Monkey Fights Help Explain Tipping Points in Animal Societies by 1kiki

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Monkey Fights Help Explain Tipping Points in Animal Societies

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Sunday, February 12, 2017 00:19
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Saturday, February 11, 2017 2:42 AM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2017/02/monkey-fights-help-exp
lain-tipping-points-animal-societies

Monkey Fights Help Explain Tipping Points in Animal Societies

Previous studies of flocks, swarms, and schools suggest that animal societies may verge on a "critical" point--in other words, they are extremely sensitive and can be easily tipped into a new social regime. But exactly how far animal societies sit from the critical point and what controls that distance remain unknown.

Now an analysis of conflicts within a captive community of pigtail macaque monkeys has helped to answer these questions by showing how agitated monkeys can precipitate critical, large-scale brawls. In the study, fights were often small, involving just two or three monkeys, but sometimes grew to be very large, with as many as 30 of the 48 adults in the society. Bryan Daniels at the ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, together with David Krakauer and Jessica Flack of the Santa Fe Institute, used ideas and models from statistical mechanics to ask whether the monkeys' conflict behavior was near a critical point. They report what they found in this week's Nature Communications.

Daniels, Krakauer, and Flack discovered that the distance from the critical point can be measured in terms of the "number of monkeys" that have to become agitated to push the system over the edge. Daniels says that in this system "agitating four or five individuals at a time can cause the system to destabilize and huge fights to break out." However, Daniels says, each monkey makes a distinct contribution to group sensitivity--and these individual differences may allow distance from the critical point to be more easily controlled. Group members that break up fights can move the system away from the critical point by quelling the monkeys that contribute most to group sensitivity. Other group members, by targeting and agitating these individuals, can move the system towards the critical point and ready it for reconfiguration.

Animal societies may benefit from the group sensitivity that lets them cross critical social thresholds. Being sensitive allows for rapid adaptation--think fish switching from foraging mode to escape mode--but it can also make a society less robust to individuals' mistakes. This tradeoff between robustness and adaptability is related to distance from the critical point.

An open question is whether animal societies collectively adjust their distance from criticality, becoming less sensitive when the environment is known and more sensitive when the environment becomes less predictable. Daniels says, "I think we've just scratched the surface."

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Saturday, February 11, 2017 12:37 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Four or five individuals ... out of how many?
Does individual ranking of the agitated members make a difference?
What do they consider as "agitation"? Aggression? Fear?
What is the source of "agitation"?
What, specifically, do the peace-making individuals do?

So many interesting unanswered questions, which (in some senses) prevent this study from applicability to mass human behavior!

I think this study correlates well with historical studies, which show that the prime motivator towards war is widespread societal FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), not necessarily privation or threat.

Tyrants and wannabes know that FEAR propels a society and makes it vulnerable to control, and so they are very VERY adept at pushing the "fear" button ... finding enemies even when there are none (or not the real enemies anyway) to stampede people in the direction that "they" want.

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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

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Saturday, February 11, 2017 3:25 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

One of the funniest things I ever seen as a kid was about 20 monkeys at the zoo having a huge poo fight. They were seriously crapping in their own hands and throwing it at each other.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, February 11, 2017 4:26 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
One of the funniest things I ever seen as a kid was about 20 monkeys at the zoo having a huge poo fight. They were seriously crapping in their own hands and throwing it at each other.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

I wish I had seen that. I would prolly have laughed my ass off... quietly, since I'm pretty sure parents would have disapproved!

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"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

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Saturday, February 11, 2017 6:43 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

We were there with my Dad. Me and my bros were laughing our asses off. The old man must have found it amusing too because we probably watched it for about a half hour before getting bored and wandering off. Don't think I ever saw such a big crowd around that exhibit.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Saturday, February 11, 2017 8:11 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14301

Control of finite critical behaviour in a small-scale social system

Our analysis begins with a time series of fights from a large, captive pigtailed macaque group collected over multiple observation periods during a four month period (see ‘Methods’ section). The study group contained n=48 socially mature individuals (we exclude non-mature individuals because their behavioural strategies are still developing and so are non-stationary over short timescales) and 84 individuals in total. We find that the system does sit near a critical point, and we quantify this distance in terms of the number of individuals that would need to be perturbed to reach the point of maximal sensitivity and instability.

... we ask whether our data are consistent with any of three basic fight-joining models: (1) decisions to join fights are independent, (2) decisions to join are correlated (equilibrium model) and (3) decisions to join fights are strategic with correlations resulting from one individual joining in response to a second individual joining (dynamical branching process). We evaluate these models by determining how effectively each recovers a key social feature—the distribution of fight sizes s (ref. 13)—when parameterized by the empirical data.

(1) The independent model simply takes into account the individual fight-joining frequencies (see ‘Independent model inference’ in Methods).

(2) The correlated decision-making model (see ‘Model descriptions and justification’ in Methods) is an equilibrium maximum entropy model that fits all pair-wise correlations. The word equilibrium is used here to indicate that interactions governing fights do not change over time (stationarity) and that time within fights does not play an explicit role (simultaneity).

(3) In the dynamical branching process (see ‘Model descriptions and justification’ in Methods), the dominant causes of conflict are temporal pairwise interactions—an individual joins the current fight with some finite probability only when it sees another individual join. Fight initiation is assumed to occur at a slower timescale, when a random individual becomes aggressive. Individuals join the fight by receiving aggression from or initiating aggression against an individual already in the fight. Parameters include individual initiation parameters p0i, each denoting the relative probability that individual i begins a fight, and conditional redirection parameters pij, each denoting the probability that j joins a fight due to i having just joined.

We rule out the independent model (Supplementary Note 2). We find the empirically parameterized maximum entropy (as in prior work14) and branching process models recover the observed distribution of fight sizes, indicating that these models are mechanistically consistent with the data.

We can now use these empirically parameterized models to investigate whether the system is near critical.

The rest is technical and mathematical.

Overall, after concluding that the data fit one of two models, they evaluated the data to conclude that the overall state of the society was near a 'critical point', where the behavior of individuals could move it in the direction of either escalating or diminishing conflict.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Saturday, February 11, 2017 10:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Overall, after concluding that the data fit one of two models, they evaluated the data to conclude that the overall state of the society was near a 'critical point', where the behavior of individuals could move it in the direction of either escalating or diminishing conflict.

So there's a 100% chance that something will happen.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, February 12, 2017 12:19 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

If by 'something' you mean that the group will either become more agitated OR more peaceable, that's a good thing! Their current environment is stable (artifical), but their evolutionary environment wasn't. A group that keeps doing the same old things in the same old ways despite a changing situation is probably not going to endure.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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