(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

BY STEVEN SPARKMAN

ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY

You’ve probably heard of empathy. It’s the ability to share another’s feelings, and it’s what keeps us from acting like rats to each other. Figuratively, that is. Turns out rats are actually pretty good at this empathy thing.

KABC reports.

“New research shows that rats get a bad rap.”
“And that’s because they don’t act like, well, rats, right? Researchers from the University of Chicago say rats can show compassion, even empathy. And in one experiment rats had to decide: free another rat trapped in a cage or eat a tempting treat. Well, 23 of the 30 rats freed their pal first and then shared the treat.”

There’s a lot of research these days showing humans aren’t alone in wanting to help our friends. Helping behavior has been shown in apes and other primates. But until now, rodents had only demonstrated the lowest form of empathy.

A writer for Wired explains.

“The experiment built on research conducted several years ago … where mice were shown capable of ‘emotional contagion’ -- a slightly scary-sounding term denoting a tendency to become upset when cagemates were in pain. … It hinted at unexpectedly sophisticated cognition: Mice were supposed to feel pain, but not each other’s, at least not outside children’s stories.”

So the researchers put rats to the test. If a friend is distressed, do rats avoid the problem or do they spring into action? Researcher Peggy Mason explains their test.

“So we put a free rat, the rat with the black dot on his head, into an arena and in the center is his cagemate trapped in a Plexiglas restrainer. The door to the restrainer can only be opened from the outside by the free rat. … Even though it takes quite a bit of rat courage to venture into the scary arena center, the free rat persists in moving to the center and trying to figure this restrainer thing out so he can help his cagemate.”

The door was intentionally hard to open, so the odds of opening it accidentally were small. But as NPR reports, the rats kept trying and eventually figured it out.

“The animals quickly learned to open the door on purpose. But they only did so for a pal, not when the trap was empty or contained a toy rat. And they did this even when opening the door released their pal into a separate cage. So it wasn’t just that the free rat wanted a playmate. They seemed to just want to help.”

Later tests showed rats get just as much pleasure helping a friend as they get eating chocolate. The researchers still can’t say whether the motive was really to help another rat or to make themselves feel better. But a writer for Ars Technica notes, the same is true of humans.

“A comparison to human behavior provides a similar question: when we give to charity, are we doing so to actually help those less fortunate than us, or to eliminate the negative feelings we have when we think about the plights of others? While this is an important distinction to make, both motivations still fall under the definition of empathy.”

The study also showed female rats were more likely to help the trapped rat, and they did so more quickly than males. We’ll just let that one go without comment.