Empathy is a useful base emotion. It’s one of the mental skill sets that set mammals apart from other animals (though birds also seem to have something very similar). Ants etc can coordinate, but it’s hard coded. Empathy allows for the dynamic adjustments that allow for cooperative mammals groups.
Humans are just particularly good at it, since we likely used it as a hunting method. Endurance hunting requires the ability to track, if you lose contact with the prey. Empathy allows a hunter to get into the head of the prey, and so predict their actions.
Rats could have complex logical planning thoughts on enlightened self interest. Humans generally don’t, however. It’s a lot easier to have a drive to take low effort actions for a large gain to another. Combine that with a basic understanding of reciprocal payoff and you have basic empathy.
I’d be interested to see an experiment into spite. Tweak the experiment so that 1 rat believes the other chose not to let it out, when given the option. Will it then help when the situation reverses? Or will it spite the other rat and leave them trapped?
Empathy is a useful base emotion. It’s one of the mental skill sets that set mammals apart from other animals (though birds also seem to have something very similar). Ants etc can coordinate, but it’s hard coded. Empathy allows for the dynamic adjustments that allow for cooperative mammals groups.
Humans are just particularly good at it, since we likely used it as a hunting method. Endurance hunting requires the ability to track, if you lose contact with the prey. Empathy allows a hunter to get into the head of the prey, and so predict their actions.
Rats could have complex logical planning thoughts on enlightened self interest. Humans generally don’t, however. It’s a lot easier to have a drive to take low effort actions for a large gain to another. Combine that with a basic understanding of reciprocal payoff and you have basic empathy.
I’d be interested to see an experiment into spite. Tweak the experiment so that 1 rat believes the other chose not to let it out, when given the option. Will it then help when the situation reverses? Or will it spite the other rat and leave them trapped?