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Reference number: 27
The handicap principle in social collaborations | | A Zahavi | | Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel |  Our study of Arabian babblers, Turdoides squamiceps, at Hazeva in Israel helped us formulate three principles that are essential for the functioning of all collaborations -- including group-living animals, sexual pairs, and symbionts:
1. Collaboration requires advertising to attract collaborators and deter rivals. The reliability of this advertising is maintained by the Handicap Principle.
2. Members of a collaboration test each other’s commitment to the collaboration by imposing a handicap on each other. These physical impositions may be aggressive, but usually take the form of love gestures such as clumping, embracing, or even copulations that cannot produce offspring.
3. Maintaining a collaboration requires altruistic investment by members of the collaboration in the welfare of the collaboration. Such altruistic individuals increase their social prestige. Social prestige attracts collaborators; even more importantly, it asserts the quality of its bearer in a manner that deters other members of the collaboration from contending with the altruist over real benefits, such as the producing of offspring.
| | Keywords: behaviour ecology, birds, cooperation, Turdoides squamiceps |
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| | This talk is part of symposium/workshop number 48: Plenary Presentations |
| | Direct link to this abstract: http://www.behav.org/IEC/default.php?proc=search&search=a_num&id=27 |
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