Carrion Crows and Azure-Winged Magpies Show No Prosocial Tendencies When Tested in a Token Transfer Paradigm

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Sharing your possessions or donating them to others, as well as helping others, can be summarized under the term, “prosocial behavior”. Recently, researchers have become interested in whether, and in which situations, animals help and share. In this study, we trained carrion crows and azure-winged magpies—two bird species that have previously been found to donate food to their group members—to exchange objects, called “tokens”, with an experimenter for food. We then tested whether the birds would provide these tokens to their group members when they themselves did not have access to the experimenter, but their group members did. We found, however, that there were very few attempted and/or successful token transfers between the birds, suggesting that they were not prosocial in this situation. We argue that the carrion crows and azure-winged magpies might not have fully understood the value of the tokens, either as placeholders for food or as “currency” with which food could be obtained. This limited understanding might have prevented them from exhibiting prosocial behavior in the current study. Therefore, we advocate the use of simpler and more naturalistic paradigms to study prosocial behaviors, such as providing food or resources to others, in a broader range of species. ABSTRACT: To study the evolution of humans’ cooperative nature, researchers have recently sought comparisons with other species. Studies investigating corvids, for example, showed that carrion crows and azure-winged magpies delivered food to group members when tested in naturalistic or simple experimental paradigms. Here, we investigated whether we could replicate these positive findings when testing the same two species in a token transfer paradigm. After training the birds to exchange tokens with an experimenter for food rewards, we tested whether they would also transfer tokens to other birds, when they did not have the opportunity to exchange the tokens themselves. To control for the effects of motivation, and of social or stimulus enhancement, we tested each individual in three additional control conditions. We witnessed very few attempts and/or successful token transfers, and those few instances did not occur more frequently in the test condition than in the controls, which would suggest that the birds lack prosocial tendencies. Alternatively, we propose that this absence of prosociality may stem from the artificial nature and cognitive complexity of the token transfer task. Consequently, our findings highlight the strong impact of methodology on animals’ capability to exhibit prosocial tendencies and stress the importance of comparing multiple experimental paradigms.