GROUP BEHAVIOR 155 



Essentially the same sort of experiment was tried 

 with isolated and paired Australian parrakeets, which 

 are commonly called love birds. (11) Rather naively, 

 perhaps, I thought that since these birds so readily 

 pair off, perhaps two might learn to run a simple 

 maze more rapidly than a single individual would. 

 This turned out to be entirely a mistaken idea. I 

 shall spare you the details concerning this maze; it 

 was adequate in size, so that two birds could pass 

 through practically abreast. Almost all the ninety- 

 odd birds that were tested learned easily to run the 

 maze and normally reduced their time per trial from 

 about two minutes to a few seconds, after six or 

 seven days of training. Errors also were reduced, and 

 several of the birds were trained so that they ran 

 the maze day after day with no errors at all. 



The selected summarizing graphs (Figures 29 and 

 30) will outline the results obtained. It made no dif- 

 ference whether the birds were caged in pairs or 

 separately; if placed alone in the maze the perform- 

 ance was similar. If, however, two birds were put 

 together in the maze, the speed was reduced and 

 errors increased as compared with the scores made 

 by isolated parrakeets. It made no difference whether 

 two males, two females or a male and a female were 

 trained in the maze together; there was always in- 

 terference. The tendency was for the more rapid 



