The Journal of Young Investigators: An Undergraduate, Peer-Reviewed Science Journal

02 September 2005 - Researchers from the University of Leicester are preparing a yearlong study that will investigate cooperative behavior, and attempt to explain how it evolves in human and animal populations.

Andrew Colman, a professor of psychology at the University of Leicester and lead researcher on the study, uses principles of game theory to study the evolution of social behavior.

Initially developed in the 1940s to study the strategies of games like poker and chess, game theory can be used to explain how the “strategies” employed by individuals trying to maximize their reproductive success depend on the actions of individuals they interact with.

Most of the previous research in this area has focused on games such as the classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma”, in which two individuals benefit by performing the same action (cooperating), but benefit most by defecting, or not cooperating, at the other individual’s expense. After repeated interactions, however, the individuals will benefit more in the long run by cooperating.

What the Prisoner’s Dilemma cannot explain, however, is the situation in which two individuals benefit by performing alternating, opposite actions in a coordinated manner, often unconsciously.

An example of this behavior in the animal kingdom involves penguins and how they raise their young. While one penguin stays with the egg, keeping it warm, the other penguin goes to the ocean to feed. They continue to switch shifts until the baby is old enough to care for itself. The baby is protected from the cold and neither penguin has to starve in the process. This is precisely the type of social behavior Colman endeavors to study and, hopefully, to explain how it evolves in a population.

Since natural selection acts on the individual, it was originally thought that the strongest, most successful individuals were those that could survive on their own, without help from others. However, this is not always the case:

“[Coordinated turn taking] does not apply to all types of interactions,” says Colman. “In many cases the standard individualist assumptions are quite right, but it turns out to apply to certain quite common types of interaction that can be defined in terms of game theory. We have already shown that coordinated turn-taking can evolve without any explicit negotiation, from quite primitive rules of behavior."

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