Prosociality moderates outcome evaluation in competition tasks.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Lu J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC9259582 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Maternal environmental effects create lagged population responses to past environments. Although they are ubiquitous and vary in expression across taxa, it remains unclear if and how their presence alters competitive interactions in ecological communities.Here, we use a discrete-time competition model to simulate how maternal effects alter competitive dynamics in fluctuating and constant environments. Further, we explore how omitting maternal effects alter estimates of known model parameters from observational time series data.Our simulations demonstrate that (i) maternal effects change competitive outcomes, regardless of whether competitors otherwise interact neutrally or exhibit non-neutral competitive differences, (ii) the consequences of maternal effects for competitive outcomes are mediated by the temporal structure of environmental variation, (iii) even in constant conditions, competitive outcomes are influenced by species' maternal effects strategies, and (iv) in observational time series data, omitting maternal effects reduces variation explained by models and biases parameter estimates, including competition coefficients.Our findings demonstrate that the ecological consequences of maternal effects hinge on the competitive environment. Evolutionary biologists have long recognized that maternal effects can be an important but often overlooked strategy buffering populations from environmental change. We suggest that maternal effects are similarly critical to ecology and call for research into maternal effects as drivers of dynamics in populations and communities.
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Project description:The observation of behaviour is a key theoretical parameter underlying a number of models of prosociality. However, the empirical findings showing the effect of observability on prosociality are mixed. In this meta-analysis, we explore the boundary conditions that may account for this variability, by exploring key theoretical and methodological moderators of this link. We identified 117 papers yielding 134 study level effects (total n = 788 164) and found a small but statistically significant, positive association between observability and prosociality (r = 0.141, 95% confidence interval = 0.106, 0.175). Moderator analysis showed that observability produced stronger effects on prosociality: (i) in the presence of passive observers (i.e. people whose role was to only observe participants) versus perceptions of being watched, (ii) when participants' decisions were consequential (versus non-consequential), (iii) when the studies were performed in the laboratory (as opposed to in the field/online), (iv) when the studies used repeated measures (instead of single games), and (v) when the studies involved social dilemmas (instead of bargaining games). These effects show the conditions under which observability effects on prosociality will be maximally observed. We describe the theoretical and practical significance of these results.
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