Forms Of Cooperative Behavior Research Articles

Managing risk, changing aspirations and household dynamics: Implications for wellbeing and adaptation in semi-arid Africa and India

Abstract Semi-arid regions across Africa and Asia are characterized by rapidly changing biophysical regimes, structural vulnerabilities, and increasing livelihood precarity. Gender, class, and caste/ethnic identities and relationships, and the specific social, economic and political power, roles and responsibilities they entail, shape the choices and decisions open to individuals and households in managing the risks they face. Unpacking the multiple, intersecting inequalities confronting rural populations in these climate hotspots is therefore vital to understand how risk can be managed in a way that supports effective, inclusive, and sustainable local adaptation. Drawing on empirical evidence from six countries, generated through a mixed methods approach, we examine how changes in household dynamics, structure, and aspirations, shape risk management with implications for household well-being, adaptive capacity, and ultimately sustainable development. The ability of individuals within households, differentiated by age, marital status, or education, to manipulate the very structure of the household and the material and social resources it offers, differentiates risk management strategies such as livelihood diversification, migration, changing agricultural practices and leveraging social support. Our evidence suggests that while greater risks can drive conflictive behavior within households, with women often reporting lower subjective wellbeing, new forms of cooperative behavior are also emerging, especially in peri-urban spaces. Through this study, we identify entry points into enabling sustainable and inclusive adaptation behavior, emphasizing that interventions should work for both women and men by challenging inequitable social and gender norms and renegotiating the domains of work and cooperation to maintain overall household wellbeing.

Is sentinel behaviour safe? An experimental investigation

Sentinel behaviour, where individuals take turns to watch for danger and give alarm calls to approaching predators, has been observed in a number of animal societies. However, the evolutionary causes of this behaviour remain unclear. There are two main, competing hypotheses regarding the evolution of sentinel behaviour. The first hypothesis is that it is a cooperative behaviour, where group members benefit from the detection of danger but share the workload of acting as a sentinel. The second is that it is a safe, selfish behaviour. Under the second hypothesis, once an individual is satiated, being a sentinel is safer because sentinels can detect threats more readily and can therefore escape from predators faster. We examined whether sentinels are safer than foragers in a wild, free-living cooperative bird (the pied babbler, Turdoides bicolor) with a well-described sentinel system. We found that sentinel behaviour was costly because (1) sentinels were targeted by predators more often, (2) they were further from cover than foragers, and (3) they took longer to reach the safety of cover following a predator alarm. These results suggest that individuals do not become sentinels because it is safer. This is the first study to demonstrate that sentinels are at greater risk of predator attack than foraging group members and suggests sentinel activity may have evolved as a form of cooperative behaviour.

Identifying teaching in wild animals

After a long period of neglect, the study of teaching in nonhuman animals is beginning to take a more prominent role in research on social learning. Unlike other forms of social learning, teaching requires knowledgeable individuals to play an active role in facilitating learning by the naive. Casting aside anthropocentric requirements for cognitive mechanisms assumed to underpin teaching in our own species, researchers are now beginning to discover evidence for teaching across a wide range of taxa. Nevertheless, unequivocal evidence for teaching remains scarce, with convincing experimental data limited to meerkats, pied babblers, and tandem-running ants. In this review, our aim is to stimulate further research in different species and contexts by providing conceptual and methodological guidelines for identifying teaching, with a focus on natural populations. We begin by highlighting the fact that teaching is a form of cooperative behavior that functions to promote learning in others and show that consideration of these key characteristics is critical in helping to identify suitable targets for future research. We then go on to discuss potential observational, experimental, and statistical techniques that may assist researchers in providing evidence that the criteria that make up the accepted operational definition of teaching have been met. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://lb.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

A new approach to analyzing patterns of collaboration in co-authorship networks: mesoscopic analysis and interpretation

This paper focuses on methods to study patterns of collaboration in co-authorship networks at the mesoscopic level. We combine qualitative methods (participant interviews) with quantitative methods (network analysis) and demonstrate the application and value of our approach in a case study comparing three research fields in chemistry. A mesoscopic level of analysis means that in addition to the basic analytic unit of the individual researcher as node in a co-author network, we base our analysis on the observed modular structure of co-author networks. We interpret the clustering of authors into groups as bibliometric footprints of the basic collective units of knowledge production in a research specialty. We find two types of coauthor-linking patterns between author clusters that we interpret as representing two different forms of cooperative behavior, transfer-type connections due to career migrations or one-off services rendered, and stronger, dedicated inter-group collaboration. Hence the generic coauthor network of a research specialty can be understood as the overlay of two distinct types of cooperative networks between groups of authors publishing in a research specialty. We show how our analytic approach exposes field specific differences in the social organization of research.

A spatial model of the evolution of quorum sensing regulating bacteriocin production

Like any form of cooperative behavior, quorum sensing (QS) in bacteria is potentially vulnerable to cheating, the occurrence of individuals that contribute less but still profit from the benefits provided by others. In this paper, we explore the evolutionary stability of QS as a regulatory mechanism of antibiotics production in a spatially structured population, using cellular automaton (CA) modeling. QSg is supposed to regulate the excretion of a bacteriocin (anticompetitor toxin) in a population of bacteria polymorphic for the ability to produce and to be immune to the bacteriocin. Both the social interactions resulting from QS and the competitive interactions resulting from the bacteriocin excretion are supposed to be only effective at the local scale, that is, restricted to the immediately neighboring cells. This implies a rather diffuse kind of group selection. The CA model is contrasted to a model assuming no spatial structure but with otherwise identical assumptions. Our analysis predicts that QS as a regulatory mechanism of bacteriocin excretion is evolutionarily unstable when the competitive interactions between bacteriocin-producing, resistant, and sensitive strains only involve closely related strains which can share the signaling and responding genes involved in QS. However, when the competition is between unrelated strains and the QS alleles can only be carried by the bacteriocin-producing strains, stable QS may evolve provided its costs are small and the critical quorum threshold is neither too low nor too high.

The Law and Economics of Survivor

In recent years, the ubiquitous body of literature falling under the general header of has come under fire. Drawing upon economics and experimental psychology, a body of literature has emerged in which legal scholars and economists operationalize formal games under laboratory conditions, and then compare the resulting play against rational choice predictions. Because the experiments often fail to unfold in the manner predicted by formal theory, scholars have relied upon these studies to challenge both the underlying assumptions of rational choice and rational choice prescriptions for law and public policy. Rational choice scholars have responded by arguing that rationality is necessarily bounded, that the empirical studies must account for the costs of acquiring information, and that rationality is not inconsistent with attaching a consumption value to certain forms of cooperative behavior. Most importantly, theorists have argued that low stakes games are of limited value in assessing rational play in high stakes legal and policy settings. This past summer, CBS ventured into the world of real life voyeuristic programming. In Survivor, CBS effectively structured a true high-stakes game. The ultimate cash payoff of $1 million was of sufficient magnitude that for those players who best positioned themselves to win, the apparent benefits of playing strategically outweighed the potential costs of appearing uncooperative or even unpleasant. To the extent that Survivor offers a glimpse into how stakes affect interactive human behavior under carefully defined conditions, and into how success might well result from careful strategy rather than inherent merit, Survivor offers an important antidote to the emerging literature critical of rational choice. When we compare Survivor with three fairly simple rational choice games, the theory comes out a winner.

Costs of cooperative behaviour in suricates (Suricata suricatta).

Functional interpretations of helping behaviour suggest that it has evolved because helpers increase their direct or indirect fitness by helping. However, recent critiques have suggested that helping may be an unselected extension of normal parental behaviour, pointing to evidence that all mature individuals commonly respond to begging young (whether they are parents, relatives or non-relatives) as well as to the lack of evidence that cooperative activities have appreciable costs to helpers. Here we provide an example of one form of cooperative behaviour that is seldom performed by parents and has substantial energetic costs to helpers. In the cooperative mongoose, Suricata suricatta, non-breeding adults commonly babysit young pups at the natal burrow for a day at a time, foregoing feeding for 24 hours. Parents rarely contribute to babysitting, and babysitting has substantial energetic costs to helpers. Members of small groups compensate for the reduced number of participants by babysitting more frequently, and neither the proportion of time that babysitters are present nor the survival of litters vary with group size.

Images of synchronized chaos: Experiments with circuits.

Synchronization of oscillations underlies organized dynamical behavior of many physical, biological and other systems. Recent studies of the dynamics of coupled systems with complex behavior indicate that synchronization can occur not only in case of periodic oscillations, but also in regimes of chaotic oscillations. Using experimental observations of chaotic oscillations in coupled nonlinear circuits we discuss a few forms of cooperative behavior that are related to the regimes of synchronized chaos. This paper is prepared under the request of the editors of the special focus issue of Chaos and contains the materials for the lecture at the International School in Nonlinear Science, "Nonlinear Waves: Synchronization and Patterns," Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, 1995. The main goal of the paper is to outline the collection of examples that illustrate the state of the art of chaos synchronization. (c) 1996 American Institute of Physics.

A Dialogue Model for User Interfaces

One feature of "intelligent" interaction is cooperation. Whenever possible, a cooperative respondent tries to recognize and accommodate its reply to a questioner's goals, plans, and needs. That reply may thus combine several forms of cooperative behavior, such as answering the question in natural language, displaying an explanatory picture, and/or performing a helpful action. The attempt to build cooperative systems confronts designers with the integration problem: how to organize systems that integrate potentially many diverse kinds of cooperative behavior. In this paper, we consider how solving the integration problem might affect the architecture of systems that generate cooperative responses.

Individual Contributions To Cooperative Behaviour in the Acorn Woodpecker: Effects of Reproductive Status, Sex, and Group Size

AbstractAcorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus) are communal breeders that live in permanently territorial family groups of 2-15 individuals. All group members participate in several forms of cooperative behaviour, which we define as the investment of resources in a common interest shared by other group members (CHASE, 1980). Acorn woodpecker group interests include the caching of acorns in a specialized storage tree (the granary), maintenance of the granary, and defence of the granary against intra- and interspecific intruders. Because of a strong positive relationship between the availability of stored acorns and group reproductive success, investments in acorn storage, granary maintenance, and granary defence have a direct positive effect on the individual fitness of breeders. Non-breeding helpers, however, do not realize a direct reproductive reward, and therefore profit less directly from investment in these forms of cooperative behaviour. Thus, we predicted that breeders should invest more heavily in cooperative behaviour than should helpers. The prediction was upheld: for nearly every form of cooperative behaviour examined, breeders contribute significantly more than do helpers. On the other hand, while established breeders only rarely intrude on neighbouring territories, nonreproductive helpers frequently do so. These dispersal "forays" constitute attempts by helpers to locate ecologically restricted breeding vacancies. The effect that group size has on individual contributions to cooperative behaviour is unclear. Individual rates of acorn storage decrease significantly with increasing group size, but granary attendance and granary maintenance do not. Male and female acorn woodpeckers do not differ in their contributions to acorn storage, granary maintenance, or interspecific defence. Females, however, play a significantly greater role in intraspecific defence because of a female-biased intruder sex ratio and sex-specific defensive behaviour.

A possible mechanism for the negative resistance characteristic of axon membranes.

THE Hodgkin-Huxley1 equations provided a good general understanding of the propagation of information along nerve axons. This depended, however, on the assumption of certain electrical characteristics for the axon membrane, which have not yet been satisfactorily explained in terms of a physical model. Models involving the opening and closing of pores by single ions moving under the influence of the electrical potential across the membrane have proved inadequate2. Some form of cooperative behaviour within the membrane has been suggested3 but these suggestions have not led to a concrete physical mechanism. Here I propose a model which predicts the negative resistance which is the most important and characteristic quality of the axon membrane.