Ibbotson, Paul;
Jimenez-Romero, Cristian;
Page, Karen M;
(2022)
Dying to cooperate: the role of environmental harshness in human collaboration.
Behavioral Ecology
, 33
(1)
pp. 190-201.
10.1093/beheco/arab125.
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Abstract
It has been proposed that environmental stress acted as a selection pressure on the evolution of human cooperation. Through agent-based evolutionary modelling, mathematical analysis, and human experimental data we illuminate the mechanisms by which the environment influences cooperative success and decision making in a Stag Hunt game. The modelling and mathematical results show that only cooperative foraging phenotypes survive the harshest of environments but pay a penalty for miscoordination in favourable environments. When agents are allowed to coordinate their hunting intentions by communicating, cooperative phenotypes outcompete those who pursue individual strategies in almost all environmental and payoff scenarios examined. Data from human participants show flexible decision-making in face of cooperative uncertainty, favouring high-risk, high-reward strategy when environments are harsher and starvation is imminent. Converging lines of evidence from the three approaches indicate a significant role for environmental variability in human cooperative dynamics and the species-unique cognition designed to support it.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Dying to cooperate: the role of environmental harshness in human collaboration |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/beheco/arab125 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arab125 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Mathematics UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10143022 |
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