Incentives for intergroup tolerance and association: A call for increased attention in evolutionary anthropological research
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Anthropology, Ecology, Evolutionary Studies
- Keywords
- Tolerance, Intergroup encounters, Intergroup contact, Hominoids, Primate behavior, Sociality
- Copyright
- © 2018 Pisor et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Incentives for intergroup tolerance and association: A call for increased attention in evolutionary anthropological research. PeerJ Preprints 6:e3400v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3400v3
Abstract
Primate individuals use a variety of strategies in intergroup encounters, from aggression to tolerance; however, recent focus on the evolution of either warfare or peace has come at the cost of characterizing this variability. We identify evolutionary advantages that may incentivize tolerance toward extra-group individuals in humans and non-human primates, including enhanced benefits in the domains of transfer and mating, food acquisition, inclusive fitness, and repeated interactions with an extra-group member. We highlight the role these factors play in the plasticity of gorilla, chimpanzee, and bonobo behavior. Humans have an especially broad range of plastic intergroup behavior. We explore how the human foraging ecology, especially large geographic and temporal fluctuations in resource availability, may have selected for a greater reliance on between-community relationships – relationships reinforced by status acquisition and cultural institutions. We conclude by urging careful, theoretically-motivated study of behavioral flexibility in intergroup encounters in humans, gorillas, and bonobos.
Author Comment
This paper is under review at Evolutionary Anthropology. We have reworked this paper to enhance our unique contributions to the larger literature. This included removing sections discussing selection pressures incentivizing or disincentivizing aggressive behavior. We instead acknowledge existing reviews that have given detailed treatment to this topic than we had in our previous versions of this paper and use the extra space to unpack the question of why natural selection would, given selection pressures disfavoring intergroup aggression, favor intergroup tolerant encounters and association. Per reviewer comments, we have expanded our treatment of humans in the paper, especially why humans have such a high prevalence of intergroup tolerant encounters and association relative to other group-living apes. We both discuss why human adaptations may have necessitated this risk-buffering strategy, and how existing data from the social sciences support this claim. We have also included (1) more explicit treatment of the role of inclusive fitness and the benefits of predicting out-group member behavior, (2) discussion of the potential for social status and cultural institutions to bolster intergroup relationships in humans, and (3) explicit recognition of our theoretical approach (namely, a socioecological perspective, including the assumption of optimal behavioral responses to social and ecological change).