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

人们普遍认为，没有什么能像共同的敌人那样团结起来，但这在多大程度上是正确的呢？ 经济学、人类学和心理学的最新进展支持了一种现象的存在，即群体之间的冲突促进了这些群体内部的合作。这对一个以改善合作为目标的社会产生了令人不安的影响，这表明群体间的冲突对加强群体内的合作是必要的。 该项目的目标是确定这种情况的真实程度，并利用这些信息制定在没有群体间冲突的情况下改善合作的可能性。 理解这一点将有利于社会从地方互动到国际关系的水平。 该项目还将在本科生、研究生和研究生阶段培训大量学生科学探究的方法，并通过在当地K-12学校与公众进行的讲座以及我们与Fernbank自然历史博物馆的持续合作，将这项研究推向公众。技术描述：最近的研究表明存在狭隘的利他主义，其中组间竞争改善了组内合作。 从进化的角度来看，这是有道理的，因为一个群体中的个体，谁合作，以胜过其他群体，将做得更好比个人谁不这样做。 但是，在多大程度上这是合作行为的一个广泛特征，而不是人类特有的特征？ 如果这是合作的一般倾向，那么它实际上是合作的驱动力的频率有多高？当前提案的总体目标是：1）了解组间竞争对合作的影响; 2）这些决策背后的荷尔蒙机制。为了实现这些目标，研究人员将研究猴子、猿和人类如何与群体中的其他成员合作，有没有群体间的竞争。重点将放在个人在他们的社会群体中互动，谁是自由选择与他们的群体的其他成员共同工作，但在严格控制的情况下，允许特定变量的影响被确定。这种方法结合了自然主义田野工作的最佳方面，突出了个体互动中合作的内源性出现，以及严格控制实验的最佳方面，突出了机制并阐明了特定环境如何影响合作。两种激素的水平据称是理解合作的关键，睾丸激素和催产素，将在相互作用期间收集，以开始解开合作和竞争背后的内分泌机制。 这项工作将有助于解开人类独特的合作特征，从那些更广泛的共享灵长类动物，并有助于阐明核心机制，促进合作，无论是在音乐会，或在没有，人类特有的适应性。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

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.