Proximate mechanisms of reciprocal cooperation in Norway rats

Supervisor: Michael Taborsky

During my diploma thesis, I trained undomesticated wild-type rats (Rattus norvegicus) to provide food to partners in a two-player exchange task, allowing me to study the reciprocal exchange of food.

Norway rats are an ideal model organism to study the economics of reciprocal cooperation. Rats easily learn how to engage in lab paradigms. Importantly, they are highly social animals. Colony members are both related and unrelated and their colony size reaches up to 150 individuals. Rats cooperate with each other, for instance, by sharing food, grooming others or huddling together.

Reciprocal cooperation can involve different decision rules, such as “I help you because you helped me” (direct reciprocity), “I help you because I was helped by someone else” (generalised reciprocity) and “I help you because you helped someone else” (indirect reciprocity). During my thesis, I was interested in the role of reputation in indirect reciprocity. More specifically, I was interested whether rats would be able to strategically invest in their reputation. The results can be found here.

© Manon Schweinfurth