scholarly journals The social and ecological costs of an ‘over-extended' phenotype

2016 ◽  
Vol 283 (1822) ◽  
pp. 20152359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndon Alexander Jordan ◽  
Sean M. Maguire ◽  
Hans A. Hofmann ◽  
Masanori Kohda

Extended phenotypes offer a unique opportunity to experimentally manipulate and identify sources of selection acting on traits under natural conditions. The social cichlid fish Neolamprologus multifasciatus builds nests by digging up aquatic snail shells, creating an extended sexual phenotype that is highly amenable to experimental manipulation through addition of extra shells. Here, we find sources of both positive sexual selection and opposing natural selection acting on this trait; augmenting shell nests increases access to mates, but also increases social aggression and predation risk. Increasing the attractiveness of one male also changed social interactions throughout the social network and altered the entire community structure. Manipulated males produced and received more displays from neighbouring females, who also joined augmented male territories at higher rates than unmanipulated groups. However, males in more attractive territories received more aggression from neighbouring males, potentially as a form of social policing. We also detected a significant ecological cost of the ‘over-extended' phenotype; heterospecific predators usurped augmented nests at higher rates, using them as breeding sites and displacing residents. Using these natural experiments, we find that both social and ecological interactions generate clear sources of selection mediating the expression of an extended phenotype in the wild.

Author(s):  
Lysanne Snijders ◽  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Alan N. Tump ◽  
Michael Breuker ◽  
Chente Ortiz ◽  
...  

Sociality is a fundamental organizing principle across taxa, thought to come with a suite of adaptive benefits. However, making causal inferences about these adaptive benefits requires experimental manipulation of the social environment, which is rarely feasible in the field. Here we manipulated the number of conspecifics in Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) in the wild, and quantified how this affected a key benefit of sociality, social foraging, by investigating several components of foraging success. As adaptive benefits of social foraging may differ between sexes, we studied males and females separately, expecting females, the more social and risk-averse sex, to benefit more from conspecifics than males. Conducting over 1,600 foraging trials, we found that in both sexes, increasing the number of conspecifics led to faster detection of novel food patches and a higher probability of feeding following detection of the patch, resulting in greater individual resource consumption. The slope of the latter relationship differed between the sexes, with males unexpectedly exhibiting a stronger social benefit. Our study provides rare causal evidence for the adaptive benefits of social foraging in the wild, and highlights that sex differences in sociality do not necessarily imply an unequal ability to profit from the presence of others.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lysanne Snijders ◽  
Stefan Krause ◽  
Alan N. Tump ◽  
Michael Breuker ◽  
Chente Ortiz ◽  
...  

AbstractSociality is a fundamental organizing principle across taxa, thought to come with a suite of adaptive benefits. However, making causal inferences about these adaptive benefits requires experimental manipulation of the social environment, which is rarely feasible in the field. Here we manipulated the number of conspecifics in Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) in the wild, and quantified how this affected a key benefit of sociality, social foraging, by investigating several components of foraging success. As adaptive benefits of social foraging may differ between sexes, we studied males and females separately, expecting females, the more social and risk-averse sex in guppies, to benefit more from conspecifics. Conducting over 1600 foraging trials, we found that in both sexes, increasing the number of conspecifics led to faster detection of novel food patches and a higher probability of feeding following detection of the patch, resulting in greater individual resource consumption. The extent of the latter relationship differed between the sexes, with males unexpectedly exhibiting a stronger social benefit. Our study provides rare causal evidence for the adaptive benefits of social foraging in the wild, and highlights that sex differences in sociality do not necessarily imply an unequal ability to profit from the presence of others.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 855-867 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Kulas ◽  
Rachael Klahr ◽  
Lindsey Knights

Abstract. Many investigators have noted “reverse-coding” method factors when exploring response pattern structure with psychological inventory data. The current article probes for the existence of a confound in these investigations, whereby an item’s level of saturation with socially desirable content tends to covary with the item’s substantive scale keying. We first investigate its existence, demonstrating that 15 of 16 measures that have been previously implicated as exhibiting a reverse-scoring method effect can also be reasonably characterized as exhibiting a scoring key/social desirability confound. A second set of analyses targets the extent to which the confounding variable may confuse interpretation of factor analytic results and documents strong social desirability associations. The results suggest that assessment developers perhaps consider the social desirability scale value of indicators when constructing scale aggregates (and possibly scales when investigating inter-construct associations). Future investigations would ideally disentangle the confound via experimental manipulation.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Derringer

Although correlations between personality and health are consistently observed, often the causal pathway, or even the direction of effect, is unknown. Genes provide an additional node of information which may be included to help clarify the relationship between personality and health. Genetically informative studies, whether focused on family-identified relationships or specific genotypes, provide clear benefits to disentangling causal processes. Genetic measures approach near universal reliability and validity: processes of inheritance are consistent across cultures, geography, and time, such that similar models and instruments may be applied to incredibly diverse populations. Although frequency and intercorrelations differ by ancestry background (Novembre et al., 2008) and cultural context (Tucker-Drob & Bates, 2016) may exert powerful moderating effects, fundamental form and function is consistent across all members of our species, and even many other species. Genetic sequence information is also of course highly temporally stable, and possesses temporal precedence. That is, the literal genetic sequence is lifetime-stable and comes before all other experiences. Human behavior genetic research, like most personality research, faces limitations in terms of causal inferences that may be made in the absence of experimental manipulation. But behavior genetics takes advantage of natural experiments: populations that differ in terms of genetic similarity (either inferred – such as twins – or measured – such as genotyping methods) to begin to unravel the complex influences on individual differences in personality and health outcomes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-424
Author(s):  
Jenei Dániel Ferenc ◽  
Csertő István ◽  
Vincze Orsolya

Háttér és célkitűzések:Tanulmányunkban azokat a narratív eseménykonstrukciós eszközöket vizsgáljuk, amelyek összefüggésbe hozhatók a kollektív áldozati tudat (Bar-Tal, Chernyak-Hai, Schori és Gundar, 2009) közvetítésével és fenntartásával. Igazolni kívánjuk, hogy a László (2012) által felvázolt áldozati narratív kompozíciós eszközök (nyelvi ágencia, értékelés, és pszichológiai perspektíva csoportelfogult használata) révén közvetíthető egy csoport áldozati pozíciója. Továbbá megvizsgáljuk, hogy egy csoport konfl iktustörténetének percepcióját képes-e megváltoztatni a narratív kompozíció kísérleti úton történő manipulálása: lehetséges-e elkövetőből áldozatot kreálni pusztán a nyelvi megszerkesztettség útján?Módszer:A társas észlelési paradigmára épülő vizsgálatban nemzeti csoportok áldozati történeteinek szisztematikus nyelvi manipulációján keresztül kialakított elfogult és elfogulatlan változatát megítélve, kérdőíves módszerrel (Egyéni és Csoportvélekedés Skála, Eidelson, 2009) mértük fel a narratív kompozíciós eszközök észlelésre gyakorolt hatását.Eredmények:Az áldozati narratívum kompozíciós eszközei statisztikai értelemben is hatással voltak a bemutatott csoportok áldozati pozíciójának észlelésére. A csoportok megítélése attól függően változott, hogy a résztvevők melyik szövegváltozatot olvasták: az elfogulatlan eseményleírás esetén az „áldozati” csoport, az elfogult változat esetén az „agresszor” észlelt áldozati pozíciója válik hangsúlyosabbá. Egyúttal azt is sikerült bizonyítani, hogy pusztán a nyelvi megszerkesztettség útján megváltoztatható egy agresszor csoport észlelése, és áldozati színezettel is bemutathatók tetteik.Következtetések:A László és munkatársai által leírt narratív kompozíció közvetíti az áldozati tudattal összefüggő hiedelmeket, és a csoport szemantikus szerepe képes felülírni az objektíven meghatározott cselekményszerepeket.Background and goals:In this paper we explore the narrative event-constructional devices that can be linked to the transmission and sustainment of collective victim consciousness (Bar-Tal, Chernyak-Hai, Schori, and Gundar, 2009). Our goal is to verify that with the narrative compositional devices (linguistic agency, evaluation, group-biased use of psychological perspective) described by László (2012), a group’s victim position can be transmitted. It is further explored, if the perception of a group’s confl ict-story can be altered by the experimental manipulation of the narrative composition: is it possible to create a victim from a perpetrator by just the linguistic composition?Method:The study is based on the social perception paradigm, in which biased and unbiased variants of national groups’ victimhood stories were created through systematic linguistic manipulation. The effect of the narrative compositional devices on the perception of the stories was evaluated with a questionnaire (Individual- and Group Beliefs Scale, Eidelson, 2009).Results:The narrative compositional devices of the victimhood narrative had a statistically signifi cant effect on the perception of the introduced groups’ victimhood position. The evaluation of the groups changed according to which variant of the story was introduced: in the case of the unbiased event-description, the „victim” group’s victim position is salient; and in the case of the biased event-description, the „perpetrator” group’s victim position becomes more salient. In addition, it is demonstrated that the perception of a perpetrator group can be changed by only the narrative construction and their actions can acquire a „victim tone”.Conclusion:The narrative compositional devices described by László et al. transmit the beliefs linked to victimhood consciousness, and the group’s semantic role can overwrite the objectively defi ned roles.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mads Kock Pedersen ◽  
Carlos Mauricio Castaño Díaz ◽  
Mario Alejandro Alba-Marrugo ◽  
Ali Amidi ◽  
Rajiv Vaid Basaiwmoit ◽  
...  

Psychology and the social sciences are undergoing a revolution: It has become increasingly clear that traditional lab-based experiments fail to capture the full range of differences in cognitive abilities and behaviours across the general population. Some progress has been made toward devising measures that can be applied at scale across individuals and populations. What has been missing is a broad battery of validated tasks that can be easily deployed, used across different age ranges and social backgrounds, and employed in practical, clinical, and research contexts. Here, we present Skill Lab, a game-based approach allowing the efficient assessment of a suite of cognitive abilities. Skill Lab has been validated outside the lab in a crowdsourced population-size sample recruited in collaboration with the Danish Broadcast Company (Danmarks Radio, DR). Our game-based measures are five times faster to complete than the equivalent traditional measures and replicate previous findings on the decline of cognitive abilities with age in a large population sample. Furthermore, by combining the game data with an in-game survey, we demonstrate that this unique dataset has implication for key questions in social science, challenging the Jack-of-all-Trades theory of entrepreneurship and provide evidence for risk preference being independent of executive functioning.


2016 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carel van Schaik ◽  
Sereina Graber ◽  
Caroline Schuppli ◽  
Judith Burkart

AbstractClassical ethology and behavioral ecology did not pay much attention to learning. However, studies of social learning in nature reviewed here reveal the near-ubiquity of reliance on social information for skill acquisition by developing birds and mammals. This conclusion strengthens the plausibility of the cultural intelligence hypothesis for the evolution of intelligence, which assumes that selection on social learning abilities automatically improves individual learning ability. Thus, intelligent species will generally be cultural species. Direct tests of the cultural intelligence hypothesis require good estimates of the amount and kind of social learning taking place in nature in a broad variety of species. These estimates are lacking so far. Here, we start the process of developing a functional classification of social learning, in the form of the social learning spectrum, which should help to predict the mechanisms of social learning involved. Once validated, the categories can be used to estimate the cognitive demands of social learning in the wild.


Author(s):  
Nicolas Langlitz

This chapter investigates how Christophe Boesch's colleague and codirector Michael Tomasello derived truth claims about the anthropological difference between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes from controlled experiments comparing the social cognition of human children with that of grown chimpanzees. Tomasello's claim that humans were the only primates capable of culture and cooperation received an enthusiastic reception by German philosophers. Yet Boesch called into question the validity of Tomasello's findings by pointing out that the social behavior of both humans and apes was too contingent on local circumstances for Leipzig kindergarten children and zoo chimpanzees rescued from a Dutch pharmaceutical company to represent all of humanity and chimpanzeehood. He accused Tomasello of not controlling for the different conditions under which Tomasello tested humans and apes. The ensuing controversy over the relationship between laboratory work and fieldwork happened at a time when new statistical methods were opening up vast new possibilities for chimpanzee ethnography, even fostering hopes that experimentation with captive animals would become superfluous because uncontrolled observations in the wild would allow the establishment of causal relations. The chapter then assesses whether Boesch's cultural primatology could inform a different philosophical anthropology than the one drawing from Tomasello's comparative psychology.


2020 ◽  
Vol 131 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-463
Author(s):  
David N Fisher ◽  
Jonathan N Pruitt ◽  
Justin Yeager

Abstract Extended phenotypes are traits that exist outside the physical body of organisms. Despite their role in the lives of the organisms that express them and other organisms influenced by extended phenotypes, the consistency and covariance with morphological and behavioural traits of extended phenotypes has rarely been evaluated. We repeatedly measured an extended phenotype involved in prey acquisition (web structure) of wild orb-weaving spiders (Micrathena vigorsii), which re-build their webs daily. We related web structure to behaviours and spider body length. Web diameter and web density were repeatable among individuals, reaction to a predation threat was very marginally so, and response to a prey stimulus and web evenness were not repeatable. Larger spiders spun wider webs, had webs with increased thread spacing, and the spider possibly tended to react more slowly to a predation threat. When a spider built a relatively larger web it was also a relatively less dense and less even web. The repeatability of web construction and relationship with spider body size we found may be common features of intra-population variation in web structure in spiders. By estimating the consistency and covariances of extended phenotypes we can begin to evaluate what maintains their variation and how they might evolve.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document