Ravens (Corvus corax) are indifferent to the gains of conspecific recipients or human partners in experimental tasks

Abstract

Although cooperative behaviours are common in animals, the cognitive processes underpinning such behaviours are very likely to differ between species. In humans, other-regarding preferences have been proposed to sustain long-term cooperation between individuals. The extent to which such psychological capacities exist in other animals is still under investigation. Five hand-reared ravens were first tested in an experiment where they could provide food to a conspecific at no cost to themselves. We offered them two behavioural options that provided identical amounts of food to the actor and where one of the two options additionally delivered a reward to a recipient. Subsequently, we made the ravens play a no-cost cooperation game with an experimenter. The experimenter had the same options as the animals and matched the ravens' choices, making the prosocial choice the more profitable option. In both conditions, ravens were indifferent to the effects of their choices and hence failed to help conspecifics and to cooperate with the experimenter. While our negative results should be interpreted with care, overall, our findings suggest that the ravens had no understanding of the consequences of their actions for a potential recipient. This study adds to several others that have used a similar set-up and have reported negative results on other-regarding preferences in animals.

Prosocial Choice in Rats Depends on Food-Seeking Behavior Displayed by Recipients

“…Animals often are prosocial, displaying behaviors that result in a benefit to one another [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] even in the absence of self-benefit [16][17][18][19][20][21] (but see [22][23][24][25]). Several factors have been proposed to modulate these behaviors, namely familiarity [6,13,18,20] or display of seeking behavior [16,21].…”

Voluntary food sharing in pinyon jays: the role of reciprocity and dominance

“…Lastly, our study manipulated which of two birds had access to food to test naturalistic, spontaneous food sharing. Other studies have used more controlled manipulations, such as tools or operant tasks to distribute food (Di Lascio, Nyffeler, Bshary, & Bugnyar, 2013;Rutte & Taborsky, 2007;Stephens, McLinn, & Stevens, 2002;Stevens & Stephens, 2004). Although such designs have been criticized as artificial (Noë, 2006), they may prove valuable in understanding the factors that influence sharing.…”

Subadult ravens generally don't transfer valuable tokens to conspecifics when there is nothing to gain for themselves

“…In a recent study, Schwab et al ( 2012 ) showed that jackdaws, Corvus monedula , can behave prosocially in an experimental set-up, although only when the recipient shows particular interest in the reward. Intriguingly, however, the closely related common raven did not demonstrate such preferences in a similar set-up (Di Lascio et al, 2013 ). This deviation between two closely related species might highlight important socio-ecological differences that may help explain the evolution of prosociality.…”