area, an arena, it says in the paper, and it has a center…
In the center of the little…
L: Gladiators! J: Fight!
C: In the center of sort of an enclosure,
and in the center of the enclosure was this sort of little rat cage?
Rat restrainer? L: Yeah.
C: Like a little tiny rat box.
In that restraint, I'm sure you can guess…
I'm sure you can guess, is a trapped rat.
L: No way. C: Yeah.
L: In the rap restraint there is a rat? C: Yeah.
L: Restrained?! C: Yes.
L: Wow. C: Incredible.
And the free rat has the power to free the trash rat.
L: This is the worst game. J: Really bad restraints.
For rat can get you out of the restraints, it's pretty bad–
L: But you're also a rat.
It's not like a rat can get me out of restraints.
C: This feels like “Saw”, but for rats.
To get the other rat out, the free rat can
basically, tip over the door by forcing it open, usually, with its head, sort of thing.
So you can just kind of tip over the door with its head.
Obviously, you can't do that from inside the restraint,
but the free rat is able to do it from the outside.
They were sort of…
If the rat couldn't open the door, the experimenter would then open the door halfway,
which would let the trap rat out, and that…
Basically, they did that to stop the rats getting depressed.
It doesn't say that. It says…
It says: “Allowing the trap rat to escape and preventing learned helplessness”.
Stopping the rats from getting depressed, wich it's nice, that's good.
L: Out of interest, is there any way that they have ruled out?
Now obviously, I'm remembering your prosocial behavior definition is important here, because
this would be irrelevant to whether they have prosocial behavior, but whether they have empathy,
is for example, is the trap rat squeaking a lot, and the other rat could be finding that annoying?
C: We'll get there, we'll get there. That's a good, that's a ver…
I'm glad you brought that up. That's a very smart thing to bring up. So–
J: Shut up.
L: Stop it. J: Fine, I’ll get you out if you shut up.
L: That would be prosocial behavior, because it does benefit the other rat.
It doesn't matter the intent, it's because I'm annoyed with you.
C: They repeat these sessions for 12 days.
Imagine being, by the way, the trapped rat, every day you wake up, and you're just trapped again,
and you've got your rat friend, and sometimes they're just not letting you out–
It's like what's that film with Tom Hanks? Where he wakes up the same day.
J: “Groundhog Day”. L: Yeah, “Groundhog Day”.
C: That's not with Tom Hanks. L: What?
J: I think it is–
L: No, no…
C: Is Bill Murray. L: It is Bill Murray.
C: It's absolutely with Bill Murray.
L: I came from a universe in which it was Tom Hanks.
C: No, you didn't.
I don't think Tom Hanks has been in any time loop movie.
L: No, no, but I came from a different parallel universe in which Tom Hanks has been.
C: OK.
J: If I watch “Forrest Gump” on repeat, then he is in a time loop movie.
L: That's true. You go in there Jamp. Good work.
Let's just keep pressing "start chapter again", "start chapter again", "start chapter again".
J: And then you let him do two chapters, and you're like: “Oh, progression”.
L: Just to edge him a little bit. J: He's learning.
L: He thinks he's getting ahead…
And back to the start again, yeah.
C: Back to the rats, cool.
They also marked the three rats heads and recorded their movements to see what they were doing.
Let's see where they’re going sort of thing.
Where they were spending their time.
They also had a control, so they had free rats with empty restrainers,
and free rats with an unrestrained cage mate across, basically separated from them.
L: Did they have free rats with a trapped rat who is unable to be saved?
C: Jesus, Luke, no.
L: Well, I mean, that's a control? C: No, it's not.
That's is…
OK, hold on. What is that controlling for?
L: Whether the free rat just likes pressing the door, near a restrained rat.
What I'm saying is…
C: They kind of tested for that afterwards, so sure.
God damn, I don't like you today.
You're bugging me.
There's nothing worse than someone being silly, but also being–
L: Technically correct. C: Yeah, like technically correct.
The free rat spent apparently more time near the restrainer, and
they moved faster than the control rats did, and the control rats obviously,
not having a trapped rat with them, that was the control basically.
Obviously, one set of controls had no restrained rat, had no rats anywhere
in the rest of the cage, and the other control rats had another rat,
but sort of separated them from them by a divide, but not trapped rat.
The control rats obviously weren't moving as quickly, and didn't spend as much time next
to the restrainer, so Luke, for you there, the rats didn't just like the restrainer.
It seems that they were at least trying to help the cage mate out of the restraint.
The reason behind it, we'll get to that in a bit.
They also learned…
The rats learned to open the door better, and the sort of latency between them being
put in the enclosure, and them letting the sort of trapped out, decreased
as the experiment went on, which is pretty cool.
What you can infer from that, that they were intending to do it,
and they were basically learning how best to open the door.
I think the best way for them to do was to sort of nudge it with their head,
and I think by the end most of them ended up doing that.
Also interestingly…
They classed rats as openers, sort of by the end of the experiment.
If they were capable of doing it, sort of consistently and quickly, and well.
23 out of 30 of the rats, in the sort of the “trap rat experiments” were openers.
L: [...] C: So 23 out of 30 of the free rats, that were–
L: Seven real, mean rats.
C: There's 23 out of 30 that were classed as openers,
and in the control, there were only 5 out of 40 that were classed as openers.
So there were 5 in the control that just bloody loved opening that thing, I'll tell you that–
L: Some of them got trapped themselves.
C: From what I know about rats, they like weird stuff.
One of the rats spit, two of the rats like to spit,
and one of them did not care for it. I didn't feed them spit.
L: I have literally, in this house, watched…
I can't remember with you or Noah,
lick your finger and go over to the rat, and the rat will enjoy licking your spit off…
How did you find that out?
C: I don’t know, ask Noah. L: I will do.
C: And also you've…
I'm certainly fed the rat’s spit. L: No, I didn't feed the rat’s spit.
C: You sure? L: Yeah.
C: You can feed the rat’s spit if you want.
L: Thank you, well there's only one left so…
C: Yeah. L: Does he like spit?
C: Yeah, he loves spit. L: Great.
C: Honestly, I think that might be what's keeping him going.
L: You know what? I'm doing it after this episode.
C: Feeding a rat’s spit, yeah absolutely. The worst part is–
J: I won’t be a part of any of this.
C: The worst part is when you've got your mouth open near them, and they quickly dive in,
and take out– J: Oh my God, a gold mine.
C: And take it straight from the source, because their head just fits right in your mouth.
I's a perfect little size, and that's another reason the
fancy rats never ever set them free, because they are not built to survive.
They are so stupid. They're very smart, but they don't survive--
Imagine going into another creature's mouth that's bigger than you. Just diving on, in there.
J: Can I look at your spit, Sir? C: Back to the trapped rat experiments.
You've kind of got the gist of that sort of first course of experiments there.
They also recorded the sounds of the rats, using an ultrasonic bat detector.
Presumably, stolen from Batman, I guess, there you go.
No. It was an ultrasonic detector, it is literally a bat detector, but obviously, if they're using
ultrasonic sound waves, it doesn't really matter what animal it's coming from.
L: Detected anything. C: Yeah, it can detect any ultrasonic sideways.
They used that to sort of test to see what was going on with the rats,
what they were saying to each other, sort of thing, and there were more alarm calls
recorded during the trapped condition, 13% than during the empty and object conditions 3% to 5%,
because the conditions where they put just an object in the cage, in the trapped cage.
L: More alarm calls, but the some alarm calls still came from the free rat in the control?
C: Yeah, I mean rats are skittish.
L: What do you mean by a lot? They're just going “Ah!”?
C: Oh, I should point that out, as well.
This is another thing, this goes on to stay, as well.
The cage the rats were in, the sort of door, the restraint,
that would sometimes shock the rats a little bit.
J: Oh– C: No, no, no.
J: We’re back to shocking.
C: Not like electric shock, scare them a little bit, with a noise.
Give them a little bit of a start,
because it makes a noise, and they're like: “What? What's that?”
But that decreased.
With the trapped rat condition, basically with the rats that had
a rat trapped in the restraint, that happened less over time.
It showed that they knew what they were doing,
because they weren't scared of opening the door anymore.
They knew that they were
nudging the door with their face, in order to open the door to free the rat.
L: Did the trapped rats
squeak less over time, because they knew that the other rat would come save them?
C: I don't have information on that. L: I would expect so.
C: Oh wait. Yes, hold on.
“Alarm calls occurred more frequently 20% to 27% on days one to three when door opening was rare,
and in 90% of files containing an alarm calls on day one, the trap rat was identified as
the source. In the remaining samples we were not able to identify the caller”.
“These data…
I love reading scientific papers sometimes.
“These data suggest that the trap rats were indeed stressed”.
L: Yeah, you think? J: Maybe.
C: I think what's quite good about this is they got quite a lot of data on this.
They thought of a lot of…
Basically, all these questions that you're asking, they've kind of thought of the answers to them.
More of the female rats. This is interesting. More of the female rats than the male rats.
6 out of 6 female rats,
compared to 17 out of 24 male rats, in the trap condition became door openers.
And it says that: “That's consistent with the
suggestions that females are more empathetic than males”.
I assume in rats. I don't know if they're trying to say…
L: Across the board. C: All females, all the time, absolutely.
J: That's how that's actually how you determine, what's a male, what’s a female.
C: Absolutely. Chromosomes? Blah. No.
J: Empathy level, that's it.
C: I mean…
L: A new biological marker for biological sex. C: That kind of is a gender thing, though.
Men are taught to be less empathetic than women. Or just feel–
L: But rat men are not taught to be less empathetic than rat women.
C: Luke, are you trying to create rat men? Is that the
whole spit-swapping thing you got going on there?
Are you creating a race of super powered rat people?
L: Yeah, to get me out of a cage when I get trapped.
C: Oddly specifically. L: Squeak, squeak…
C: Oddly specific use case, but honestly, I'm not gonna question it.
L: I get trapped in a cave somewhere. “Don't worry everyone, I'm gonna call my rat man brigade”.
♪ Rat-man ♪
J: Just Snowhite, but just rats.
Help me.
C: But it is a human with a rat's head, the size of a rat's head, honestly.
J: I like Mr. Rat. L: I'm not telling you, because–
C: No, no, no, because that's a human…
Mr. Rat has a rat’s head, but it is the size of a human head.
I’m talking a human with a rat’s head the size–
J: The size of a rat’s head.
L: Rat body with a full size human head.
C: That is infinitely worse.
L: Drag yourself along backwards.
And I'm like: “How are you gonna save me from this trap?”
J: What doors your opening? L: Yeah, it does, somehow.
C: Sometimes people comment saying that this podcast is too full of nonsense,
that they don't get enough facts, and I say:
“Damn it, there are tons of facts, you just gotta wade through the nonsense”.
J: Yeah, stop listening.
C: Or better, wade through the facts to get to all this fun nonsense,
which is the real reason for this podcast.
L: Yeah. J: Yeah.
C: Good. Back to the rats.
As I've said, the females seem to be more empathetic than the males.
Again, there's only 6 females that were tested in this, and only 24 males that were tested, so
I don't know if we could extrapolate this out to all rats, but in this experiment at least,
the females seem to be more empathetic than the males, which is interesting.
I mean, I guess if I was to pull an explanation for that out from anywhere,
males are maybe a little bit more fighty with each other, than females are, but–
L: I can't let the rat out, it might fight me.
C: Exactly, there's a dominant…
There's still dominance between female rats, as well, so it's tough to say.
L: I would love to know if you did a big enough study, whether there was a difference between the
number of female rats/male rats would let out, and the number of male rats/female rats would let out.
C: Well Luke, all we need to do,
is get a lot of rats. L: Well, yeah…
C: And they're very easy to get. L: Yeah. They're really cheap.
C: They're so cheap, and also they just make more.
They make more super quick. L: Unlimited rats.
C: You don't even need to do anything.
You can literally just put two together and in two weeks you'll have like ten more,
and then if you keep on leaving them together, they just exponentially grow out.
J: Mitosis. L: We have three billion rats.
C: You just drop some food in there every now and then,
like suddenly you've got more rats. It's like magic, honestly.
The next question they could have had was is there something else affecting this.
Is the sort of rate of opening affected by boldness of the rats, so they thought:
“OK, let's take some rats. Let's see how bold they are–
L: Make them fight. C: No.
L: That's how you test boldness, is it not? C: No, that's not your test boldness.
How you test boldness is, actually, I think a lot more interesting.
There was a ledge test…
J: Gosh.
L: Like a cliff? J: It's just like jumping between high places?
C: I mean no, no, no. Just a ledge. So they're…
Sorry, this is just really ridiculous.
They basically just had some ledges and they test how
quickly the rats would be able to overcome the ledge, and that's it.
L: When you say overcome the ledge, what do you mean? Jump down?
C: Yeah, yeah.
It's that, it's just silly.
L: But that's not necessarily a test for boldness, it can also be a test for stupidity.
J: What if they committing suicide? C: It's not–
L: All the depression, it's a depression. J: It could be depression.
C: Rats can fall a really far distance and be fine. It's not…
J: It could also not be fine.
C: No, no. J: OK.
C: Again. I've seen a rat jump off of like a five foot cage–
J: But if they know they'll be fine, is that really boldness?
C Yeah, because it's still, I mean–
L: It's your test of knowledge, of terminal velocity.
They're actually gravitational geniuses.
What I'm saying is that, your conclusion that
this is a test for boldness is not necessarily the only conclusion.
C: OK, so let me go more in depth on this. It's the ledge of a half opened cage.
It's basically to see how long it would take for them to approach that ledge, rather than–
L: Approach the lead? C. Yeah, rather than jump off it.
Approach the ledge, and then see what they're doing there. If they're like:
“Oh, I'm scared to go–
L: So it's a test
for whether you're scared of heights. J: Which is directly linked to boldness.
C: OK, you know what? Let's stop the episode here. You two,
tell me how you would test boldness and rats?
L: Make him fight.
C: No, no, no. I want Jamp to start off.
J: I wouldn't. C: No, no, no. Tell me.
L: …something else.
C: Give it a go. J: I simply asked them.
J: On a scale from 1 to 10, how bold do you consider you are?
C: Bear in mind, Jamp…
L: That’s cool qualitative data, Jamp.
C: We have a rat downstairs.
If you are going to stand behind asking a rat how bold it is, we can test that right here and now.
J: Well, if the rat doesn't answer me, it must be
pretty bold to have the cheek, and the audacity to ignore, a creature that's much larger than it.
L: I'm with Jamp on this. That is a perfect test. It doesn't test for anything else.
J: The call and the gumption. L: I am such a creature,
such a majestic creature, as myself.
C: I don't know how this episode got so silly.
I don't know where it came from.
L: Well, I mean–
J: It's about rats saving each other.
L: Yeah, about rats being trapped and saving each other…
J & L: From restraint.
L: I don't know how this episode got so silly.
The researchers 100 years ago used to create devices that allowed rats
to electrocute each other whilst getting a snack, when did this episode get silly?
C: That was 60 years ago. L: Well, I'm so sorry.
C: And so Luke, you were talking about
the squeals of the rat, and see if that was going to be affecting it.
L: Yes.
C: I'm not going to talk about that,
I'm going to talk about something slightly different. I'm going to talk about–
L: What the heck what’s that? That’s weird.
C: Just keeping you on your toes.
I want to talk about the sort of social interaction, because they want to see:
“Oh, are the rats freeing the other rats just because they want to hang out with them?”
Well, they decided to test for that.
So what they did was they had a different setup wherein the rat
could free the other rat, but then they couldn't hang out.
They were just slightly separated–
L: Great work. C: …and they still did let them out.
J: It's nice.
C: So they did this for, I think…
Gosh 29 days of testing, but there were 3 rats that didn't open the door on any
of the last 3 days of testing, and then they weren't tested any further.
J: This is futile, you're just going to end up back in there anyway.
L: Mum was called, and they came to pick them up.
C: OK, hold on.
Let me go over this again.
J: Quick, mum’s coming. Hide in the restraints.
C: There were 12 pairs of rats, and they were exposed in sort of that trapped
condition over 12 days, and 3 of the rats didn't open the door in the last 3 days,
so they stopped with them and then, they use the new setup for 29 days.
The new setup being, if you let the rat out, go somewhere else, and you don't get to hang out.
They tested that and then they reversed it, so the rats that were in the separate
engagement condition were then tested in the separated empty condition, and vice versa.
They basically swapped the control rats with the non-control rats, to see what would happen.
L: The trap traps became the freeing rats–
C: No, no. So they…
L: No? C: The control being…
Remember? There was just an empty cage.
So they swapped the rats with the empty cage, with the rats that had a trap trap.
Is this making sense?
J: Yes. L: Yes, yeah.
C: Is this making sense? Let me know in the comments.
J: Did they have to pair up the control rats with another control rat to become friends?
C: I think all of the rats were just paired with other rats, and then they…
J: Oh, previously, then some of them went on to just be alone.
C: I think, because they were swapping the control rats between…
I think they just…
It doesn't actually explicitly say there, but I think they just paired up a bunch of rats,
there were rat pairs, and they had them working in pairs, and when they wanted them to be controls,
obviously, they weren't working in pairs, so they just separated them.
J: Very good, that makes sense. C: Good.
Looking at this, essentially, what they found was that with the separate cagemate condition,
they either continued or returned to opening the door at short latency,
as they had in the trap condition.
They continued to let the rats out,
at a faster rate, even though they couldn't hang out with them.
And conversely, when there was an empty restraint,
they usually ended up kind of stopping opening it, because they weren't letting a rat out.
They'd open it for a bit, and then be like: “This is pointless”.
L: Because they're trying to figure out what it is,
and it's not interesting anymore, because you know what it is.
C: Exactly, yeah.
That kind of indicates that they're
not doing it just for social contact, because rats do like social contact.
If you were lonely, and there was someone trapped, you'd be like: “Maybe they'll talk to me”,
and you let them out, and then you can talk.
That's the only reason–
L: You could talk to without letting them out, to be fair, maybe.
J: That's true. L: Just shout.
C: That's true. J: Through the bars.
C: They only let through screams.
J: Help, help…
C: It's not a very good scream. J: I was trying to do like a tiny rat’s scream.
Help, help…
C: I hate that so much. L: That is horrifying.
C: That is horrible.
That is…
No, no, no. Stop that. L: You're staying in the cage.
C: I would honestly, put you out of my misery, I think, genuinely...
J: Put a cage in a cage.
L: I'd let you out, but only in the version where I didn't get to hang out with you.
Right, go away.
J: Or is it a ledge nearby, you push…
C: They also…
This is coming towards the end of their experiment. They did something else.
They wanted to see what the value of the sort of laying the cage made out was.
You want to see how much do you actually care about doing this.
They got some chocolate chips, because rats love some chocolate chips—
L: But they would do it for free, before. C: They got some chocolate chips…
Listen here, yeah. L: Sorry, OK.
C: So what they had, they had some chocolate chips, and they had a choice between, essentially…
I mean letting the other rat out first or having the chocolate.
And obviously, there were a bunch of controls,
being like chocolate with no restraint rat, and all that sort of stuff.
There were two restrainers in this experiment.
One of them had five chocolate chips. The other had a trapped rat, right?
J: They’d still free both of them.
L: Just the order. C: The order and how they act.
L: What would you pick, Jamp?
J: Ah, well I’m not a rat. So…
C: If Luke was trapped in a restraint, and there were also five chocolate chips
trapped in the restraint, which would you choose to open first? Bear in mind–
J: Would you like some chocolate chips? C: These are not vegan chocolate chips.
J: Oh, they're not? Well I'll go Luke, then.
C: Really? L: Ah, thanks.
C: I'd still get the chocolate chips first, might be useful.
L: There's no currency. C: You can wait.
L: I'll make you some chocolate chips if you let me out.
C: We're in a restraint. I want to get those chocolate chips first.
I don't trust you. Were you going to take him from me?
Want to share my chocolate chips? No. I'll take them first and then you can come up.
L: Wow, remember the bit where prosocial behavior feels good and sharing is nice?
C: Hey, I'll decide whether to share once I've let you out.
L: Once you've had your chocolate chips.
C: I'm not gonna eat those chocolate chips, I'm saving them in case I need them.
L: Right, for me. C: No, maybe.
L: OK. C: Just not gonna let you make that decision.
I’m gonna keep it to myself, don't trust you.
J: So what did the rats do, did they choose the chocolate buttons or did they choose Luke?
Sorry, Luke rat.
L: I don't remember being in this, but…
J: It was 12…
C & J: It was 11 years ago.
L: Yeah, I blocked it out. Kept getting.
Chocolate chips picked instead of me.
C: Imagine… J: [...]
C: A lot of people have the experience of being picked last in gym class,
or being not being picked in school, Luke was picked last by rats, many times.
J: Over some chocolate buttons.
L: I was also picked in gym class last over some chocolate buttons, as well.
It was just a team of chocolate buttons against me playing basketball.
J: Yeah, I want my goalie to be these chocolate buttons, please.
C: Give me a dodgeball and you're just up against the chocolate buttons.
J: They still lost.
C: They're very hard to hit, aren't they? J: They are, yeah.
C: In this experiment with the restraint full of five chocolate chips…
I say full. The restraint with five–
L: What do you mean a “restraint full of five chocolates”?
C: It's the same restraint. L: I'm imagining it like–
J: Well, it's like a little room–
C: It's the same restraint that the other rat is in, it's just a little box.
Like a little trap rat. J: They have to push the door.
L: Oh, they push the door up and then they can get the chocolate chips.
C: Yeah, it's the same restraint that the other rat is in.
They've got to do the same thing with the door, but in the chocolate chips case,
instead of a rat coming out, they can just pop in and get some chocolate chips.
L: OK, yeah. C: We all understand.
J: It's equally easy to get into.
C: It's the same restraint, it's just in one case there's a rat,
and in the other case there's five chocolate chips.
In this experiment, there wasn't…
Either for the rats that had the chocolate chip, and the other rats are trapped in the restraints,
“there was no difference in the door opening latencies
for the two restrainers during days 6 to 12” and…
“In contrast, the rats in the chocolate empty conditions”.
The rats that had one restraint with chocolate in it, another restraint being empty,
“opened the chocolate containing restraint far more quickly than the empty one”.
Basically, if there was a rat trapped and a chocolate chip trapped,
the latency was roughly the same for the first…
L: Right. On average, rats value another rat versus five chocolate chips roughly the same.
C: In the last 6 to 12 days, yeah.
L: OK, quite sad.
C: But hold on, what that says is
that, yeah, the value of freeing a friend and getting some chocolate are roughly the same.
And bear in mind, rats bloody love chocolate.
L: Could the rat that was freed, get to the chocolate chips?
C: Yeah. If you freed the other rat first, they both basically
had access to get the chocolate chips, and something that's interesting here…
This is really cool. If they got the chocolate first,
obviously, they could just eat all the chocolate, and these rats were fed.
These weren't starved rats. They made sure that they were fully fed. They weren't hungry rats.
J: There's always room for chocolate buttons. C: There's always room for chocolate.
There's always room for a little chocolate. Although, yes, a rat can be not hungry…
J: As soon as you bring out the chocolate buttons…
C: I swear to God, oh my God, the number of times the rats found chocolate, and just demolished it.
J: I've seen so many pictures that Noah's taking.
C: Well, there was Christmas chocolate. There was one where we got Christmas chocolate sent,
and Noah puts them down in the room and he comes in the next day, and it's just
a rat, a big fat rat covered in chocolate.
J: Pictures of a rat with chocolate around its mouth.
C: There is a specific picture of Alfie looking real fat, being grabbed around the middle with me.
J: Yeah, that's the one I'm thinking.
C: It's getting wrapped away from chocolate is a tough thing.
Obviously, if they opened the chocolate chip restraint first,
they could have all the chocolate chips they wanted, but they found that the rats…
If there's another rat trapped, as well, so the rats in the chocolate cage mate condition,
they would save on average about one of the five chocolate chips for the other rat.
L: Wow. J: That's nice.
C: And obviously, in the chocolate chip empty condition, they just ate all the chocolate chips.
The actual numbers here are in 52% of the trials, they shared some chocolate chips,
I think that was in the first few days.
And in 61% of the trials on days 6 to 12, they shared the chocolate chips.
They actually were more likely to share towards the end of the experiment.
And the rats in the chocolate empty condition,
usually, a pretty much all the chips, 4.8 is the average sort of number of
chocolate chips there were eaten, when there was just chocolate chips, and an empty restraint.
As I said, in the free condition, they ate fewer chips.
It was actually 3.5, I think, plus or minus 1.5.
They basically let the other rats eat the remaining chips,
which is roughly about one and a half chips, they would leave.
Which for a rat, leaving one chocolate chip for another rat__
J: It’s pretty sensible. C: That is really nice, isn't it?
J: You know when you're full. C: Yeah…
Well, they're never full obviously, but they're specifically leafing…
I think that's really interesting that they're
specifically leaving a chocolate chip for another rat to eat, after they…
They're planning like: “OK, I'm gonna go and get these first, my chocolate chips,
and then I'll leave the one chocolate chip, and you can have that one once I've–
J: I’ve saved this for you.
C: Look, I found one chocolate chip, you can have it my lovely friend, since you have been trapped.
J: I will sacrifice chocolate chip. I will go chocolate chipless.
C: There were no more chocolate chips, you may have this one.
What is this on my face you ask?
Feces, I'm a rat.
J: This is what I had to eat to save the chocolate chip for you.
I wish they did a version where saving the chocolate chips, like opened a trapdoor
and the rat fell, and so had to actually pick between chocolate chips or my friend.
L: Wow. C: Why are you two making such cruel–
L: I want a version–
J: Well, they can fall quite long.
L: I want a version where there's two experiments, but in both,
there's a rat in the trap and and there's also the chocolate chips, but in one of them, there is
see-through glass or see-through plastic, so the other rat can see and judge, and I want to see if
rats have guilt when they know the other rat knows, and they then leave more chips.
C: That's interesting.
My hypothesis on that is that rats don't have that kind of guilt.
L: Well, let's run the experiment. C: Let's do it, yeah.
I mean, that'd be really interesting. It'd be really interesting.
L: I also think rats probably can't count to five, so…
J: Half of five is one, I'll give you one. C: That's actually…
L: I highly doubt rats can count to five. J: Did any of the rest–
C: I think rats can probably count to five. I think a rat could probably–
L: We've got two experiments to do now, haven't we?
Whether the rats can count to five,
and also whether rats have guilt when they know the other person knows they're guilty?
C: Yeah, I mean it isn't counting to five necessarily so much that it's just
understanding a quantity of five.
L: Oh yeah, I just mean whether the other rat looking on, will be able to tell the
difference between two, or three, or one, and hold that in memory and then…
Then we need to have another experiment for whether that other rat it gets petty about it.
C: Man, I think you just want to watch a bunch of rats, which I would recommend just getting–
L: I want to watch a bunch of rats in a systematic way,
and draw conclusions. I want to be a scientist.
Oh wow, cool.
C: Luke, you just want pet rats. You just want pet rats.
L: Yeah, true. I don't necessarily care about empirical data,
I just want to watch them do things, and then talk about it.
“I saw my rat do this thing. Oh, interesting”.
C: Well, you tell everyone that you're testing them,
but actually, you're just watching them do stuff.
That's what I did. J: I got really guilty.
Did any of them share the chocolate chips and split the fifth one? To have half each?
C: Have you read a scientific paper? J: No.
L: Not one. Not one ever? J: Maybe half of one.
L: You split it?
J: Yeah, with the rats.
C: Tend not to have that kind of information in them, usually.
J: Well, they're quite thorough, or so I'm told.
L: Did any rats release the other rat and then the other rat went an eat all of the–
C: It doesn't say that. L: OK, that's a shame.
C: I'll just read the sort of the results or discussion part. It says:
“Our study demonstrates that rats behave prosocially when
they perceive a conspecific experiencing non-painful psychological restraint stress”.
Essentially, what it's saying is,
rats do something nice for other rats, when another rat feels bad.
L: And there's no downside for them.
C: Yeah, there's no downside for them, but also there's no physical harm coming to the other rat.
This is purely just a sort of psychological stress for the other rat. That's what it says.
And then goes on to say:
“Demonstrates that rats behave prosocially when they perceive and conspecific experiencing
non-painful psychological restraint stress, acting to end that distress through deliberate action.”
“In contrast to previous work, the present study shows prosocial
behavior which is accomplished by the deliberate action of a rat”.
“Moreover this behavior occurred in the absence of training or social reward,
and even when in competition with highly palatable food”.
Sorry. I just love that in experiments with
rats you've got to take into account the fact that they really love food…
Like a lot like.
As in, we'll go for chocolate chips over letting someone else out–
J: Who can blame them? C: I mean, yeah…
I did say I would do the same thing.
Probably, I'm going to stick by that, sorry buddy.
L: Well, but you said you'd do the same thing if it was me trapped.
You may you'd do a different thing when it was anybody else.
C: If it was a rat trap, I would let the rat…
No. I don't trust, no.
I would only get the chocolate chips first so that
I could give them to the rat, and the rat would be friends with me.
J: That's nice. L: Is that prosocial behavior then? I'm not sure.
C: It is prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior is regardless–
L: But it is not empathy.
C: There may be some empathy in there. J: Maybe a little bit.
C: There is some empathy in there. It's just the overriding emotion
is I want me to feel good, and be a savior to the little rats.
J: He's specifically saving chocolate chips for the rat, for them–
L: He's saving chocolate chips so the rat will love him. That was very clear.
J: Yeah, but he's going–
L: Not so that rat will be–
J: I know the rat's going to enjoy this. L: Yes, and therefore it will love me.
That is the overarching message there.
C: Yeah. J: Yeah.
C: Yeah. L: Yeah.
I don't say there's something wrong with that, I'm just saying it's not pure empathy.
C: Ain't nothing wrong with that. The rat gets loved, and I get loved by rat.
Obviously, there's a discussion.
They give some alternative explanations. It says in the paper they give some other reasons for the
results that they might have seen, which is a standard thing that you do in paper.
I'll just read some of these out, because I want you to bear these in mind, because
it's kind of the topic of discussion I want to get to, once once we finish this.
They said that “the rats might have acted to stop the alarm calls of the trapped rats”, but the
explanation for this is that apparently, the sort of little rat screams, weren't frequent enough.
They didn't happen often enough to support that idea, so…
The rats were complaining a lot, but just not enough for it to make sense
that the other rats would want him to shut up, sort of thing.
On top of that, they said:
“OK, well the rats are curious little creatures, aren't they?
Maybe they freed the cage mate because they were curious”,
but actually, they did it for over a month, after over a month a rat is going to stop being curious.
J: That was the point of getting them familiar with each other.
C: If it's been a month, you're gonna expect...
J: [...] C: They're gonna get bored of this, right?
So they kind of did that in order to make sure,
"OK, well, it's not just the curious thing",
and this happens a lot in science.
You've got to think... You would have the kind of mind to think:
What are the other explanations for this and how can we rule those out.
And they said, also, door opening could be just coincidental,
because they're very active, but...
It's not likely, because once the rats learned to open the door,
they did so in short and short times.
They were quicker at doing it.
It was a short time between them being put in the
cage and them opening the door and they did it in the same way,
like they consistently did it with the same method.
And so it kind of shows that they learned how to open the door
and then they were making the decision to open the door rather than just doing it by random chance,
because if they were doing it by random chance,
you wouldn't expect to see in like...
A short and short time.
L: I have a question. C: Yes?
L: So, this will probably not be in your paper there, but...
One thing that's come up in my head is like,
I would assume, once the rat lets the other rat out, experiment is over.
C: They get to hang out for a little bit. L: They get hang out for a little bit, OK.
That's fine, because I was wondering whether they just didn't want to be in the cage
and they learned that letting the other rat out
meant that the experiment would be done and they'd be taken away.
C: The experiments lasted at the same amount of time every time.
They just got-- L: Right...
J: And that's why even if they didn't free them they got taken out.
C: Yeah, and remember, even if they didn't free them,
they would they would let the other rat out for a little bit.
L: Right. Bravo, science, well done.
C: Sorry, I should have mentioned that, but--
They did cover their bases quite a bit on this and so...
They then go on to say that this sort of...
This sort of shows that they were probably having this like, sort of empathy response, right?
Or this feeling of empathy or the equivalent of empathy for rats.
And that was driving them to let the other out, which...
I mean, I think is a harder thing to prove.
Like, you've really got to infer that.
Like, we've ruled out a lot of things,
but we don't think we've ruled out everything, right?
And so there's another study I've got that kind of looks into whether it's social contact...
Rather than empathy that drives rats to "rescue" other rats.
And that was done in 2013 that was published in Animal Cognition.
And I'll just briefly go over it.
Essentially, they did a similar experiment, but what they said was that,
this was kind of a new kind of experiment, right?
It was a novel experiment.
And obviously, with new experiments
There are some kind of kinks that you got to work out, like...
If the method isn't like, sort of replicated a lot,
then there could be some sort of issues with it
or some things that you've missed
or some things that we're just not sort of sure of yet.
Like as in, the results that you see could be a result
of the experimental design rather than a result of the behavior of the rats
and because it's not been replicated a lot it's hard to tell what is what.
That makes sense?
So they basically used a sort of similar...
They used a kind of similar-ish design, but quite--
Similar-ish in terms of they were looking for the same sort of thing,
they had a trapped rat, but they did it in a very different way.
In order to sort of stress test this idea, right?
Whether it is sort of this empathy response that is causing these rats to do this,
using like, quite a different design that kind of tests for the sort of same thing.
And the results that they had were that it seemed more like it was social,
basically social companionship that the rats were pursuing...
L: But they still let them out when they couldn't hang out with them.
C: Yeah, I know...
So that, again, they said that could be an issue with the...
L: [...] thinks it's going to be able to hang out with them.
C: There could be issues with the experimental design of the other experiment...
L: Surely over time the time to release the rat in
the group that doesn't get to hang out with the rat would increase.
C: Not necessarily, though.
L: Well, it would learn...
If it was like, motivated towards, I get to hang out with the rat.
C: Yeah, so what it says in this paper,
that's kind of a response to the paper that we've just gone over is that
it's just that the method is new and so they're stress testing it.
And again, it could just not be like, sort of statistically significant.
Again, because they use like, kind of 30-ish rats in that initial experiment,
so when you're saying, "oh, you might expect to see this",
then also there's the rats...
There's a sort of random chance in there, especially with only 30 of them,
so they used a different experimental design that had the similar sort of idea of
a trapped rat and like, different chambers,
basically to push the sort of...
To push the sort of idea that they had to its limits, to see if they still saw the same results
and they didn't see the same results.
Looking at theirs.
But also, on top of that, there was a paper in 2020 in Nature called,
"Rats display empathetic behavior independent of the opportunity for social interaction"
and in that paper they removed social interaction as--
They just removed the social interaction almost altogether,
using like, I think it was this weird cage where there was like, water involved and it was just...
There was no contact between the rats whatsoever.
And they found that rats would still learn to release a sort of cage mate that was stressed out
and they would remember how to do the task for like a long a longer period of time.
And if they had previous experience with the same environment,
it then would shorten the time that it would take for the rat to sort out,
so if they had experience, they'd be like, "oh, God I don't like that.
"I remember how that was.
"I want to let them out",
that's kind of what they're saying that happened with those rats.
And it says that all together they sort of they basically think that
kind of indicates that the rats are experiencing some form of empathy.
And the reason I bring up sort of these two studies is because...
The point I'm trying to make is that it's very difficult
to infer the internal experience of something.
So, for example, like an ant--
That's an example that was used in the second paper that I mentioned.
In ants they will basically try and help or rescue other ants, right?
If there's an ant in trouble, often they'll try and rescue another ant,
but are they doing that because they feel empathy for the other ants?
Or is it just like, this inbuilt, like sort of programming in their answer of like,
"oh, we get this signal, got to rescue the ant", right?
Like, because it's beneficial for the entire group, right?
L: I don't quite understand the difference between those two things.
C: So there's a bit of a difference between an emotional response
that pushes you towards doing something.
So, for example, if you are feeling sad and I then feel empathy for your sadness
that doesn't mean that I'm immediately going to try and comfort you or make you feel better.
I could be like, "oh, you're really bumming me out".
J: I'm gonna go away. C: "Go home".
I could do that or be like, "can you like, stop being sad?
"It's bothering me". I could do that.
Whereas with the ant, it's not feeling empathy.
It's not feeling sad because the other ant is feeling sad
and that's not driving it to then rescue the other ant,
it just has an inbuilt thing of "this signal means this output".
L: Yeah, sure. So empathy is the feeling
and so you're trying to measure whether
whether an organism has a subjective experience of some kind of...
For example, some kind of suffering
when another animal or another organism is suffering despite
the fact that there's no reason for it to suffer materially.
And that is a subjective experience,
which you can never really know if another organism is having.
And so...
But if an ant is acting in a way to save another ant and potentially putting itself in harm's way
in order to save that ant,
that is a different thing to if an ant is acting selfishly and
has a positive output or outlook on another.
A positive outcome on another organism, right?
So to a certain extent, you can never prove whether an ant is--
Or either an ant or whether a mouse or a rat or whatever has empathy,
you just can't, it's not possible.
You can't prove if another person has empathy you can only look at whether
they are willing to put themselves in harm's way even by a tiny amount.
Pushing open the door for another rat is putting yourself in harm's way,
even if it is by a tiny amount, you're diverting your behavior
from something you'd otherwise be doing, in order to benefit another organism
and regardless of what the subjective driver is, because you can never really know that, that is...
You are observing a similar behavior,
the willingness to put yourself at risk in order to save another organism.
C: I don't think you can say "this experiment proves that rats have empathy".
And I don't think I have said that, I wouldn't say that.
They're trying to infer empathy and that is as much as they can do.
And the point of that is, as I've said,
it is to figure out if that is something that non-human animals are capable of
and that has a number of uses in understanding the evolution of sort of emotions,
cognition, all of these things.
It could be very useful.
And like, obviously, it's like...
We're not trying to figure out explicitly, "do they have this exact subjective experience?"
It is the precursor towards this prosocial behavior.
Similar to humans, right?
Because a massive driver for prosocial behavior in humans is empathy,
like as I said at the top.
And we're trying to see is that the same from rats or is it...
Is there a different precursor to prosocial behavior?
L: Yes. C: Now it's time for the quick fire quiz!
L: That's a quick ending.
J: Friend edition.
C: You know the rules for the quick fire quiz.
I will ask one question to the two of you, the first person to answer
the question correctly after buzzing in, after I finished asking the question...
Wins, what did they win, Jamp?
J: Nothing.
C: You're gosh darn right.
So, my question for you is: Luke, what's your buzzer?
Very good. Jamp, what's your buzzer?
J: I'm coming to help! L: Thank you.
C: [..] That's not gonna work!
So, my question is:
On average how many chocolates did the three rats save for the trap rats?
J: I'm coming to help!
L: 1.5 chocolates. C: Yeah.
C: Well done, good job!
J: You win 1.5 chocolates. L: Do I?
C: No, you win nothing. L: Oh, that's cruel!
C: Did you not listen? It's absolutely nothing!
J: Not even a single chocolate chip.
L: You didn't even save me a single chocolate chip?
C: There weren't any chocolate chips! L: Not even on average 1.5 chocolate chips?
J: Not even 0.2 chocolate chips, left over on average by the control rats.
C: Before we go we'd like to thank all of our patrons and thank you for watching.
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J: That's sciguyspod@gmail.com.
L: ♪ Sci Guys Pod ♪ C: At @gmail.com.
You can follow me at @notcorry everywhere.
J: You can follow me at @jampkin everywhere.
L: You can follow me at @LukeCutforth everywhere.
C: Goodbye. J: Goodbye!