What conclusion would you come to with this experiment?

Question

"One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/27/AR2007052701056_pf.html

Would you conclude this to mean the rat felt empathy for the other rat, or stopped eating only b/c it feared that it too would get shocked if it ate?

Answer 1

In a way, even a fear of being shocked itself is a basic form of empathy. It shows that the rat understands the other creature is in pain somehow, especially when you consider it may well have no idea what an electric shock feels like.

Another question you might ask here is "Does the rat really understand it's fellow is in pain, or is it simply being stressed out by the other rat's behaviour (i.e any negative stimulus would do)?"

So you could try an experiment where you used various negative stimuli on different rats and determined if they learn to ignore or accept the stimuli in order to get food or they forgo the food after a time. Not many details were given so the researchers might have done this.

Even then you might have some unanswered questions like "why is a pain reaction in another rat a negative stimuli at all"? Any way you slice it, it seems like at least a rudimentry form of empathy.

Edit : Note that this is a dicussion of empathy only here, proof of altruism as suggested in the article is a very different question.

Answer 2

Even rats are social animals, which depends on their awareness of each other's welfare. This experiment alone wouldn't conclusively prove anything, but it would be further evidence of social empathy, once it's already known that the animal exhibits social behavior. Rats have also been shown capable of understanding that they do think, and that sometimes they can be faced with a problem they might be unable to solve, just like what humans do. Just because they're tiny animals does not preclude such cognition.

If one were to claim that rats forgo eating only out of fear of being shocked as well, even though the shocks are only happening to other rats, then further differential experiments would have to be made to confirm this. Researchers of animal pscyhology are aware how easy it can be to anthromorphize animals, so extra steps are frequently taken to eliminate this possibility. That's the reason why animal pscyhology experiments can be difficult to design.

Answer 3

Probably the smell of electro-fried rodent made it lose it's appetite.