Winning, losing, and reaching out

Abstract

Here, we argue that behavioral ecologists can do even more than we have done to facilitate new, interdisciplinary collaborations. Our argument is a general one, but we focus on how to do this with winner and loser effects. We develop a new, general model of winner and loser effects as the outcome of flexible decisions about how much to invest in competition and discuss the model’s implications for overall levels of conflict within a species. Finally, we argue that winner and loser effects is a topic ripe for fostering collaborations with researchers in cultural anthropology and sports psychology. We would be rude and remiss if we did not start off with the appropriate salutation on an occasion such as this: Happy 25th anniversary, dear Behavioral Ecology! Perhaps it sounds overly emotional, but both of us love being behavioral ecologists, and we think Behavioral Ecology is a wonderful representative of our cherished discipline. The field of behavioral ecology, which seeks no less than to understand how ecology sets the stage on which natural selection acts on behavior, has grown by leaps and bounds since this journal was initiated. One of the many ways this has happened is by behavioral ecologists reaching out to those in related, and sometimes seemingly unrelated, disciplines—cognitive psychology, biological anthropology, mathematics, economics, and political science, to name just a few—and fostering collaborations, with the long-term goal of a deeper understanding of the roots of behavior. Not surprisingly, when such links are first established, each side can be reluctant to take the perspective of the other; but in time, openminded scientists, after heated discussions, sort through all that. We applaud this aggressive, interdisciplinary, collaborative approach and we try to take it ourselves—indeed, it is one of the many reasons we are behavioral ecologists. In this article, we simply want to make the case that behavioral ecologists can, and should, do even more to facilitate new, interdisciplinary collaborations. Our argument is a general one, but as a case in point, we focus on the winner and loser effects that behavioral ecologists have been studying from both proximate and ultimate perspectives, expand this work by developing a new, general model of winner and loser effects and their implications and argue that this topic is ripe for fostering collaborations with researchers in cultural anthropology and sports psychology. Winner and Loser e ffects and d ominance Hierarc H ies