Cooperation
edyong | September 22, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
As a species, we value fair play. We're like it so much that we're willing to eschew material gains in order to punish cheaters who behave unjustly. Psychological games have set these maxims in stone, but new research shows us that this sense of justice is, to a large extent, influenced by our genes.
When it comes to demonstating our innate preference for fair play, psychologists turn to the 'Ultimatum Game',…
edyong | September 20, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
Imagine that one day, you make a pact with your brother or sister, vowing to never have children of your own and instead spend your life raising theirs. You'll agree to do the grocery shopping, cook for them, clean their rooms and bathe them, until you die.
That seems like a crazy plan, but it's one that some of the most successful animals in the world - the social insects - have adopted. It's called '…
edyong | September 3, 2009When it comes to encouraging people to work together for the greater good, carrots work better than sticks. That's the message from a new study showing that rewarding people for good behaviour is better at promoting cooperation than punishing them for offences.
David Rand from Harvard University asked teams of volunteers to play "public goods games", where they could cheat or cooperate with each other for real money. After many rounds of play, the players were more likely to work together if they could reward each other for good behaviour or punish each other for offences. But of these two…
edyong | August 12, 2009In a French laboratory, a team of ants is attempting a daring rescue. One of their colony-mates is trapped in a snare - a nylon thread that dastardly researchers have looped around its waist and half-buried in some sand. Thankfully, help is at hand. A crack squad of rescuers work together to dig away at the sand, expose the snare, and bite at the threads until their colleague is liberated.
Many animals help each other but actual rescue attempts, even between individuals of the same species, are rarely documented. Among back-boned animals, dolphins are famously said to help injured comrades…
emjohnson | July 23, 2009Primate sociality is linked to brain networks for pair bonds.
Social conservatives are fond of linking morality with monogamy and will be quick to condemn the moral crimes of adulterous felatio while ignoring the moral crimes of cutting social programs for poor mothers. However, in a bizarre twist, research suggests that morality and monogamy are closely intertwined, though it's doubtful many conservatives will champion the reasons why.
In the journal Science Robin Dunbar revisits the question with a unique perspective as to why some species (including humans) succeed so well as members of…
jjacquet | July 1, 2009A neighborhood in Leicester, England had an entire YouTube channel dedicated to neighborhood issues, including catching "litter louts". As BoingBoing point out, this is a fine example of citizen surveillance. This case study also fits very nicely into our discussion of soft enforcement and sousveillence for conservation (it might also spawn a discussion about rights to privacy). The neighborhood has provided an email, and if someone knows the litterers in the videos they can email to alert the neighborhood management board.
jjacquet | June 23, 2009As part of the "Keep America Beautiful" campaign, "The Crying Indian" spot first aired in 1971 and was shown throughout the 1970s and 80s. It won two Clio Awards and was named one of the top 100 advertising campaigns of the 20th Century by Ad Age Magazine:
But research in psychology shows that this public service announcement (PSA) may not have been as effective as is widely believed.
Research by Bob Cialdini at Arizona State University reveals that the PSA's main message -- that we should not litter -- may have been undermined by showing how many people do in fact litter.
In his…
edyong | June 7, 2009Where there are plants, there are almost certainly aphids feeding on them. These ubiquitous insects are banquets for many predators, and some have evolved incredible defences against them. The cabbage aphid, for example, is a walking bomb.
Its body carries two reactive chemicals that only mix when a predator attacks it. The injured aphid dies. But in the process, the chemicals in its body react and trigger an explosion that delivers lethal amounts of poison to the predator, saving the rest of the colony.
The aphids' chemical weapons are stolen from the plants they eat. Far from being…
edyong | May 23, 2009
Two years ago, a group of Ugandan chimps provided a blow to the idea that humans are the only animals that truly behave selflessly to one another. These chimps showed clear signs of true selflessness, helping both human handlers and other unrelated chimps with no desire for reward.
The question of why we help each other, instead of looking out for ourselves, is one of the most compelling in modern biology. Evolutionary and game theory alike predict that selfish behaviour should be the rule with altruism the exception, and animal experiments have largely supported this idea. Nature, 'red in…
edyong | May 8, 2009The success of termites Âand other social insects hinges on their complex social systems, where workers sacrifice the ability to raise their own young in order to serve the colony and its queen - the only individual who reproduces. But this social order can be thrown into chaos by knocking out a single gene, and one that originally had a role in that other characteristic termite ability - eating wood.
Judith Korb from the University of Osnabrueck in Germany found that the queen termite relies on a gene called Neofem2 to rule over her subjects. Korb worked with the termite Cryptotermes…
edyong | March 8, 2009
Imagine that you're driving along a country lane. As often happens, the road suddenly transforms from a well-paved street to a pothole-ridden nightmare. As your suspension and your stomachs start to tire, your friends in the back suddenly force you to stop the car.
To your amazement, they jump out and lie across the potholes, beckoning you to drive your car over them. It may seem like a far-fetched scenario, but if you were an army ant, such selfless behaviour would be a matter of course.
Army ants are some of the deadliest hunters of South America. Amassing in legions of over 200,000 ants…
edyong | March 2, 2009I live in London. According to Google Analytics, 96% of this blog's readers make their homes in a different city and 91% live in another country altogether. The fact that most of you are reading this post at all is a symptom of the globalised state of the 21st century.
Through telecommunications, the Internet, free trade, air travel and more, the world's population is becoming increasingly connected and dependent on one another. And as this happens, the problems that face us as a species are becoming ever more apparent, from our relentless overuse of natural resources to the threat of…
edyong | February 1, 2009The Japanese pinecone fish searches for food with living headlights. This ÂÂhand-sized fish harbours colonies of light-producing bacteria in two organs on its lower jaw. The beams from these organs shine forward, and when night falls and the fish goes searching for food, its jaw-lamps light the way.
Elsewhere in the Pacific Ocean, the Hawaiian bobtail squid also uses luminous bacteria, but theirs act as a cloaking device. They produce a dim glow that matches the strength of moonlight from above, hiding the squid's silhouette from hungry fish below. It's a mutual relationship; the squid gets…
edyong | January 19, 2009People seem inordinately keen to pit nature and nurture as imagined adversaries, but this naive view glosses over the far more interesting interactions between the two. These interactions between genes and environment lie at the heart of a new study by Rose McDermott from Brown University, which elegantly fuses two of my favourite topics - genetic influences on behaviour and the psychology of punishment.
three previous pieces on punishment. Each was based on a study that used clever psychological games to investigate how people behave when they are given a choice to cooperate with, cheat, or…
edyong | December 9, 2008If a colleague of yours was rewarded for their work while you received nothing for your (similarly sized) efforts, you would probably be quite peeved. Now it seems that man's best friend also shares our disdain for unfairness.
Humans are notorious for our dislike of injustice. It rankles us to see others being rewarded or penalised unfairly. We not only have the capacity to recognise when someone else is being rewarded beyond their efforts, but the inclination to punish them for it, often at personal expense. But other species behave in the same way - recent studies have found that capuchin…
edyong | December 4, 2008Is punishment a destructive force that breaks societies or part of the very glue that holds them together? Last year, I blogged about two studies that tried to answer this question using similar psychological games. In both, volunteers played with tokens that were eventually exchanged for money. They had the option to either cooperate with each other so that the group as a whole reaped the greatest benefits, or cheat and freeload off the efforts of their peers.
In both studies, giving the players the option to punish each other soon put a relative end to cheating. Faced with the threat of…
edyong | August 27, 2008 Yesterday, I wrote about selfless capuchin monkeys, who find personal reward in the act of giving other monkeys. The results seemed to demonstrate that monkeys are sensitive to the welfare of their peers, and will make choices that benefit others without any material gain for themselves. Today, another study looks at the same processes in a very different sort of cheeky monkey - human children.
Humans are notable among other animals for our vast capacity for cooperation and empathy. Our concern about the experiences of other people, and our natural aversion to unfair play are the bedrocks…
edyong | August 26, 2008There are some who say that helping others is its own reward, and many biologists would agree. The fact that selfless acts give us a warm glow is evident from personal experience and neurological studies, which find that good deeds trigger activity in parts of the brain involved in feelings of reward. But feeling food by being good isn't just the province of humans - monkeys too get a kick out of the simple act of giving to their fellow simians.
At the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Frans de Waal's team of scientists have been investigating the selfless side of eight brown capuchin…
edyong | August 8, 2008
Social lives are delicate things. We've all had situations where friendships and relationships have been dented and broken, and we're reasonably skilled at repairing the damage. This ability to keep our social ties from snapping relies on being able to read other people, and on knowing a thing or two about what's normal in human society.
For instance, we appreciate that cheating fosters ill-will, while generosity can engender trust. So cheaters might try to win back their companions with giving gestures. These little exchanges are the glue that bind groups of people into happy and…
edyong | July 21, 2008
Social spiders are an arachnophobe's nightmare. While the vast majority of spiders work alone, the odd few live communally and cooperate to hunt and feed. Their numbers, along with the massive webs that they all have a spinneret in creating, allow them to tackle prey far larger than themselves. The aftermath of a kill opens up new conflicts for the spiders that other cooperating hunters like lions or wolves don't share. They don't divide up the carcass to eat separately, for like all spiders, they digest their prey outside their bodies.
All the colony members spit their digestive enzymes…