Carrion Crows and Azure-Winged Magpies Show No Prosocial Tendencies When Tested in a Token Transfer Paradigm

摘要

Sharing your possessions or donating them to others, as well as helping others, can be summarized under the term, “prosocial behavior”. Recently, researchers have become interested in whether, and in which situations, animals help and share. In this study, we trained carrion crows and azure-winged magpies—two bird species that have previously been found to donate food to their group members—to exchange objects, called “tokens”, with an experimenter for food. We then tested whether the birds would provide these tokens to their group members when they themselves did not have access to the experimenter, but their group members did. We found, however, that there were very few attempted and/or successful token transfers between the birds, suggesting that they were not prosocial in this situation. We argue that the carrion crows and azure-winged magpies might not have fully understood the value of the tokens, either as placeholders for food or as “currency” with which food could be obtained. This limited understanding might have prevented them from exhibiting prosocial behavior in the current study. Therefore, we advocate the use of simpler and more naturalistic paradigms to study prosocial behaviors, such as providing food or resources to others, in a broader range of species.