原创《动物们有同情心吗》：本论文可用于同情心论文范文参考下载，同情心相关论文写作参考研究。
Throughout her career as a neurobiologist1, Peggy Mason has been told over and over that the rats she experiments on are not capable of empathy. Only humans and other primates2 can understand the emotions of another. Most other animals can’t, and certainly not beady-eyed3 rats.
But what she was witnessing in the lab was telling her something very different. In experiments, Mason and her colleagues at the University of Chicago were finding that when one rat was placed near another jailed rat, the free rat would open the hatch4 for a rescue—something it wouldn’t do for a toy rat. What’s more, when given the choice between saving a fellow rat and some delicious chocolate, the free rat would open both cells and then share.
The study, published in Science in 2011, was a breakthrough. If rats were capable of basic forms of empathy, then perhaps empathy was common—or even universal—among mammals5. Studying animal empathy could give us insight into how human empathy evolved6.
But almost immediately, Mason’s results met intense skepticism7.
Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist, argued that Mason was simply projecting humanlike feelings and emotions onto these rat “rescues”—a tendency known as anthropomorphism.8
“We don’t have evidence that there is an internal first-person experience that leads the animal to do it,” Kacelnik tells me. “Do they experience any emotion when helping a partner? It may as well be, but we don’t know.”
In a response to Mason’s study, Kacelnik and his colleagues wrote that tiny ants can also appear as if they are “rescuing” other ants in some situations. But ants are nearly brainless, and few consider them capable of empathy.
Alan Silberberg, a psychologist at American University, also wondered if Mason was inferring too much from the data.9 In his view, the free rat opened the cage for selfish reasons： It liked playing with the other rat. He published a paper replicating Mason’s design, but with a twist.10 He showed when the rats couldn’t play with each other after the trap opened, the free rat wasn’t as interested in conducting the jailbreak11.
These criticisms don’t mean Mason’s findings are incorrect. But they do illustrate a core difficulty in studying animal empathy： While it’s easy to observe animal behavior, it’s near impossible to confirm the motivations behind that behavior.
The quest to understand animal empathy has been long and fraught, but it isn’t trivial.12 If animals can indeed feel emotions like our own, the revelation may one day lead to treatments for conditions where social bonding is difficult—like in autism—or is nonexistent, like in sociopathy.13
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