Fair-minded birds
New research conducted at Harvard demonstrates sharing behavior in African grey parrots. “I think people usually think of the natural world as being akin to Tennyson’s ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw,’ ” said Irene Pepperberg, a psychology researcher and co-author of the study. “But this type of sharing isn’t unheard of in the wild. In a mated pair, for example, birds often share food or engage in reciprocal grooming.” What makes the study noteworthy, Pepperberg said, is that earlier work that produced similar findings in apes did so only under highly specific conditions. The new work, she said, suggests that African greys such as Griffin, the study subject, not only can grasp the concept of sharing, but also are capable of connecting their actions in the near-term to those of their human partners in the future. “What was important was that in the initial experiment, Griffin wasn’t simply copycatting what the student was...