Models of social conflict in animal societies generally assume that within-group conflict reduces the value of a communal resource. For many animals, however, the primary cost of conflict is increased mortality. We develop a simple inclusive fitness model of social conflict that takes this cost into account. We show that longevity substantially reduces the level of within-group conflict, which ...

Recent theory in social evolution has been mainly concerned with competition and cooperation within social groups of animals and their impact on the stability of those groups. Much less attention has been paid to conflicts arising as a result of solitary floaters (outsiders) attempting to join groups of established residents (insiders). We model such conflicts over group-membership using a demo...

This study modeled teacher-student relationship trajectories throughout elementary school to predict gains in achievement in an ethnic-diverse sample of 657 academically at-risk students (mean age = 6.57 years, SD = .39). Teacher reports of warmth and conflict were collected in Grades 1-5. Achievement was tested in Grades 1 and 6. For conflict, low-stable (normative), low-increasing, high-decli...

Conflict is competition by groups or individuals over incompatible goals, scarce resources, or the sources of power needed to acquire them. This competition is also determined by individuals’ perceptions of goals, resources, and power, and such perceptions may differ greatly among individuals. One determinant of perception is culture, the socially inherited, shared and learned ways of living po...

Group behavior is an important feature of conflict scenarios. Often such groups are chaotically organized, but their ideals are sociologically embedded across members such that the group has expected behavior that can represent a major threat. Therefore being able to model the evolution of groups on a generative basis, to anticipate their possible mutation, is valuable. However this is complex ...

This research investigates the moderating effect of social capital on the conflict–innovation relationship and poses the argument that social interaction amplifies the beneficial effect of task conflict and the harmful effect of relationship conflict, whereas trust suppresses these effects. Analyses of a sample of 232 Canadian-based firms demonstrate that at higher levels of social interaction,...

Realists in international relations and realistic conflict theorists in social psychology argue that the perception of threat in intergroup conflict is a function of power asymmetries between groups. In contrast, social constructivists and social identity theorists argue that a shared sense of identity can reduce perceptions of intergroup threat. In this article, we test these competing argumen...

The paper analyses a model where the fight for the appropriation of rents from natural resources between two groups leads to multiple equilibria. The possibility to be trapped into the low-income equilibrium, characterized by strong social conflict (civil war) and stagnation of income, increases with the weakness of political institutions, the population growth rate, the amount of rents from na...