Abstract
The Asymmetric War of Attrition (AWA) model of animal conflict in evolutionary biology (Maynard Smith and Parker in Nature, 246, 15–18, 1976) suggests that an organism’s decision to withdraw from a conflict is the result of adaptations designed to integrate the expected value of winning, discounted by the expected costs that would be incurred by continuing to compete, via sensitivity to proximate cues of how quickly each side can impose costs on the other (Resource Holding Potential), and how much each side will gain by winning. The current studies examine whether human conflict expectations follow the formalized logic of this model. Children aged 6–8 years were presented with third-party conflict vignettes and were then asked to predict the likely winner. Cues of ownership, hunger, size, strength, and alliance strength were systematically varied across conditions. Results demonstrate that children’s expectations followed the logic of the AWA model, even in complex situations featuring multiple, competing cues, such that the actual relative costs and benefits that would accrue during such a conflict were reflected in children’s expectations. Control conditions show that these modifications to conflict expectations could not have resulted from more general experimental artifacts or demand characteristics. To test the selectivity of these effects to conflict, expectations of search effort were also assessed. As predicted, they yielded a different pattern of results. These studies represent one of the first experimental tests of the AWA model in humans and suggest that future research on the psychology of ownership, conflict, and value may be aided by formalized models from evolutionary biology.
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Notes
Other factors include how much each contestant values the welfare of the other (see Cosmides and Tooby 2013; Lukaszewski 2013; Sell 2005, 2011; von Rueden et al. 2008) and whether the conflict falls within the bounds of formal and informal social contracts (reflected in the folk constructs of morality, reciprocity, and fairness: Adams 1965; DeScioli and Kurzban 2009, 2013; Neary and Friedman 2013; Shaw 2013; Shaw et al. 2012; Tooby and Cosmides 1988, 2010).
Natural selection “tunes” proximate systems to generate conflict persistence thresholds designed around recurrent situations in which net costs would not exceed net benefits on average, as dictated by the dynamics of that species’ evolutionary history. Although at first glance it may appear simple, calculating optimal cost/benefit persistence thresholds is intractable without considering both game-theoretical dynamics (what you do depends on what others do) and also population-level feedback loops (costs and benefits change depending on the frequency and distribution of resources, severity of fights, number of owners versus non-owners, and so on; reviewed in Kokko 2013). These complexities need not be calculated within individual organisms, however (and it is unlikely the full set of dynamics is visible to any one organism within a single lifespan in any case). Instead, these complexities play out in the environment over evolutionary time, and natural selection produces phenotypes that generate persistence thresholds which de facto take them into account (by virtue of how they are designed to contingently interact with the environment, including design for cue-based ontogenetic calibration).
For simplicity we collapse several different animal conflict models, including the Hawk/Dove (or Hawk/Mouse) model, and within war of attrition models the Sequential Assessment Model, the Energetic War of Attrition, and the Cumulative Assessment Model. For an overview of the differences between these models see Hardy and Briffa 2013.
Decision rules involving conflict are one part of a larger class of cognitive adaptations for resolving conflicts of interest and negotiating costs and benefits (e.g., Sell 2005; Tooby and Cosmides 2010). These adaptations enable the creation of socially negotiated agreements, such as allowing disinterested third parties to enforce property disputes and the establishment of different norms and expectations for different kinds of resources within a community (see Stake 2004 for a discussion of evolutionary models as a framework for understanding the folk and legal constructs of ownership, possession, and the codification of resource allocation; also Hirshleifer 2001). Because these negotiated rules attempt to dampen the conflict (and particularly to penalize the influence of physical RHP) in modern Western societies, it was desirable to assess expectations in a younger sample. If and how these expectations differ across cohorts, cultures, and resource types are interesting empirical questions.
Whether or not ownership in fact reflects an uncorrelated (payoff-independent) asymmetry in any species, including humans, is an open empirical question (Kokko 2013), particularly if the reputational effects of ownership have long-term fitness effects (which would cause ownership to become a value determinant). For the purposes of the current paper, none of the predictions of the AWA model depend on whether cues of ownership are considered by proximate systems because they reflect a selective history of cost-saving convention or because they are also RHP and/or value correlates. However, these different selective histories do make different design predictions about the proximate psychology of ownership, and will need to be adjudicated in future research.
“Value” here refers to expected fitness benefits (an ultimate description), not the motivational settings or phenomenology of a psychological system (a proximate description). It is important to distinguish between proximate and ultimate here because it is likely that RHP and ownership—even in the absence of ultimate value differences (or fitness payoffs)—create the proximate phenomenological experience of valuation (i.e., having more of an attachment to, caring about, and wanting to retain a resource).
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Pietraszewski, D., Shaw, A. Not by Strength Alone. Hum Nat 26, 44–72 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-015-9220-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-015-9220-0