Human third-party observers accurately track fighting skill and vigour along their unique paths to victory

Sexual selection via male-male contest competition has shaped the evolution of agonistic displays, weaponry, and fighting styles, and is further argued to have shaped human psychological mechanisms to detect, process, and respond appropriately to cues of fighting ability. Drawing on the largest fight-specific dataset to date across the sports and biological sciences (N = 2,765), we examined how different indicators of fighting ability in humans reflect unique paths to victory and indicate different forms of perceived and actual resource-holding power (RHP). Overall, we discovered that: (1) both striking skill and vigour, and grappling skill and vigour, individually and collectively predict RHP; (2) different RHP indicators are distinguished by a unique path to victory (e.g., striking skill is a knockout-typical strategy, whereas grappling vigour is a submission-typical strategy); and (3) third-party observers accurately track fighting skill and vigour along their unique paths to victory. Our argument that different measures of RHP are associated with unique paths to victory, and third-party observers accurately track fighting vigour and skill along their unique paths to victory, advance our understanding not only of human contest competition, but animal contest theory more broadly.

Perceived and actual fighting ability: determinants of success by decision, knockout or submission in human combat sports

Animal contest theory assumes individuals to possess accurate information about their own fighting ability or resource-holding potential (RHP) and, under some models, that of their opponent. However, owing to the difficulty of disentangling perceived and actual RHP in animals, how accurately individuals are able to assess RHP remains relatively unknown. Furthermore, it is not just individuals within a fight that evaluate RHP. Third-party observers evaluate the fight performance of conspecifics in order to make behavioural decisions. In human combat sports, when fights remain unresolved at the end of the allotted time, bystanders take a more active role, with judges assigning victory based on their assessment of each fighter's performance. Here, we use fight data from mixed martial arts in order to investigate whether perceived fighting performance (judges' decisions) and actual fighting success (fights ending in knockout or submission) are based on the same performance traits, specifically striking skill and vigour. Our results indicate that both performance traits are important for victory, but that vigour is more important for fights resolved via decision, even though the effect of vigour is enhanced by skill. These results suggest that while similar traits are important for fighting success across the board, vigour is overvalued in judges' perceptions of RHP.

Cybernetic combatants support the importance of duels in the evolution of extreme weapons

A current evolutionary hypothesis predicts that the most extreme forms of animal weaponry arise in systems where combatants fight each other one-to-one, in duels. It has also been suggested that arms races in human interstate conflicts are more likely to escalate in cases where there are only two opponents. However, directly testing whether duels matter for weapon investment is difficult in animals and impossible in interstate conflicts. Here, we test whether superior combatants experience a disproportionate advantage in duels, as compared with multi-combatant skirmishes, in a system analogous to both animal and military contests: the battles fought by artificial intelligence agents in a computer war game. We found that combatants with experimentally improved fighting power had a large advantage in duels, but that this advantage deteriorated as the complexity of the battlefield was increased by the addition of further combatants. This pattern remained under the two different forms of the advantage granted to our focal artificial intelligence (AI) combatants, and became reversed when we switched the roles to feature a weak focal AI among strong opponents. Our results suggest that one-on-one combat may trigger arms races in diverse systems. These results corroborate the outcomes of studies of both animal and interstate contests, and suggest that elements of animal contest theory may be widely applicable to arms races generally.

The 2019 European Parliament election in the UK

This article examines the 2019 European Parliament election in the UK. The main beneficiaries were the newly formed Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats, both of which ran on clear Brexit platforms, while the Conservatives and Labour struggled to attract support. But the Brexit focus of the campaign – and the victory of parties with clear positions on these issues – belied the extent to which the election conformed to the expectations of second-order contest theory, with low turnout, declining support for the governing (Conservative) party, a surge in support for new and small parties, and scant discussion of European Union-level issues. While the vote shows realignment in the UK continues and can tell us much about the shifting politics of Brexit, we should be cautious inferring much from the victory of the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats given the second-order nature of the contest.

Leadership competencies and job satisfaction among Aviation employees of Pakistan International airline (PIA)

Job satisfaction and leadership style has always been tested and correlated in the past to understand the impact of the leadership on the degree of job satisfaction of employees. Since the passage of time employee satisfaction has become a great aspect of organizational success, therefore, different theories of management and leadership have been proposed. In the recent contest, theory of leadership competencies has been developed that measures the different competencies of the managers and leaders. In the current study, three independent variables namely emotional quotient (EQ), intelligence quotient (IQ), and managerial quotient (MQ) are being tested on the employee’s job satisfaction level of PIA. Data was gathered by questionnaires and 212 responses were received. SPSS were applied for analysis of data and there is a confirming connection amid job satisfaction and the EQ, MQ, and IQ of PIA employees along with the positive relationship between the Leadership competencies (LC) and the job satisfaction and lastly the significant relationship between job satisfactions.

The media contest during the Iran–Iraq war: The failure of mediatized Shiʿism

This article explains why Iran was unsuccessful in its efforts to persuade Shiʿi Iraqis to support Iran during the critical early years of the Iran–Iraq war. Analysis of Iranian and Iraqi framing communicated to that target population shows Iran failed due to both structural and cultural factors. Its media strategy lacked reach and variety and it misunderstood the cultural identity of Shiʿi Iraqis. The author makes use of original archive material of radio transcripts from 1981–1983 as well as other primary sources and historical accounts. The research makes an original theoretical contribution by applying media contest theory to a military confrontation between two sovereign states, rather than between a state ‘authority’ facing a non-state ‘challenger’. The findings have implications for considering how Iran today may communicate more effectively beyond its borders through regional media strategies and thus the viability of a mediatized Shiʿism.