Collective action and the collaborative brain.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Gavrilets S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4277098 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:We presented small groups of chimpanzees with two collective action situations, in which action was necessary for reward but there was a disincentive for individuals to act owing to the possibility of free-riding on the efforts of others. We found that in simpler scenarios (experiment 1) in which group size was small, there was a positive relationship between rank and action with more dominant individuals volunteering to act more often, particularly when the reward was less dispersed. Social tolerance also seemed to mediate action whereby higher tolerance levels within a group resulted in individuals of lower ranks sometimes acting and appropriating more of the reward. In more complex scenarios, when group size was larger and cooperation was necessary (experiment 2), overcoming the problem was more challenging. There was highly significant variability in the action rates of different individuals as well as between dyads, suggesting success was more greatly influenced by the individual personalities and personal relationships present in the group.
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Project description:Collective action problems arise when cooperating individuals suffer costs of cooperation, while the benefits of cooperation are received by both cooperators and defectors. We address this problem using data from spotted hyenas fighting with lions. Lions are much larger and kill many hyenas, so these fights require cooperative mobbing by hyenas for them to succeed. We identify factors that predict when hyena groups engage in cooperative fights with lions, which individuals choose to participate and how the benefits of victory are distributed among cooperators and non-cooperators. We find that cooperative mobbing is better predicted by lower costs (no male lions, more hyenas) than higher benefits (need for food). Individual participation is facilitated by social factors, both over the long term (close kin, social bond strength) and the short term (greeting interactions prior to cooperation). Finally, we find some direct benefits of participation: after cooperation, participants were more likely to feed at contested carcasses than non-participants. Overall, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that, when animals face dangerous cooperative dilemmas, selection favours flexible strategies that are sensitive to dynamic factors emerging over multiple time scales.
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Project description:BackgroundDespite decades of new discoveries in biomedical research, the overwhelming complexity of cells has been a significant barrier to a fundamental understanding of how cells work as a whole. As such, the holistic study of biochemical pathways requires computer modeling. Due to the complexity of cells, it is not feasible for one person or group to model the cell in its entirety.ResultsThe Cell Collective is a platform that allows the world-wide scientific community to create these models collectively. Its interface enables users to build and use models without specifying any mathematical equations or computer code - addressing one of the major hurdles with computational research. In addition, this platform allows scientists to simulate and analyze the models in real-time on the web, including the ability to simulate loss/gain of function and test what-if scenarios in real time.ConclusionsThe Cell Collective is a web-based platform that enables laboratory scientists from across the globe to collaboratively build large-scale models of various biological processes, and simulate/analyze them in real time. In this manuscript, we show examples of its application to a large-scale model of signal transduction.
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Project description:This study applies system-focused resilience and collaborative professionalism to examine how teachers in Korea collectively developed resilience and transformed teaching during COVID-19. Using qualitative data from seven individual interviews and four focus groups, we found Korean teachers navigated complex challenges (rapidly changing policies, online teaching, exacerbated learning gaps, and excessive social pressure) and utilized contextual resources (collective autonomy and flexibility, solidity and solidarity, and collective responsibility) to develop strategies (collaborative inquiry, timely communication, and envisioning the future of schooling). The study extends teacher resilience toward more collective and communal, from the individual level, by linking resilience to collaborative systemic changes.
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Project description:Innovation is often assumed to be the work of a talented few, whose products are passed on to the masses. Here, we argue that innovations are instead an emergent property of our species' cultural learning abilities, applied within our societies and social networks. Our societies and social networks act as collective brains. We outline how many human brains, which evolved primarily for the acquisition of culture, together beget a collective brain. Within these collective brains, the three main sources of innovation are serendipity, recombination and incremental improvement. We argue that rates of innovation are heavily influenced by (i) sociality, (ii) transmission fidelity, and (iii) cultural variance. We discuss some of the forces that affect these factors. These factors can also shape each other. For example, we provide preliminary evidence that transmission efficiency is affected by sociality--languages with more speakers are more efficient. We argue that collective brains can make each of their constituent cultural brains more innovative. This perspective sheds light on traits, such as IQ, that have been implicated in innovation. A collective brain perspective can help us understand otherwise puzzling findings in the IQ literature, including group differences, heritability differences and the dramatic increase in IQ test scores over time.
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Project description:Human behavior is strongly affected by culturally transmitted norms and values. Certain norms are internalized (i.e., acting according to a norm becomes an end in itself rather than merely a tool in achieving certain goals or avoiding social sanctions). Humans' capacity to internalize norms likely evolved in our ancestors to simplify solving certain challenges-including social ones. Here we study theoretically the evolutionary origins of the capacity to internalize norms. In our models, individuals can choose to participate in collective actions as well as punish free riders. In making their decisions, individuals attempt to maximize a utility function in which normative values are initially irrelevant but play an increasingly important role if the ability to internalize norms emerges. Using agent-based simulations, we show that norm internalization evolves under a wide range of conditions so that cooperation becomes "instinctive." Norm internalization evolves much more easily and has much larger effects on behavior if groups promote peer punishment of free riders. Promoting only participation in collective actions is not effective. Typically, intermediate levels of norm internalization are most frequent but there are also cases with relatively small frequencies of "oversocialized" individuals willing to make extreme sacrifices for their groups no matter material costs, as well as "undersocialized" individuals completely immune to social norms. Evolving the ability to internalize norms was likely a crucial step on the path to large-scale human cooperation.
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Project description:Many problems in nature can be conveniently framed as a problem of evolution of collective cooperative behaviour, often modelled resorting to the tools of evolutionary game theory in well-mixed populations, combined with an appropriate N-person dilemma. Yet, the well-mixed assumption fails to describe the population dynamics whenever individuals have a say in deciding which groups they will participate. Here we propose a simple model in which dynamical group formation is described as a result of a topological evolution of a social network of interactions. We show analytically how evolutionary dynamics under public goods games in finite adaptive networks can be effectively transformed into a N-Person dilemma involving both coordination and co-existence. Such dynamics would be impossible to foresee from more conventional 2-person interactions as well as from descriptions based on infinite, well-mixed populations. Finally, we show how stochastic effects help rendering cooperation viable, promoting polymorphic configurations in which cooperators prevail.
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