Are good leaders willing or reluctant to help?

In recent research, the question of whether good leaders in a social group are likely to help their subordinates or on the contrary tend not to help them has been explored.

The study has been directed from the Institute of Neurosciences (IN) of Alicante, attached to the Miguel Hernández University (UMH) in Elche, Alicante, and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), in Spain.

The results of the study indicate that good leaders are more willing to help and that the attitude of subordinates is crucial to encourage this behavior. The work, carried out on rats, shows that social hierarchy is a key modulator of prosocial behaviors, behaviors that benefit others, while gender or the degree of familiarity are factors that do not affect.

Prosocial behaviors are not unique to humans, but are conserved across different species, including rats, given their importance for survival. These altruistic behaviors favor the development of positive social interactions, such as cooperation, which support individual and group well-being.

There are several factors that modulate prosocial behaviors, including familiarity and social status. In relation to the latter, the flexible adaptation of decision making based on the social hierarchy can be a crucial survival strategy. However, little is known about the behavioral correlates that promote choices for the benefit of other members of the community.

“It is especially striking that altruistic behaviors by individuals who occupy the highest positions in the social hierarchy or are dominant are driven by their subordinates, with their approach to leaders and the increase in positive or affiliative vocalizations when they foresaw that these were going. to behave selfishly”, highlights the coordinator of the study, researcher Cristina Márquez Vega.

This multimodal communication behavior by submissive animals indicates their needs, attracts the attention of leaders, and encourages prosocial behaviors by dominant rats more quickly. In addition, scientists have observed that body language is a fundamental feedback that allows leaders to know the effect of their actions on their subordinates.

The study provides a better understanding of the behavioral dynamics that influence the selection of actions by leaders after the perception of socially relevant cues and for social decision making.

“With this work we have evaluated how laboratory rats adapt their decision to help or not help based on the social context to identify how animals incorporate the actions of others in social decision making,” explains Márquez.

To address this question, researchers have used a two-choice task in which rats can provide rewards to a peer in the absence of self-benefit or selfish behavior, and have assessed which conditions promote prosociality by manipulating the social context of rats. animals.

In previous work, Márquez’s team had shown that male rats behave prosocially, providing food to a known conspecific in the absence of self-benefit, and that the foraging behavior displayed by those to be helped is necessary for prosociality to emerge. Now, the researchers have used the same task to figure out what factors promote or hinder prosociality by modulating the familiarity, gender, and social status of the interacting animals.

They hypothesized that pre-choice social interactions could be crucial in increasing the social relevance of recipient individuals’ attempts to reach food, and therefore such behavior could prompt leaders to understand that their choices have an impact on others.

With this objective “first we identify the social conditions in which differences in prosociality can be detected and then we carry out a refined analysis of the observed social interactions”, says Michael Gachomba, first author of the work. “We wanted to understand why there are individuals who help others more, or who do not help others. It was an important question that still had no answer”, says Joan Esteve-Agraz, another of the authors of the work.

Joan Esteve-Agraz, Cristina Márquez and Michael Gachomba, from the research team. (Photo: Institute of Neurosciences / CSIC / UMH)

Thus, they have shown that, as has been observed in non-human primates, dominant male rats are more prosocial, with a faster onset of prosocial actions. “Beyond the description of this effect, we unravel the behavioral correlates that cause it based on the analysis of social interactions,” explains Márquez.

“Interestingly, we have seen that the higher levels of prosociality of the dominant or leaders are a consequence of their submissive partners being better at communicating their needs and, therefore, being able to modify their behavior. This interesting effect highlights the importance of taking into account the bidirectionality of social interactions in decision-making”, adds Márquez.

Gachomba specifies: “Normally we think of dominant subjects as more aggressive, but in this study we describe that this is not the case, but that they also pay more attention to the needs of others.”

In addition, with the identification of the behavioral dynamics involved during the helping process, the study will advance the investigation of how the brain and its circuits interpret the actions of others in social decision-making, a complex process that is affected in different social disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders or antisocial personality disorders.

The study is titled “Multimodal cues displayed by submissive rats promote prosocial choices by dominants”. And it has been published in the academic journal Current Biology. (Source: Pilar Quijada / IN / CSIC / UMH)