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Comment by dudeinjapan | Hacker News Reader

The setup is transparent plexiglass. I suspect a bit of Clever Hans effect here. The parrot may share its token to appease the researcher (who they've learned controls the food), not the other parrot.

It's quite unfortunate that they didn't test this when both parrots' food holes are open. Nor did the "middleman parrot" appear to share its walnuts back the other way.

Then again, given that these are Ivy League parrots there is a solid chance at least one of them has read Das Kapital (and can repeat it back better than most students!)

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I wasn't aware ETH Zürich was considered the Ivy League!

But all jokes aside I think you should give these professionals a little more credit--they also factored that possibility into their experimental design and included tests for "useless" token transfers [0]. While parrots would often transfer tokens to empty compartments (for when they knew their neighbor was missing and lacked tokens), these same parrots did not when there was a completely empty partition [1]. Further even the article notes they didn't just hand out tokens automatically or willy-nilly, but were more or less willing depending on the bond.

Personally I think the most interesting thing about the study is not that non-mammalian animals have the capacity for altruism or prosocial behaviors, but that Blue Headed Macaws (despite being extremely intelligent as well) were not willing and the difference is that their general populations form smaller (though equally cohesive) flocks compared to AGPs.

EDIT: and the reason why they used tokens vs direct walnut transfer is that these birds were trained in a prior experiment (with an equally interesting premise) [2]

[0] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)... [1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30933-5

Ah misread the article, there was a quote from a Princeton University researcher who was not related.

"Useless tokens"... there's another joke about NFTs in there somewhere.

I thought the same; to actually prove those birds are willing to give away their tokens and loose out on walnuts in the process, they should have been granted the option to trade their tokens themselves. The way the experiment was carried out seems to be based on lots of brittle assumptions…

You might find this TED talk (and the clips of experiments shown during the talk) interesting: https://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_moral_behavior_in_an...

Good link! I'm familiar with Frans de Waal. Perhaps I'm a primate chauvinist, but I'm less skeptical of ascriptions of anthropomorphic social behavior in chimps than in parrots.

Unlike the "altruistic" parrots, chimps are very aware when their neighbor gets a treat and they don't--and they get enraged!

I felt the same way. If they don't share walnuts directly then that's not what they're intending to do. They likely see a local lack of value to the rings, meaning seeing them exchanged satisfies curiousity but perhaps not seen as being socially benevolent (although it might, I don't discount entirely)

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