Working dogs cooperate among one another by generalised reciprocity.
Working dogs cooperate among one another by generalised reciprocity.
复制标题
DOI：
10.1038/srep43867
复制
发表时间：
2017-03-06
影响因子：
4.6
通讯作者：
Taborsky M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gfrerer N;Taborsky M
广义互惠合作意味着个人应用“如果有人帮助就帮助任何人”的决策规则。这种机制已被证明可以产生进化上稳定的合作水平，但目前还不清楚这种合作机制在动物中的应用范围有多大。狗（Canisamilis）是高度社会化的动物，具有相当大的认知潜力和区分个体社会伙伴的能力。但是，尽管狗可以解决复杂的问题，但它们可能会使用简单的规则来做出行为决策。在这里，我们展示了经过工具性合作任务训练的狗，在之前接受过狗的帮助后，会更频繁地帮助同种人，以向社会伙伴提供食物。值得注意的是，在这样做的过程中，他们并没有表现出以前帮助过他们的伙伴和完全不熟悉的同种人之间的区别。显然，狗使用表征广义互惠的简单决策规则，尽管它们可能能够使用更复杂的直接互惠决策规则：“帮助那些帮助过你的人”。然而，广义互惠涉及较低的信息处理成本，因此是一种更便宜的合作策略。我们的结果表明，在其他相互合作的动物中，广义互惠可能比直接互惠更普遍地应用。
Cooperation by generalised reciprocity implies that individuals apply the decision rule “help anyone if helped by someone”. This mechanism has been shown to generate evolutionarily stable levels of cooperation, but as yet it is unclear how widely this cooperation mechanism is applied among animals. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are highly social animals with considerable cognitive potential and the ability to differentiate between individual social partners. But although dogs can solve complex problems, they may use simple rules for behavioural decisions. Here we show that dogs trained in an instrumental cooperative task to provide food to a social partner help conspecifics more often after receiving help from a dog before. Remarkably, in so doing they show no distinction between partners that had helped them before and completely unfamiliar conspecifics. Apparently, dogs use the simple decision rule characterizing generalised reciprocity, although they are probably capable of using the more complex decision rule of direct reciprocity: “help someone who has helped you”. However, generalized reciprocity involves lower information processing costs and is therefore a cheaper cooperation strategy. Our results imply that generalised reciprocity might be applied more commonly than direct reciprocity also in other mutually cooperating animals.