Ontogenetic & evolutionary roots of social competence and their implications for wellbeing

Like many other animals, humans are social beings and have a great desire to socialise, exemplified in the Covid-19 pandemic. Being alone with limited social connections can impact our mental and physical health. At the same time, interacting with others can cause troubles.

From early on, we thus need to learn how to navigate through a complex social environment. One essential foundational skill to interact adequately with others is reciprocity, i.e., interacting and cooperating with nice and avoiding exploitative partners. Given the important role social competence plays in our life, it is surprising that it is unclear how this has emerged and can be maintained.

The goal of this project is to elucidate the origins of social competence and its impact on wellbeing. Recent advances based on my work have turned rats into an ideal study subject because they have been shown to be highly social, showing a range of behavioural and cognitive social skills. In addition, working with rats allows us to manipulate experimentally their social environment and, due to their short life span, we can study the trajectory of their social skills throughout their entire lifetime.

In this project, we will follow 160 rats through their life. We will observe their undisturbed interactions and will present them with several non-invasive tasks to assess when they develop specific social skills independently or in a set, like remembering conspecifics, showing emotional contagion, consoling others, sharing food, helping others and using information from others.

We will also test when they start to develop reciprocity. Comparing the emergence of reciprocity to that of the trajectory of social skills will help us to understand whether reciprocity is foundational to social competence. We predict that social skills are not predetermined but rather are shaped by the social environment as they are learned and practised.

To test this, we plan to keep some rats in small groups of 4 individuals, i.e., the common group size for laboratory rats, and others in large groups of 16, i.e., the typical size of subgroups in the wild. We predict that rats from small groups will develop social skills later than rats from large groups, but not before reciprocity.

Every year, millions of rats are used for research. Previous research has found that physical enrichment is important for their well-being. However, we understand very little about their social needs, especially whether they might benefit from living in larger groups.

Large groups might enable the individuals to create their own social sub-group, where they can choose their preferred partners and avoid aggressive partners. Therefore, we will investigate whether rats in larger groups are more socially competent and show less aggression and more cooperation compared to those in smaller groups. In addition, we will assess their mood and predict that, if rats benefit from living in a large group, they will show more positive emotions than those from a small group.

Finally, we will observe whether this enhanced well-being in large groups translates into an increased life span, which would speak in favour of housing rats in larger groups.

In summary, this project will enable us to create new knowledge about how social animals learn to navigate through their social environment and how the underlying psychological mechanisms can evolve. Thus, this project will contribute to the hotly-debated topic of how social competence and prosociality more generally can evolve - a question that Darwin already struggled with and for which we now have the right tools to start to answer.

This project will also shed light on the impact of social competence on wellbeing with the potential to improve the lives of many rats and other social lab animals by simply keeping them in larger groups and thereby also increasing scientific validity.