How animals collaborate: Underlying proximate mechanisms

Abstract

Collaboration or social interactions in which two or more individuals coordinate their behavior to produce outcomes from which both individuals benefit are common in nature. Individuals from many species hunt together, defend their territory, and form coalitions in intragroup competition. However, we still know very little about the proximate mechanisms underlying these behaviors. Recent theories of human cognitive evolution have emphasized the role collaboration may have played in the selection of socio-cognitive skills. It has been argued that the capacity to form shared goals and joint intentions with others, is what allows humans to collaborate so flexibly and efficiently. Although there is no evidence that nonhuman animals are capable of shared intentionality, there is conceivably a wide range of proximate mechanisms that support forms of, potentially flexible, collaboration in other species. We review the experimental literature with the aim of evaluating what we know about how other species achieve collaboration; with a particular focus on chimpanzees. We structure the review with a new categorization of collaborative behavior that focuses on whether individuals intentionally coordinate actions with others. We conclude that for a wider comparative perspective we need more data from other species but the findings so far suggest that chimpanzees, and possibly other great apes, are capable of understanding the causal role of a partner in collaboration.

Intergroup conflict: origins, dynamics and consequences across taxa

“…Accordingly, groups need to ensure that (enough of) their members participate-groups need to overcome problems of cooperation that emerge from individual temptations to free-ride on others' cooperative efforts and avoid the opportunity costs and injuries associated with joining intergroup conflict [69]. Relatedly, groups sometimes face problems of coordination [70][71][72], for example, when they need to calibrate how much effort each individual expends [50,67] or when they need to decide when to intrude into enemy territory and when to 'lay low' [68,73] (further see §3b).…”

Evidence that bottlenose dolphins can communicate with vocal signals to solve a cooperative task

“…Cooperation experiments have traditionally been used to explore the cognition underlying coordination towards a shared goal [10][11][12]. The cooperative rope pulling paradigm widely used in these studies requires two animals to coordinate their efforts by each pulling a rope in the same direction in order to gain a food reward [13].…”

“…The fact that this experimental design requires tight behavioural synchronization eliminates the possibility that success could be achieved from mechanisms such as response facilitation or responding to some environmental cue [14]. Thus, consistent success during this task is suggestive of active coordination [12]. Using this experimental design, the current study explored how two dolphin dyads (a male dyad and a female dyad) actively used vocal signals during trials that increased in task difficulty, ranging from partners being sent together, to progressive delays between partners, to partners being unable to see one another when they pressed their buttons.…”

Cooperating elephants mitigate competition until the stakes get too high

“…She would often stand close to SMW, who had a higher affiliation with a more dominant male elephant than she did; this allowed her to gain access to the rope over SMW or to share the food reward with him when the dominant pulled the other end of the rope. These behaviors support the idea that elephants may understand relationships between other elephants and use this information to maximize the benefits of cooperation [ 63 , 64 ].…”