Division of labour within cooperatively breeding groups

Behaviour ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 142 (11-12) ◽  
pp. 1577-1590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn E. Arnold ◽  
Ian P.F. Owens ◽  
Anne W. Goldizen
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Helping Behaviours ◽  
Noisy Miner ◽  
Cooperatively Breeding ◽  
Helping Behaviour ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Manorina Melanocephala ◽  
Breeding Groups

AbstractWithin cooperative societies, group members share in caring for offspring. Although division of labour among group members has been relatively well studied in insects, less is known about vertebrates. Most studies of avian helping focus solely on the extent to which helpers provision the offspring, however, helpers can participate in everything from nest building to predator defence. Bad provisioners may, for example, not be as 'uncooperative' as they appear, if they are good defenders. Thus, the distribution of helping tasks between group members should have important implications for our interpretation of group dynamics. Here, we compare two distinct forms of helping behaviour in the cooperatively breeding noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala): chick provisioning and mobbing nest predators. We show that the way in which individual helpers invest in these two helping behaviours varies enormously across individuals and among social groups. Good provisioners often contributed relatively little to mobbing and vice versa. Indeed, (18%) of helpers only mobbed, 22% just provisioned, whereas 60% of helpers performed both forms of helping. Across nests, provisioning was significantly negatively correlated with mobbing effort. We suggest that small differences in the costs or benefits of different aspects of helping (due to differences in age, relatedness or social status) have a big impact on the division of labour within a group. Consequently, social groups can be made up from individuals who often specialise in one helping behaviour, and/or helpers who perform a number of behaviours to differing degrees. Division of labour within social groups will, therefore, have important consequences for the maintenance of cooperatively breeding in vertebrates.

scholarly journals Principle of Care and Giving to Help People in Need

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 240-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Bekkers ◽  
Mark Ottoni–Wilhelm
Keyword(s):  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Empathic Concern ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Experiment Study ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Personality Psychology ◽  
Helping Behaviours ◽  
Helping Behaviour ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Nationally Representative

Theories of moral development posit that an internalized moral value that one should help those in need—the principle of care—evokes helping behaviour in situations where empathic concern does not. Examples of such situations are helping behaviours that involve cognitive deliberation and planning, that benefit others who are known only in the abstract, and who are out–group members. Charitable giving to help people in need is an important helping behaviour that has these characteristics. Therefore we hypothesized that the principle of care would be positively associated with charitable giving to help people in need, and that the principle of care would mediate the empathic concern–giving relationship. The two hypotheses were tested across four studies. The studies used four different samples, including three nationally representative samples from the American and Dutch populations, and included both self–reports of giving (Studies 1–3), giving observed in a survey experiment (Study 3), and giving observed in a laboratory experiment (Study 4). The evidence from these studies indicated that a moral principle to care for others was associated with charitable giving to help people in need and mediated the empathic concern–giving relationship. © 2016 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology

scholarly journals Looking for unity in diversity: human cooperative childcare in comparative perspective

2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1869) ◽  
pp. 20171184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith M. Burkart ◽  
Carel van Schaik ◽  
Michael Griesser
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Psychological Characteristics ◽  
Social Tolerance ◽  
Proximate Mechanisms ◽  
Evolutionary Origins ◽  
Allomaternal Care ◽  
Cooperatively Breeding ◽  
Male Care ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Unity In Diversity

Humans engage in cooperative childcare, which includes some elements not found in other animals, such as the presence of post-reproductive helpers, extensive food sharing among adults and a pervasive sexual division of labour. In animals, cooperative offspring care has typically been studied in two different contexts. The first mainly involves helpers contributing care in cooperatively breeding family groups; the second context is allomaternal care in species usually not categorized as cooperative breeders (e.g. plural and communal breeders, often without male care). Comparative analyses suggest that cooperative breeding and allomaternal care in plural and communal breeders have distinct evolutionary origins, with humans fitting neither pathway entirely. Nevertheless, some critical proximate mechanisms of helping, including hormonal regulators, are likely to be shared across species. Other mechanisms may vary among species, such as social tolerance, proactive prosociality or conditional mother–infant bonding. These are presumably associated with specific details of the care system, such as whether all group members contribute, or whether mothers can potentially raise offspring alone. Thus, cooperative offspring care is seen in different contexts across animal lineages, but may nonetheless share several important psychological characteristics. We end by discussing how work on humans may play a unifying role in studying cooperative offspring care.

scholarly journals Principle of Care and Giving to Help People in Need

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rene Bekkers ◽  
Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm
Keyword(s):  
Charitable Giving ◽  
Empathic Concern ◽  
Moral Principle ◽  
Experiment Study ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Helping Behaviours ◽  
Helping Behaviour ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Representative Samples

Theories of moral development posit that an internalized moral value that one should help those in need—the principle of care—evokes helping behaviour in situations where empathic concern does not. Examples of such situations are helping behaviours that involve cognitive deliberation and planning, that benefit others who are known only in the abstract, and who are out-group members. Charitable giving to help people in need is an important helping behaviour that has these characteristics. Therefore we hypothesized that the principle of care would be positively associated with charitable giving to help people in need, and that the principle of care would mediate the empathic concern–giving relationship. The two hypotheses were tested across four studies. The studies used four different samples, including three nationally representative samples from the American and Dutch populations, and included both self-reports of giving (Studies 1–3), giving observed in a survey experiment (Study 3), and giving observed in a laboratory experiment (Study 4). The evidence from these studies indicated that a moral principle to care for others was associated with charitable giving to help people in need and mediated the empathic concern–giving relationship.

Cooperatively Breeding Groups of Carrion Crow(Corvus Corone Corone) in Northern Spain

The Auk ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 119 (3) ◽  
pp. 790-799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Baglione ◽  
José M. Marcos ◽  
Daniela Canestrari
Keyword(s):  
Cooperative Breeding ◽  
Northern Spain ◽  
Juvenile Dispersal ◽  
Carrion Crow ◽  
Cooperatively Breeding ◽  
Corvus Corone ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Breeding Groups ◽  
Mode 3 ◽  
One Year

AbstractThe Carrion Crow (Corvus corone) is almost invariably reported as a species breeding as unassisted pairs, but a population of Carrion Crows (Corvus c. corone) from northern Spain that we have been studying since 1995 regularly exhibits cooperative breeding. The Spanish population thus demonstrates that cooperative breeding can vary greatly across populations. Most of the breeding territories (73.3%) in Spain were held by cohesive groups, which consisted of up to nine birds (mode = 3 birds). The proportion of fledglings that delayed dispersal for one year varied between 12.2 and 47.5% for different cohorts. The corresponding values for juveniles postponing dispersal for two years were 4.9 and 19.2%. Philopatry was skewed toward males. Some social groups contained immigrants. Therefore, delayed juvenile dispersal was not the only route towards sociality. Up to three helpers provided food to the nestling and at least one helper was found in all the groups surveyed. However, some group members refrained from visiting nests and thus the contribution to nestling care was highly variable among individuals.

scholarly journals Creation, evolution, and dissolution of social groups

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Flamino ◽  
Boleslaw K. Szymanski ◽  
Ashwin Bahulkar ◽  
Kevin Chan ◽  
Omar Lizardo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Group Membership ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Social ◽  
Group Members

AbstractUnderstanding why people join, stay, or leave social groups is a central question in the social sciences, including computational social systems, while modeling these processes is a challenge in complex networks. Yet, the current empirical studies rarely focus on group dynamics for lack of data relating opinions to group membership. In the NetSense data, we find hundreds of face-to-face groups whose members make thousands of changes of memberships and opinions. We also observe two trends: opinion homogeneity grows over time, and individuals holding unpopular opinions frequently change groups. These observations and data provide us with the basis on which we model the underlying dynamics of human behavior. We formally define the utility that members gain from ingroup interactions as a function of the levels of homophily of opinions of group members with opinions of a given individual in this group. We demonstrate that so-defined utility applied to our empirical data increases after each observed change. We then introduce an analytical model and show that it accurately recreates the trends observed in the NetSense data.

scholarly journals Proactive prosociality in a cooperatively breeding corvid, the azure-winged magpie ( Cyanopica cyana )

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 20160649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Horn ◽  
Clara Scheer ◽  
Thomas Bugnyar ◽  
Jorg J. M. Massen
Keyword(s):  
Cooperative Breeding ◽  
Cooperatively Breeding ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Over Time

One of the contemporary hypotheses concerning the evolution of human altruism is the cooperative breeding hypothesis (CBH) which has recently been tested in non-human primates. Using a similar paradigm, we investigated prosociality in a cooperatively breeding corvid, the azure-winged magpie. We found that the magpies delivered food to their group members at high rates, and unlike other corvids, they did so without any cues provided by others. In two control conditions, the magpies stopped participating over time, indicating that they learned to discriminate prosocial tests from controls. Azure-winged magpies are thus the first birds that experimentally show proactive prosociality. Our findings are in line with the CBH; however, additional corvid species need to be tested in this promising paradigm.

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