ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Exploitative leaders incite intergroup warfare in a social mammal.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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21 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dwarf mongooses pre-emptively alter their behaviour relative to the threat posed by different rival groups.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Modeling the rise and demise of Classic Maya cities: Climate, conflict, and economies of scale.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Strategic use of male alternative reproductive tactics in cooperatively breeding banded mongoose groups.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Life-history and genetic relationships in cooperatively breeding dwarf mongoose groups.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- The evolution of democratic peace in animal societies.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Compromise or choose: shared movement decisions in wild vulturine guineafowl.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Leader-follower behavioural coordination and neural synchronization during intergroup conflict.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- A positive effect of cumulative intergroup threat on reproductive success.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Challenges of mismatching timescales in longitudinal studies of collective behaviour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Fitness consequences of outgroup conflict.eLife · 2022Review
- Fighting force and experience combine to determine contest success in a warlike mammal.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Leaders of war: modelling the evolution of conflict among heterogeneous groups.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Intergroup conflict: origins, dynamics and consequences across taxa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Sex bias in intergroup conflict and collective movements among social mammals: male warriors and female guides.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Key individuals catalyse intergroup violence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Variation between species, populations, groups and individuals in the fitness consequences of out-group conflict.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Evolution of warfare by resource raiding favours polymorphism in belligerence and bravery.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The ecology of wealth inequality in animal societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Review
- The dynamics of social cohesion in response to simulated intergroup conflict in banded mongooses.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Hawks, Doves, and mongooses.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Collective conflicts among humans are widespread, although often highly destructive. A classic explanation for the prevalence of such warfare in some human societies is leadership by self-serving individuals that reap the benefits of conflict while other members of society pay the costs. Here, we show that leadership of this kind can also explain the evolution of collective violence in certain animal societies. We first extend the classic hawk-dove model of the evolution of animal aggression to consider cases in which a subset of individuals within each group may initiate fights in which all group members become involved. We show that leadership of this kind, when combined with inequalities in the payoffs of fighting, can lead to the evolution of severe intergroup aggression, with negative consequences for population mean fitness. We test our model using long-term data from wild banded mongooses, a species characterized by frequent intergroup conflicts that have very different fitness consequences for male and female group members. The data show that aggressive encounters between groups are initiated by females, who gain fitness benefits from mating with extragroup males in the midst of battle, whereas the costs of fighting are borne chiefly by males. In line with the model predictions, the result is unusually severe levels of intergroup violence. Our findings suggest that the decoupling of leaders from the costs that they incite amplifies the destructive nature of intergroup conflict.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.