Suppression of Social Conflict and Evolutionary Transitions to Cooperation

Abstract

Evolutionary conflict arises at all levels of biological organization and presents a barrier to the evolution of cooperation. This barrier can be overcome by mechanisms that reduce the disparity between the fitness optima of subunits, sometimes called the "battleground" of conflict. An alternative, unstudied possibility is that effort invested in conflict is unprofitable. This possibility has received little attention because most existing models of social conflict assume that fitness depends on the ratio of players' conflict efforts, so that "peaceful" outcomes featuring zero conflict effort are evolutionarily unstable. Here I show that peaceful outcomes are stable where success depends on the difference rather than the ratio of efforts invested in conflict. These difference form models are particularly appropriate to model strategies of suppression or policing. The model suggests that incomplete information and asymmetries in strength can act to eliminate costly conflict within groups, even among unrelated individuals, and thereby facilitate the evolution of cooperation.

Group Size and Social Conflict in Complex Societies

“…Most theoretical works modeling how social and ecological factors influence social conflict either are simple two-player models (Johnstone 2000;Shen and Reeve 2010;Cant 2012) or do not consider the effect of group size (Frank 1995;Foster 2004; but see Reeve and Hölldobler 2007, which modeled within-group conflict in the context of betweengroup competition). Thus, the general relationships among group size, group productivity, and social conflict remain largely unexplored theoretically, and given the mixed empirical evidence of a consistent relationship between group size and social conflict, better predictive models are clearly needed.…”

Models of social evolution: can we do better to predict ‘who helps whom to achieve what’?

“…El Mouden et al [5] b ; Fletcher & Zwick [6]; Fletcher & Doebeli [7]; Gardner et al [8]; Gardner & West [9,10]; Krupp & Taylor [11] c ; Marshall & Rowe [12]; Mathew & Boyd [13]; Nowak & Roch [14]; Ohtsuki et al [15]; Pacheco et al [16,17]; Perrin & Lehmann [18]; Pfeiffer et al [19]; Rankin & Taborsky [20]; Roberts & Sherratt [21]; Roberts [15,22], [23]; Sherratt & Roberts [24]; Van Cleve & Akcay [25]; Van Dyken et al [26]; West et al [27] André [1] d ; Alizon & Taylor [28]; Aviles et al [29]; Cant [30]; Day & Taylor [31] e ; El Mouden et al [5] f ; Frank [32] g ; Hamilton &…”

Longevity suppresses conflict in animal societies

“…0). According to most models of social conflict, the dominant's share, p D , of the contested resource is given by the following function, the contest success function (CSF, [3]): As discussed in detail by Cant [3], CSFs of the form of expressions (2.1a,b) cannot yield unilaterally or mutually peaceful outcomes (in which either x, or y, or both are zero). This is because, if both players had reduced their conflict efforts to zero, any player would gain by investing an infinitesimally small amount of effort, as this would increase its share of the resource from 0.5 to 1.…”

“…They have assumed that effort invested in social conflict reduces the value of the communal resource, e.g. because energy wasted in conflict is lost for offspring production or parental care (reviewed by [3]). However, if conflict takes the form of physical fighting or agonistic interaction, the costs may be in terms of increased mortality rather than reduced fecundity.…”