Skip to main content
bioRxiv
  • Home
  • About
  • Submit
  • ALERTS / RSS
Advanced Search
New Results

Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships

View ORCID ProfileThomas G. Aubier, View ORCID ProfileHanna Kokko
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.01.462760
Thomas G. Aubier
1Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
2Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • ORCID record for Thomas G. Aubier
  • For correspondence: thomas.aubier@normalesup.org
Hanna Kokko
1Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
3Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • ORCID record for Hanna Kokko
  • Abstract
  • Full Text
  • Info/History
  • Metrics
  • Supplementary material
  • Preview PDF
Loading

ABSTRACT

Cooperation does not occur in a vacuum: interactions develop over time in social groups that undergo demographic changes. Intuition suggests that stable social environments favour developing few but strong reciprocal relationships (a ‘focused’ strategy), while volatile social environments favour the opposite: more but weaker social relationships (a ‘diversifying’ strategy). We model reciprocal investments under a quality-quantity tradeoff for social relationships. We find that volatility, counterintuitively, can favour a focused strategy. This result becomes explicable through applying the theory of antagonistic pleiotropy, originally developed for senescence, to social life. Diversifying strategies show superior performance later in life, but with costs paid at young ages while the social network is slowly being built. Under volatile environments, many individuals die before reaching sufficiently old ages to reap the benefits. Social strategies that do well early in life are then favoured: a focused strategy leads individuals to form their first few social bonds quickly and to make strong use of existing bonds. Our model highlights the importance of pleiotropy and population age structure for the evolution of cooperative strategies and other social traits, and shows that it is not sufficient to reflect on the fate of survivors only, when evaluating the benefits of social strategies.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
Back to top
PreviousNext
Posted February 11, 2022.
Download PDF

Supplementary Material

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships
(Your Name) has forwarded a page to you from bioRxiv
(Your Name) thought you would like to see this page from the bioRxiv website.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Share
Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships
Thomas G. Aubier, Hanna Kokko
bioRxiv 2021.10.01.462760; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.01.462760
Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo LinkedIn logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
Volatile social environments can favour investments in quality over quantity of social relationships
Thomas G. Aubier, Hanna Kokko
bioRxiv 2021.10.01.462760; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.01.462760

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Subject Area

  • Evolutionary Biology
Subject Areas
All Articles
  • Animal Behavior and Cognition (4654)
  • Biochemistry (10299)
  • Bioengineering (7614)
  • Bioinformatics (26191)
  • Biophysics (13448)
  • Cancer Biology (10620)
  • Cell Biology (15344)
  • Clinical Trials (138)
  • Developmental Biology (8453)
  • Ecology (12755)
  • Epidemiology (2067)
  • Evolutionary Biology (16765)
  • Genetics (11356)
  • Genomics (15400)
  • Immunology (10548)
  • Microbiology (25041)
  • Molecular Biology (10152)
  • Neuroscience (54099)
  • Paleontology (398)
  • Pathology (1655)
  • Pharmacology and Toxicology (2877)
  • Physiology (4314)
  • Plant Biology (9197)
  • Scientific Communication and Education (1581)
  • Synthetic Biology (2541)
  • Systems Biology (6752)
  • Zoology (1452)