Collaborative Research: How between-group competition impacts within-group cooperation

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Popular belief holds that nothing unites like a common enemy, but to what degree is this true? Recent advances in economics, anthropology and psychology support the existence of a phenomenon in which conflict between groups improves cooperation within those groups. This has disturbing implications for a society whose goal is to improve cooperation, suggesting that between-group conflict is necessary to enhance within-group cooperation. The goal of this project is to determine the degree to which this is true and use the information to formulate possibilities for improving cooperation in the absence of intergroup conflict. Understanding this would benefit society from the level of local interactions to international relations. The project will also train numerous students at the undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels in the methods of scientific inquiry and bring this research to the general public through talks to the general public, at local K-12 schools, and through our ongoing collaboration with the Fernbank Museum of Natural History.Technical description:Recent research suggests the existence of parochial altruism, in which between-group competition improves within-group cooperation. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense, as individuals within a group, who cooperate to outcompete other groups, will do better than individuals who fail to do so. But to what extent is this a broad feature of cooperative behavior versus a characteristic specific to humans? If this is a general disposition of cooperation, how frequently is it really a driver of cooperation? The overarching goals of the current proposal are to 1) understand the impact of between-group competition on cooperation and 2) the hormonal mechanisms underlying these decisions. To achieve these goals the researchers will examine how monkeys, apes and humans cooperate with other members of their group, with and without between-group competition. The focus will be on individuals interacting within their social groups, who are freely choosing to work jointly with other members of their group, but in tightly controlled circumstances that allow the influence of specific variables to be identified. This approach combines the best aspects of naturalistic field work, highlighting the endogenous emergence of cooperation from individual interactions, and the best aspects of tightly controlled experiments, highlighting the mechanisms and clarifying how specific contexts influence cooperation. Levels of two hormones purported to be key to understanding cooperation, testosterone and oxytocin, will be collected during the interactions to begin to unpack the endocrine mechanisms underlying cooperation and competition. This work will help to untangle uniquely human characteristics of cooperation from those more broadly shared across the primates and help elucidate core mechanisms that promote cooperation, either in concert with, or in the absence of, human-specific adaptations.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.