Help Me if You Can

There are things we do every day without thinking about it. We buy food for the whole family. We hold the door open for someone. We make breakfast sandwiches for our children. Some of us play an instrument in an orchestra. Others give blood regularly.

All these activities can be grouped under one heading: We work together and help each other. In other words, our behavior benefits other people, and we often benefit in return. Sometimes, we gain nothing at all from our actions, such as when we give blood.

While it has long been clear that not only humans but also animals cooperate with each other, it has been thought that helping is uniquely human. Helping is a social behavior that does not benefit you but only your partner. There are several ways of helping: You can give your partner important information, you can share food, you can help him or her achieve a goal, and you can comfort him or her. For all that, you need two things: You need to understand what the problem is—what your partner needs and wants. And secondly, you, as the helper, need to be motivated to help (Bräuer, 2015).

Humans, chimps, and dogs

Human children are born helpers. Psychologist Felix Warneken surprised the scientific world in 2006 with his studies on helpful infants. The children in Warneken's study were one and a half years old and could barely walk. Yet they willingly picked up a dropped pencil when an adult reached for it. Or they opened a cupboard door for him when he had his hands full.

And the little ones don't just do this for their parents or siblings. They also like to help strangers (Warneken et al. 2006). So, human children have both the motivation to help and the understanding of what is needed.

Chimpanzees also help each other: Experiments have shown that they open doors for each other and help their group members get the food or tools they need (Melis et al. 2006; Yamamoto et al. 2012). But chimpanzees are less helpful to humans: They will show a human a hidden tool so that the human can get food for them. But they will stop doing so if the human needs a tool to get a reward for himself. So, chimpanzees clearly understand the problem but are sometimes unwilling to help others (Bullinger et al. 2011).

Dogs are the opposite. They are highly motivated to please but often do not understand the problem. So, we developed a test for dogs to show the human's need as clearly as possible. The question was whether the dogs would open a plexiglass door to a room for a human by pressing a button on the floor. In the target room, there was a key that the human wanted.

If the human alerted the dog with words and intense body language, shook the Plexiglas door, held out his hand for the key, or pointed to the key, the dogs helped. They opened the door. The dogs repeated this behavior over and over again, even when they were not directly rewarded for it. They did not open the door if the human obviously did not want the key, for example, if the human was reading a newspaper (Bräuer et al. 2012). Also, other more recent studies show that dogs are motivated to help but have problems understanding the situation (Van Bourg et al. 2020).

Helping in mice

So, children do it, chimpanzees do it (when they feel like it), dogs do it (when they understand the problem)—but according to a brand-new study, mice also help each other (Sun et al. 2025).

Subjects encountered conspecifics that were either dead, unconscious, or motionless. If they were familiar, the animals took care of them: They approached, sniffed the motionless animal, and licked its fur. The subjects seemed to concentrate on the face and throat, licking the partner's eye or biting its mouth. In more than half of the trials, the helpers even pulled the tongue out of the unconscious partner's mouth, effectively widening the airway. And if there was an object in the victim's mouth, the helping mouse usually removed it.

This behavior was actually helpful: Mice under anesthesia who were cared for in this way actually regained consciousness more quickly than mice without such help. Importantly, as soon as the animals recovered, the helpers stopped caring for them. In other words, the mice only helped for as long as was necessary.

So, these little rodents are obviously motivated to help. Do they really understand the problem of their unconscious conspecific and try to solve it? This is unlikely. The authors suggest that helping unresponsive group members may be an innate behavior in mice.

But whether or not the helping mice understand what they are doing, helping is clearly not unique to humans and is more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously thought.