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Abstract
Conflict destabilizes social interactions and impedes cooperation at multiple scales of biological organization. Of fundamental interest are the causes of turbulent periods of conflict. We analyze conflict dynamics in an monkey society model system. We develop a technique, Inductive Game Theory, to extract directly from time-series data the decision-making strategies used by individuals and groups. This technique uses Monte Carlo simulation to test alternative causal models of conflict dynamics. We find individuals base their decision to fight on memory of social factors, not on short timescale ecological resource competition. Furthermore, the social assessments on which these decisions are based are triadic (self in relation to another pair of individuals), not pairwise. We show that this triadic decision making causes long conflict cascades and that there is a high population cost of the large fights associated with these cascades. These results suggest that individual agency has been over-emphasized in the social evolution of complex aggregates, and that pair-wise formalisms are inadequate. An appreciation of the empirical foundations of the collective dynamics of conflict is a crucial step towards its effective management.
Highlights
Less is understood about the causes of conflict, and almost nothing is known about the dynamics of multiparty conflict –conflicts that spread to involve more than two individuals to encompass a sizable fraction of a group
To provide solution concepts for games that find uninvadible strategies, rather than to extract from the data directly those strategies individuals are playing [27]. To complement these standard deductive game theoretic approaches, we introduce Inductive Game Theory, in which the strategies used by individuals, and their consequences for social dynamics, are derived computationally from highly resolved timeseries data on competitive processes
One is the implication of each Cðn,mÞ model and its associated strategies for conflict dynamics, including cascade severity. Another is which of the models better reproduces the data, and which of the Cðn,mÞ strategies individuals and subgroups are more likely to be playing in the group
Summary
Aggregates, and societies must overcome the destabilizing consequences of conflict in order to persist [1,2,3,4,5]. Conflict plays a central role in the evolution of social organization. Less is understood about the causes of conflict, and almost nothing is known about the dynamics of multiparty conflict –conflicts that spread to involve more than two individuals to encompass a sizable fraction of a group. Multiparty conflicts are common in many gregarious individual societies [22]. In these systems, it is often difficult to establish why individuals become involved in an ongoing fight or why the fight started
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