One of my favorite scientific experiments took place in the early 2010s and was published in Science in December 2011. In it, Dr. Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago, worked with other researchers to obverse how rats would respond to another rat being trapped in a cage. They found that the free rats always heard the calls of distress from the caged rats, and figured out how to open the cage for them. In time, they improved their ability to do so.
As part of the same experiment, researchers gave the free rats a hoard of chocolate chips. The rats, astonishingly, always saved some for the caged rats.
I don’t have much to add to this. I just wanted to point out that experiment, because it makes me feel good to think about, and I thought it would make you feel good, too.
I mean — we’re talking about rats here.
Yet I’ve come across plenty of people in my life more than willing to leave someone in a cage if it benefits them, and not only refuse to save any of their resources for someone else, but do whatever they can to take other resources from others.
But of course, I’ve also met a lot of people who do the opposite, who do whatever they can to free others from the cages they’re trapped in, who give them all that they have to give. (Y’all know who you are. I love you.)
Dr. Mason told a reporter, “There is nothing in it for [the rats] except for whatever feeling they get from helping another individual … There is a common misconception that sharing and helping is a cultural occurrence. But this is not a cultural event. It is part of our biological inheritance.”
In other words, helping someone in distress is the natural order of things. That’s not something that has to be taught.
I think this applies to people, too. I don’t think that human beings have to be taught to free trapped people, to give to people who need some help at certain points in their lives.
Anything that is the opposite of that — allowing others to suffer, making others suffer, withholding from others — that is what’s unnatural.