To a deplorable few, the Golden Rule may be, “Have all your toilets gold-plated”. But it’s reassuring to know that even parrots understand its real meaning. There is something fundamentally right about helping others out.
It’s been known for a few years that some other higher primates (especially orangutans) will voluntarily help others, especially if they think they’ll get something in return, and that doesn’t seem too surprising. But a nicely conceived test of the very intelligent African gray parrot shows that it willfully helps other parrots out of what appears to be empathy when presented with the opportunity. Not in dangerous situations or anything like that (as in food sharing to avoid starvation in vampire bats), but just to help the other parrot be a little happier.
The study, by Désirée Brucks and Auguste M.P. von Bayern of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, appears in the January 9 issue of Current Biology. They tell us that it is the “first proof of instrumental helping in a non-mammalian species”.
The parrots easily learned that they could exchange a token with a human for a treat. But when one parrot saw another unable to get a treat and often whimpering because it had no tokens, it would carry a token over to the opening between their enclosures and do a beak-to-beak handoff (a beakoff?) and then happily watch the other parrot get its treat.
The test is very well-explained in this crisp video:
The parrots don’t need to learn this behavior or to calculate that there will be a reward. About 7/8 of the time they do it on the first try, and they’re especially inclined to do it if the parrots know each other or are related. With all the controls that were done, it’s pretty clear that the birds understand what they’re doing.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of a commercial for a local restaurant I used to see when I was a kid. You’ll surely remember it too, if you grew up around any Eat N Parks. I had sort of forgotten about it, but I still think it’s one of the best ever:
We have an instinct to help others, because it just makes us happy.
The evolutionary reasons for altruistic behavior, voluntary and involuntary, are certainly debated, but many entire books have been written about it, so it seems that’s more appropriate for a degree than a diary. But the innate desire to help others can have as much pull as the desire to eat or reproduce, so it must have some pretty high value.
You certainly need to have some brain power to assess that your friend is in need and also figure out a way to help. And the African gray parrot is a very smart bird indeed. This has been established in other tests in which these parrots outperform even human children:
The classic Piagetian test works like this: Show a child two identical glasses of juice and ask which he or she wants. The child will giggle and say the amounts are the same. Then pour the juice into separate containers—one tall and thin, the other short and squat—and again ask the child to choose. Until about age 6, children typically choose the taller container, believing it now holds more.
Griffin [the parrot], by comparison, wasn't thrown—and was even smart enough to see through subsequent tests designed to fool him—in experiments conducted by Irene Pepperberg, a research associate in Harvard's Psychology Department, and Francesca Cornero '19.
Here is one of those subsequent tests:
So think of being helpful as a sign of an advanced mind!
You may have noticed in the first video that another type of bird, the blue-headed macaw, could also learn to give tokens for treats but wasn’t interested in helping its friends. And that illustrates one more thing we all know.
Some birds are just jerks.