Mentoring Women's Farmer Groups in Utilizing Yard Land as an Effort for Food Security in the Pandemic Period

The objectives of this community service are: 1. assisting women farmer groups in the use of yard land, 2. educating women farmer groups in efforts to food security during the pandemic. This community service was carried out for 3 months, namely April, May, and June 2021 through the following methods: 1) lectures by the implementation team for the Women Farmer Group in Baran village, Cawas, Klaten who attended a total of 52 people regarding food security education in during the pandemic, 2) distribution of assistance for a number of vegetable seeds to be planted in a predetermined yard, 3) assistance in planting and using vegetables as a source of family nutrition. The result of this community service is that the women in Baran Village, Cawas, Klaten who are members of the Women Farmers Group have an independent business in the form of vegetable plants as a source of nutrition that can be used as a share of crop yields: from, by, for the Woman Farmer Group members.

Hierarchical Hyperedge Embedding-Based Representation Learning for Group Recommendation

Group recommendation aims to recommend items to a group of users. In this work, we study group recommendation in a particular scenario, namely occasional group recommendation, where groups are formed ad hoc and users may just constitute a group for the first time—that is, the historical group-item interaction records are highly limited. Most state-of-the-art works have addressed the challenge by aggregating group members’ personal preferences to learn the group representation. However, the representation learning for a group is most complex beyond the aggregation or fusion of group member representation, as the personal preferences and group preferences may be in different spaces and even orthogonal. In addition, the learned user representation is not accurate due to the sparsity of users’ interaction data. Moreover, the group similarity in terms of common group members has been overlooked, which, however, has the great potential to improve the group representation learning. In this work, we focus on addressing the aforementioned challenges in the group representation learning task, and devise a hierarchical hyperedge embedding-based group recommender, namely HyperGroup. Specifically, we propose to leverage the user-user interactions to alleviate the sparsity issue of user-item interactions, and design a graph neural network-based representation learning network to enhance the learning of individuals’ preferences from their friends’ preferences, which provides a solid foundation for learning groups’ preferences. To exploit the group similarity (i.e., overlapping relationships among groups) to learn a more accurate group representation from highly limited group-item interactions, we connect all groups as a network of overlapping sets (a.k.a. hypergraph), and treat the task of group preference learning as embedding hyperedges (i.e., user sets/groups) in a hypergraph, where an inductive hyperedge embedding method is proposed. To further enhance the group-level preference modeling, we develop a joint training strategy to learn both user-item and group-item interactions in the same process. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed HyperGroup in comparison to the state-of-the-art baselines.

A Group’s Level of Defensive Functioning Affects Individual Outcomes in Group Psychodynamic-Interpersonal Psychotherapy

We used an actor–partner interdependence model (APIM) to study the association between the individual group member and other group therapy members’ defensive functioning on an individual group member’s treatment outcome. We hypothesized that (a) more adaptive individual defensive functioning at pretreatment will be significantly related to better treatment outcomes (i.e., lower binge eating and interpersonal distress) at 6 months post-treatment; and (b) more adaptive other group members’ defensive functioning at pretreatment will be significantly related to better treatment outcomes at 6 months post-treatment. Participants (N = 136) were individuals with BED enrolled in group psychodynamic-interpersonal psychotherapy (GPIP). Participants completed attachment interviews and were assessed on interpersonal distress and days binged at pre-treatment and 6 months post-treatment. The interview audio recordings were transcribed and used to code defensive functioning. We found that individual overall defensive functioning (ODF) scores at pretreatment were not significantly associated with binge-eating frequency or interpersonal distress at 6 months post treatment. Other group members’ mean ODF scores at pretreatment were significantly associated with individual interpersonal distress at 6 months post-treatment. However, the other group members’ mean ODF scores were not significantly associated with individual binge-eating outcomes at 6 months post treatment. Defensive functioning of other members of a therapy group may be particularly important for improving interpersonal functioning in individuals with BED.

Null results for the steal-framing effect on out-group aggression

Whether intergroup conflict is a necessary condition for the evolution of human prosociality has been a matter of debate. At the center of the debate is the coevolutionary model of parochial altruism—that human cooperation with in-group members has coevolved with aggression toward out-group members. Studies using the intergroup prisoner’s dilemma–maximizing difference game to test the model have repeatedly shown that people do not exhibit out-group aggression, possibly because of an inappropriate operationalization and framing of out-group aggression. The coevolutionary model predicts out-group aggression when the actor understands that it will lead to the in-group’s benefit. However, in the game, such an aspect of out-group aggression that benefits the in-group is typically not well communicated to participants. Thus, this study tested the hypothesis that out-group aggression in the game would be promoted by a framing that emphasizes that attacking out-group members enhances the in-group’s gain. Results of two laboratory experiments with 176 Japanese university students in total showed that such a framing did not promote out-group aggression and individuals invested more money to cooperate with in-group members only, avoiding the strategy of cooperating with in-group members to harm out-group members. These results do not support the coevolutionary model.

Children’s intergroup prosocial behavior: The role of group stereotypes

Children are prosocial from a young age onward but their prosocial actions are not necessarily egalitarian – especially with regard to others’ group membership. From around four years of age children tend to help and share more with in-group members compared to out-group members. However, a growing body of findings also suggest that sometimes children act more prosocially toward out-group members. How can we reconcile such seemingly contradicting behaviors? In this chapter, I describe how the salience of group stereotypes might shed light on these inconsistent findings. Specifically, different helping contexts can activate different group stereotypes. These different stereotypes could lead children to sometimes act more prosocially toward in-group peers, but sometimes show out-group bias in their helping or sharing behavior. For example, contexts that involve reciprocity could increase salience of a stereotype that out-groups are less trustworthy and thus children might be less inclined to share their resources with the out-group (i.e., in-group bias). Whereas an academic helping context might make a stereotype salient that entails out-groups are less competent and thus needing more help (i.e., out-group bias). Taking into account group stereotypes in children’s prosocial behavior will provide us with a deeper understanding of the underlying motivations that lead to selective prosociality in children. In the long run, such insights can contribute to combating discrimination and prejudice early in life.

Dominance in a socially dynamic setting: hierarchical structure and conflict dynamics in ravens' foraging groups

Dominance hierarchies typically emerge in systems where group members regularly encounter and compete for resources. In birds, the ‘open’ and dynamic structure of foraging groups may prevent the emergence of structured hierarchies, although this assumption have hardly been tested. We report on agonistic data for ravens Corvus corax , collected over two 18-month periods for 183 marked individuals of a wild (fluid) population and 51 birds from six captive (stable) groups. We show that the dominance structure (steep and transitive) in wild foraging groups is strikingly similar to that found in captivity. In the wild, we found that higher ranks are mainly occupied by males, older and more aggressive individuals that also tend to receive fewer aggressions. Exploring the mechanisms sustaining the wild dominance structure, we confirmed that males are more aggressive than females and, with age, tend to receive fewer aggressions than females. Males that are about to leave the foraging groups for some months are less aggressive than newcomers or locals, while newcomers are specifically targeted by aggressions in their first year (as juveniles). Taken together, our results indicate that the socially dynamic conditions ravens face during foraging do not hinder, but provide opportunities for, using (advanced) social cognition. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies’.

Can Status Inequality Organize Cooperation in Multi-leader Systems? An Evolutionary Theory

Status hierarchies often emerge in small collective task groups. In these groups, clearly defined hierarchies facilitate and stabilize structured cooperative interactions among group members, supporting their evolutionary function in the real world. What the existing research in this field has failed to consider, however, is that cooperation matters in these hierarchies with clear status inequality, as well as in other more realistic, multiple-leader groups with less clear hierarchies. Multi-leadership is ubiquitous but, by definition, flattens status inequality and may, in turn, jeopardize its capacity to sustain cooperation. Leveraging the relationship between multi-leadership and cooperation, our evolutionary game model reveals that hierarchies, in general, promote cooperation in groups with multiple leaders, but these hierarchies only do that up to a point, after which multi-leadership backfires. Accordingly, the model provides not only a theoretical account for how multi-leadership coexists with cooperation but also the conditions under which the coexistence would break.

Costs dictate strategic investment in dominance interactions

Dominance is important for access to resources. As dominance interactions are costly, individuals should be strategic in whom they interact with. One hypothesis is that individuals should direct costly interactions towards those closest in rank, as they have most to gain—in terms of attaining or maintaining dominance—from winning such interactions. Here, we show that male vulturine guineafowl ( Acryllium vulturinum ), a gregarious species with steep dominance hierarchies, strategically express higher-cost aggressive interactions towards males occupying ranks immediately below themselves in their group's hierarchy. By contrast, lower-cost aggressive interactions are expressed towards group members further down the hierarchy. By directly evaluating differences in the strategic use of higher- and lower-cost aggressive interactions towards competitors, we show that individuals disproportionately use highest-cost interactions—such as chases—towards males found one to three ranks below themselves. Our results support the hypothesis that the costs associated with different interaction types can determine their expression in social groups with steep dominance hierarchies. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies’.

Self-organization of collective escape in pigeon flocks

Bird flocks under predation demonstrate complex patterns of collective escape. These patterns may emerge by self-organization from local interactions among group-members. Computational models have been shown to be valuable for identifying what behavioral rules may govern such interactions among individuals during collective motion. However, our knowledge of such rules for collective escape is limited by the lack of quantitative data on bird flocks under predation in the field. In the present study, we analyze the first GPS trajectories of pigeons in airborne flocks attacked by a robotic falcon in order to build a species-specific model of collective escape. We use our model to examine a recently identified distance-dependent pattern of collective behavior: the closer the prey is to the predator, the higher the frequency with which flock members turn away from it. We first extract from the empirical data of pigeon flocks the characteristics of their shape and internal structure (bearing angle and distance to nearest neighbors). Combining these with information on their coordination from the literature, we build an agent-based model adjusted to pigeons’ collective escape. We show that the pattern of turning away from the predator with increased frequency when the predator is closer arises without prey prioritizing escape when the predator is near. Instead, it emerges through self-organization from a behavioral rule to avoid the predator independently of their distance to it. During this self-organization process, we show how flock members increase their consensus over which direction to escape and turn collectively as the predator gets closer. Our results suggest that coordination among flock members, combined with simple escape rules, reduces the cognitive costs of tracking the predator while flocking. Such escape rules that are independent of the distance to the predator can now be investigated in other species. Our study showcases the important role of computational models in the interpretation of empirical findings of collective behavior.

Third-party vocal intervention in the proboscis monkey (Nasalis larvatus)

Vocal intervention is a triadic social interaction, where a third party responds vocally to a conflict between group members, minimizing the costs of aggression in response to the intervention. Because there is little information on vocal third-party intervention in nonhuman mammals, we investigated whether adult male proboscis monkeys use the bray vocalization as a vocal third-party intervention signal to intervene in intragroup conflicts. First, we audio-recorded 1,811 vocalizations from 17 free-ranging proboscis monkey groups in the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, analyzing 378 vocal responses of the adult male to agonistic vocal exchanges (shrieks) of group members. Second, we video- and audio-recorded five habituated groups in the Labuk Bay Proboscis Monkey Sanctuary investigating the context of these vocalizations and the conflict dyads evoking vocal support. We found that adult males of one-male/multifemale groups mainly uttered bray vocalizations, whereas females, immatures, and infants uttered shrieks in intragroup conflicts or in response to other animal species. The adult male uttered significantly more often brays after agonistic shrieks than expected based on the overall occurrence of brays. Brays ended 65% of agonistic conflicts, which were accompanied by vocalizations of the conflict partners and occurred more often after conflicts between females than between offspring. This suggests that the bray functions as a vocal third-party intervention signal for intragroup conflict resolution. We suggest that living in the high canopies of the tropical rainforest might restrict direct access to conflict partners and prevent physical intervention, favoring the evolution of the bray as a third-party vocal intervention signal.