Interdisciplinary Workshop on Cooperation, Conflict and the Evolution of Sociality at the Texas A&M Univ Campus, 2014.

该项目通过将社会科学和动物行为学的研究领导者聚集在一起，将合作与冲突的研究整合在一起。研讨会的目的是促进思想和方法的交流和整合，促进创造性的新研究项目，并努力为思考合作与竞争及其基本机制建立一个统一的框架。在过去的几十年里，社会科学的主要主题之一是人类卓越的合作能力。在动物行为研究中也出现了类似的主题，合作仍然是研究的主要焦点。在社会科学中，博弈论行为模型的出现导致合作被视为一种异常或神秘。直到最近，面对压倒性的实验室和现场证据，正式的模型才得以扩展，以揭示这些行为如何可能是“理性的”。同样，在动物行为研究（包括人类动物）中，合作行为的普遍性挑战了理论家们如何解释它们如何提高适应性。理解个体之间、群体之间和物种之间合作的进化起源，是20世纪生物学的胜利之一。与此同时，对个人或群体之间冲突的研究也带来了重要的见解。对博弈论或进化基础的关注较少，因为这种行为被视为生存和繁殖驱动的标准模型的逻辑结果。冲突被认为是由资源竞争引起的，获胜者要求的额外资源用于提高他们的效用（在社会科学中）或生存和繁殖（在动物研究中）。在很大程度上，冲突与合作是分开研究的。然而，它们是同一枚硬币的两面。合作与冲突可以看作是一系列行为可能性的端点。但合作与冲突也以另一种方式交织在一起。冲突，或潜在的冲突，可能是支持合作的必要条件，而一个群体内的合作可能是与另一个群体成功冲突的必要条件。本次研讨会促进了对形成涉及合作和冲突的互动的基本社会和生物力量的理解。这种方法将从根本上改变我们对合作与冲突相互作用的理解。该研讨会为广泛学科的理论核心提供了重要的进展。此外，该项目资助由研讨会产生的后续合作项目，从而利用汇集的专门知识来产生新的知识。此外，研讨会明确包括来自各个学科的博士生和博士后的参与，希望这些年轻的学者能够参与到资助的项目中，从而影响下一代学者。

This project integrates the study of cooperation and conflict by bringing together research leaders in social science and animal behavior for an interdisciplinary workshop. The workshop is designed to foster exchange and integrate ideas and methods, to spur creative, new research projects, and to work towards creating a unified framework for thinking about cooperation and competition and their underlying mechanisms. One of the dominant themes of social science in the past several decades has been the remarkable capacity of humans for cooperation. A parallel theme has emerged in animal behavior research, where cooperation remains a major focus. In social science, the advent of game-theoretic models of behavior led to cooperation being viewed as an anomaly or mystery. Only recently, in the face of overwhelming laboratory and field evidence, were formal models expanded to reveal how such behaviors could be "rational." Similarly, in animal behavior research (including human animals), the pervasiveness of cooperative behaviors challenged theorists to explain how they increased fitness. Understanding the evolutionary origins of cooperation among individuals, and among groups and species, is one of the triumphs of 20th-century biology. At the same time, the study of conflict among individuals or groups also has led to important insights. The focus has been less on game-theoretic or evolutionary underpinnings, because the behavior is seen as a logical outgrowth of standard models of the drive to survive and reproduce. Conflict is seen as arising from resource competition, with the extra resources claimed by winners serving to enhance their utility (in social science) or survival and reproduction (in animal research). For the most part conflict has been studied separately from cooperation. They are,however, two sides of the same coin. Cooperation and conflict can be viewed as endpoints on a continuum of behavioral possibilities. But cooperation and conflict also are intertwined in a different way. Conflict, or the potential for conflict, may be necessary to support cooperation, and cooperation within a group may be necessary to mount successful conflict with another group. This workshop advances understanding of the fundamental social and biological forces that shape interactions involving cooperation and conflict. This approach stands to fundamentally transform our understanding of the interplay of cooperation and conflict. The workshop provides an important advance in the theoretical core of a wide range of disciplines. In addition, the project funds follow-on collaborative projects resulting from the workshop, thus leveraging the assembled expertise to produce new knowledge. In addition, the workshop explicitly includes the participation of PhD students and postdocs from a variety of disciplines, and it is expected that these younger scholars will participate in the funded projects, thus influencing the next generation of scholars.