Abstract
Groups of social organisms in nature are resilient systems that can overcome unpredicted threats by helping its members. These social organisms are assumed to behave both autonomously and cooperatively as individuals, the helper, the helped and other part of a group depending on the context such as emergencies. However, the structure and function of these resilient actions, such as how helpers help colleagues and how the helper’s action is effective at multiple subsystem scales remain unclear. Here we investigated the behaviour of organised and efficient small human groups in a ballgame defence, and identified three principles of hierarchical resilient help when under attack. First, at a present high emergency level, the helper simply switched the local roles in the attacked subsystem with the helped. Second, at an intermediate emergency level, the helpers effectively acted in overlapping subsystems. Third, for the most critical emergency, the helpers globally switched the action on the overall system. These resilient actions to the benefit of the system were assumed to be observed in only humans, which help colleagues at flexibly switched and overlapped hierarchical subsystem. We suggest that these multi-layered helping behaviours can help to understand resilient cooperation in social organisms and human groups.
Highlights
Groups of social organisms in nature are resilient systems that can overcome unpredicted threats by helping its members
We show the resilient helping behaviour in heterogeneous groups at multiple subsystem scales against intended attacks by observing sophisticated teams engaged in basketball game (Fig. 1a,b)
Degrees of threat were explained as competitive inter-agent distance in heterogeneous field with static spatial- and dynamical predictive-specificity (Video S1)
Summary
Groups of social organisms in nature are resilient systems that can overcome unpredicted threats by helping its members. In a well-organised system, agents should alternately or simultaneously behave as autonomous individuals, help or are helped in cooperative dyad and work dependently as part of the whole These autonomous and dependent multi-agents in role-sharing[27] to jointly act[28] at appropriate subsystem scales (from the individual to the overall system) are necessary to solve problems based on hierarchical goal as an overall system; in nature, these joint actions remain unclear. The structure and function of the resilient action, such as how helpers help colleagues, and how the helper’s action can be effective at multiple subsystem scales, remain unclear Understanding these resilient helping in nature enables us to identify how groups of social organisms adapt to and survive (or manage the risk) inherent in confronting enemies or unpredicted crises. We analysed defensive subsystem coping behaviour with ‘screens’ as intended competitor’s subgroup attack, which is used to disrupt defensive players by blocking them
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