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

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 trade-off 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 soci

SUBMITTER: Aubier TG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9019516 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature