Fighting Assessment

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00023752%3A_____%2F19%3A43919557" target="_blank" >RIV/00023752:_____/19:43919557 - isvavai.cz</a>

Alternative codes found

RIV/00216208:11310/19:10391519

Result on the web

<a href="https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2738-1#howtocite" target="_blank" >https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2738-1#howtocite</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2738-1" target="_blank" >10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2738-1</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Fighting Assessment

Original language description

When organisms are competing for the same resource there are multiple strategies that each individual might take. They might cooperate, they might try to scramble to outcompete, they might leave and seek alternative sources, or they might aggressively compete (Duntley 2005). This last choice is a decision to inflict costs on the other and is likely made where at least one of the other strategies are available. It is therefore an interesting question to analyse when and how organisms decide to aggressively compete. While a number of factors will be at play in the wider context, such as the value of the resource and how divisible it is, for our purposes here we focus on the relative fighting abilities of the prospective combatants in a human context or as Parker (1974) describes it the decision whether to fight or not may be based upon an assessment of “relative resource holding potential.” It is possible that assessment of the other prospective candidate may be unnecessary. Arnott and Elwood (2009) report that in a variety of species, there is evidence for a pure selfassessment where the prospective combatant pays attention to its own resources and health and will only deescalate from a fight if these resources drop below some trigger point. This strategy avoids the costly effort of evaluating others. There is some evidence for use of this reduced cost strategy in humans. Taller men (Watkins et al. 2010a) or merely individuals that feel powerful in the moment (Watkins and Jones 2012; Watkins et al. 2010b) have a reduced ability to discriminate differences in male facial dominance. This suggests that their self-assessment is sufficient to at least ignore rival characteristics although not precisely evidence that self-assessment would be enough to escalate to a fight. What is more likely, however, is that human competitors mutually assess rivals before considering escalating to physical aggression. Various models exist to describe this but all involves initial low-cost sampling of the rival abilities before escalating (Arnott and Elwood 2009). In many species, agonistic conflicts with conspecifics are key determinants of access to fitness contributors like resources, territory, and mating opportunities or promotion in social hierarchy (Ellis 1995). Species that engage frequently in physical confrontations with conspecifics calibrate their behavior according to their relative fighting ability. Many such species assess fighting ability from visual, auditory, or olfactory cues. Moreover, individuals remember these assessments over time, use them to determine relative fighting ability, calibrate their assessments based on previous victories or losses in fights, and engage in ritualized behavior involving displays and mutual assessments of formidability, and these contests are frequently resolved when one of the antagonists surrenders, which prevents actual costly fights (Sell et al. 2012). Any individual that can reliably assess the chance to win a conflict in advance and that can make more sensible decisions about whether to initiate, escalate, or retreat from a potential fight is likely to obtain selective advantage. Thus, it seems likely that natural selection would have favored the evolution of cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that would facilitate assessment of fighting ability and that promote the most appropriate decisions and responses to decrease costs and increase benefits from potential confrontations. Perception of numerous socially relevant characteristics that are important in social contexts (e.g., confrontations and negotiations) are frequently determined by physical traits like conspecifics’ morphology. In many species, direct visual inspection of others’ physical size is well documented (Arnott and Elwood 2009) as primary determinant of social dominance and formidability (see Třebický and Havlíček 2017). Individuals across various taxa can recognize the relative dominance, including fighting ability, of their conspecific upon first encounter depending on displays of body size or presence and size of armaments, ranging from paper wasps (Tibbetts and Lindsay 2008), hermit crabs (Neil 1985), monitor lizards (Frýdlová et al. 2017), numerous avian species (Fretwell 1969; Senar and Camerino 1998), domestic pigs (Rushen 1987) to nonhuman primates (Bergman et al. 2009; Ghazanfar and Santos 2004).

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

50101 - Psychology (including human - machine relations)

Project

<a href="/en/project/LO1611" target="_blank" >LO1611: Sustainability for The National Institute of Mental Health</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2019

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

ISBN

978-3-319-16999-6

Number of pages of the result

11

Pages from-to

1-11

Number of pages of the book

7100

Publisher name

Springer

Place of publication

Cham

UT code for WoS chapter

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