Cooperation beyond the dyad: on simple models and a complex society

Connor, Richard C.

doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0150

Cited by 90 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 82 publications

(159 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…First, the behaviour of an individual may be conditional on the behaviour of its social partner(s), as occurs, for instance, in multimove games such as the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game (Trivers 1971;Axelrod & Hamilton 1981;Leimar 1997), the Bargaining game (Binmore et al 1997;McNamara 1999) or the Foraging game detailed in §7 (a variety of game-theoretic concepts are also presented in various contribution to this volume, see Connor 2010;Leimar & Hammerstein 2010). This type of 'strategic conditionality' is implicitly taken into account in the model discussed above.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How life history and demography promote or inhibit the evolution of helping behaviours

Lehmann

Rousset

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

227

275

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In natural populations, dispersal tends to be limited so that individuals are in local competition with their neighbours. As a consequence, most behaviours tend to have a social component, e.g. they can be selfish, spiteful, cooperative or altruistic as usually considered in social evolutionary theory. How social behaviours translate into fitness costs and benefits depends considerably on life-history features, as well as on local demographic and ecological conditions. Over the last four decades, evolutionists have been able to explore many of the consequences of these factors for the evolution of social behaviours. In this paper, we first recall the main theoretical concepts required to understand social evolution. We then discuss how life history, demography and ecology promote or inhibit the evolution of helping behaviours, but the arguments developed for helping can be extended to essentially any social trait. The analysis suggests that, on a theoretical level, it is possible to contrast three critical benefit-to-cost ratios beyond which costly helping is selected for (three quantitative rules for the evolution of altruism). But comparison between theoretical results and empirical data has always been difficult in the literature, partly because of the perennial question of the scale at which relatedness should be measured under localized dispersal. We then provide three answers to this question.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How life history and demography promote or inhibit the evolution of helping behaviours

Lehmann

Rousset

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

227

275

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In particular, in many social situations, the variance in a behavioural trait is important in determining how the mean value of the trait will evolve. This can occur for a range of reasons, including (i) high variation means that it is worth taking a chance that a partner is more cooperative than the mean; (ii) variation promotes individuals to learn about one another, leading to negotiation through mutual reciprocity or other forms of contingent behaviour that can produce cooperative behaviour; (iii) high variation means that it may be worth breaking off the interaction with an uncooperative partners in order to find a better partner, so putting pressure on the current partner to be cooperative; (iv) high variation means that it may be worth paying observation costs to find out about a partner, so that individuals are observed, thus putting pressure on them to be cooperative in order to establish a good reputation (see Connor 2010;Leimar & Hammerstein 2010 for detailed analyses of game-theoretic concepts).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Variation and the response to variation as a basis for successful cooperation

McNamara

Leimar

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

102

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In applying game theory to problems in biology, differences between individuals are often ignored. In particular, when analysing the evolution of cooperation it is often implicitly assumed that ignoring variation will produce predictions that approximate the solution when differences are included. This need not be true. As we demonstrate, differences are not innocuous noise, but can fundamentally change the nature of a game. Even small amounts of variability can stabilize cooperation by, for example, maintaining the need to deal with cheaters. Differences promote the need to learn about others in an interaction, leading to contingent behaviour that can reduce conflict, and to negotiated outcomes that may or may not be more cooperative than unconditional actions. Once there are mechanisms such as mutation and environmental influences that maintain variation within populations, whether cooperation evolves may depend on the variation in the cooperativeness trait. Variation means that it may be worth taking a chance that a partner is cooperative by being cooperative. When there are markets, so that individuals can break off interactions to seek a better partner, variation promotes choosiness and hence penalizes those uncooperative individuals, who are rejected. Variation promotes the need to monitor the previous behaviour of others, and once this social sensitivity exists, the need to maintain a good reputation can promote cooperation.

show abstract

“…they repay the caring male) when acting as helpers in his next breeding attempt. In this context, the raising of extra-pair offspring can be regarded as a form of pseudo-reciprocity, defined as a cooperative behaviour that enhances the probability that its beneficiaries (here, the extra-pair offspring) will later behave in self-serving ways that benefit the actor (here, the caring male) as a side-effect [22]. The results are affected by parameter settings as follows.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

When should cuckolded males care for extra-pair offspring?

Liedtke¹,

Fromhage

2012

Proc. R. Soc. B.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In socially monogamous species with bi-parental care, males suffer reduced reproductive success if their mate engages in extra-pair copulations (EPCs). One might therefore expect that males should refuse to care for a brood if they can detect that an EPC has occurred. Here, we use a game-theory model to study male brood care in the face of EPCs in a cooperatively breeding species in which offspring help to raise their (half-) siblings in their parents' next breeding attempt. We show that under certain conditions males are selected to care even for broods completely unrelated to themselves. This counterintuitive result arises through a form of pseudo-reciprocity, whereby surviving extra-pair offspring, when helping to rear their younger half-siblings, can more than compensate for the cost incurred by the male that raised them. We argue that similar effects may not be limited to cooperative breeders, but may arise in various contexts in which cooperation between (half-) siblings occurs.

show abstract

Cooperation beyond the dyad: on simple models and a complex society

Cited by 90 publications

References 82 publications

How life history and demography promote or inhibit the evolution of helping behaviours

How life history and demography promote or inhibit the evolution of helping behaviours

Variation and the response to variation as a basis for successful cooperation

When should cuckolded males care for extra-pair offspring?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About