The expression “prosocial behavior” indicates all those actions performed for the benefit not of the individual but of society, in fact; altruistic actions that do not bring immediate advantages to those who perform them: for example, speaking of us humans, try to save the life of a person in cardiac arrest.
There are examples of prosocial behavior also in some animals: dolphins, chimpanzees and elephants, for example, have been observed several times to carry out “first aid” operations on their fellow men. A new study published on Scienceaccompanied by a Videos that you can see belowadds a name to the list of prosocial species: The mice, which when they are faced with a for life companion do everything to revive him.
“Soon, that mouse is bad!”. Most of the prosocial behaviors that we observed in animals occurred in nature, but the University of South California team that led the study decided to test the mice in a laboratory environmentso that you can study them more effectively and go in search of Biochemical bases of behavior. Study subjects were a group of mice, some of which are anesthetized so as to be unconscious and apparently in danger of life.
The other mice, the conscious ones, were left free to interact with their companions, and were filmed. The results suggest that Mice have a “protocol” when they are faced with a specimen in difficulty: first it annus and “pampering” it, and when they realize that there is no answer they pass to bite him and even a Take his tongue out of his throat to prevent him from suffocating.
Effective emergency room. These first aid actions occur only when one of the two mice is unconscious: a simply sleeping mouse does not generate the same reaction. Not only that: The more the mice knew each other, the more the rescuer committed himself in resuscitation. The observations, however, tells us that the behaviors are effective: when unconscious mice has been proud to force Object in the throatthe Removal operations On the part of the companions they worked in the80% of cases.
Survival and cohesion. The study is part of a wider job, which has also produced other searches always published on Science: here is the “container” that collects all the studies, including one that identifies the neuronal mechanism that triggers these behaviors. According to the authors, these works show that social animals have an innate tendency to assist their companions if they see them in difficulty, a behavior that promotes not only the survival of the group, but also its cohesion.
