Animals that live in cooperative societies form hierarchies in which dominant individuals reap disproportionate benefits from group cooperation. The stability of these societies requires subordinates to accept their inferior status rather than engage in escalated conflict with dominants over rank. Applying the logic of animal contests to these cases predicts that escalated conflict is more like...

Mutual policing is an important mechanism that maintains social harmony in group-living organisms by suppressing the selfish behavior of individuals. In social insects, workers police one another (worker-policing) by preventing individual workers from laying eggs that would otherwise develop into males. Within the framework of Hamilton's rule there are two explanations for worker-policing behav...

Health inequality exists in this world, across, within, and between every society and in every State. These inequalities manifest themselves in a number of ways, including but not limited to malnutrition levels, chronic diseases such as diabetes, access to fresh foods, rates of incarceration, and exposure to environmental hazards. There is an association between a lower Socio-Economic Status (S...

The spatial structure of genetic diversity underlying social variation is a critical determinant of how cooperation and conflict evolve. Here we investigated whether natural social groups of the cooperative soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus harbor internal genetic and phenotypic variation and thus the potential for social conflict between interacting cells. Ten M. xanthus fruiting bodies isolat...

For people influenced by collectivistic cultures, the encounter of negative social exchanges may be particularly detrimental as harmonious and balanced interpersonal relationships are highly valued. Focusing on Asian Americans, this study examines the relative importance of three domains of negative versus positive social exchanges on psychological distress, and how acculturation-related factor...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of a firm’s strategy to invest in a conflict location. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been done before. We examine this using a standard model of international business, overlaid with the fundamental approach to corporate social responsibility. We start with the population of multinationals who have chosen to invest in low inc...

The literature on social polarization predicts that redistributive conflicts will be most intense in societies with two equally large groups. However, the effect of relative group size on the risk of onset of violent conflict remains unexplored. In this paper we study a game between a rentextracting government and an excluded social group which can explain the determinants of conflict onset and...