Individuals are expected to manage their social relationships to maximize fitness returns. For
example, reports of some mammals and birds offering unsolicited affiliation to distressed
social partners (commonly termed 'consolation') are argued to illustrate convergent evolution
of prosocial traits across divergent taxa. However, most studies cannot discriminate between
consolation and alternative explanations such as self-soothing. Crucially, no study that
controls for key confounds has examined consolation in the wild, where individuals face …