Contrafreeloading

In a set of lab experiments involving rats, the rodents were taught to press a lever to get a reward, usually food. Once the rats had learnt this technique, a cup of the same food was placed in a cup inside the cage. The cup in the food was there for the taking: unlike the press-lever-for-food mechanism, it didn’t require any action by the rats.

This is where things get strange: even after the rats had discovered both ways of getting food (by working on the lever and by doing nothing), the majority of rats preferred to “earn” their food by pressing the lever! And this just didn’t happen with rats. Fish, birds and monkeys behaved the same way preferring to “work” to get their food.

Maybe the preference to work is something that is hard wired into all species for survival reasons. I mean, in nature, one can’t get food for nothing. And a species that expects to get food without effort will go extinct soon enough.

We humans behave the same way. Even though people curse their workload, most of them feel begin to feel uncomfortable during prolonged periods of no work. That’s because people know that one of two things will happen sooner rather than later at such a workplace: either you’ll be assigned work or you’ll get laid off.

This tendency to not freeload, even when it’s an option, is called “contrafreeloading”.

But there’s one animal that does freeload given the chance, as in the lab experiment. Yes, it’s the cat. And the cat is also quite happy to lap up affection without ever feeling the need to reciprocate. So it looks like the contrafeedloading gene isn’t there in cats.

Comments

  1. KumarJanuary 2, 2011 at 10:54 AM

    Humans may also have contra-freeloading gene, if not with respect to food, definitely with respect to the way of making money. Others may work very hard for some people, while they themselves may relax and in the end enjoy the fruits of others' labor. I suppose this subject is in the domain of economics and not in gastronomic!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more