Pietraszewski David, Shaw Alex
Department of Psychology, Yale University, Box 208205, New Haven, CT, 06520-8205, USA,
Hum Nat. 2015 Mar;26(1):44-72. doi: 10.1007/s12110-015-9220-0.
The Asymmetric War of Attrition (AWA) model of animal conflict in evolutionary biology (Maynard Smith and Parker in Nature, 246, 15-18, 1976) suggests that an organism's decision to withdraw from a conflict is the result of adaptations designed to integrate the expected value of winning, discounted by the expected costs that would be incurred by continuing to compete, via sensitivity to proximate cues of how quickly each side can impose costs on the other (Resource Holding Potential), and how much each side will gain by winning. The current studies examine whether human conflict expectations follow the formalized logic of this model. Children aged 6-8 years were presented with third-party conflict vignettes and were then asked to predict the likely winner. Cues of ownership, hunger, size, strength, and alliance strength were systematically varied across conditions. Results demonstrate that children's expectations followed the logic of the AWA model, even in complex situations featuring multiple, competing cues, such that the actual relative costs and benefits that would accrue during such a conflict were reflected in children's expectations. Control conditions show that these modifications to conflict expectations could not have resulted from more general experimental artifacts or demand characteristics. To test the selectivity of these effects to conflict, expectations of search effort were also assessed. As predicted, they yielded a different pattern of results. These studies represent one of the first experimental tests of the AWA model in humans and suggest that future research on the psychology of ownership, conflict, and value may be aided by formalized models from evolutionary biology.
进化生物学中动物冲突的非对称消耗战（AWA）模型（梅纳德·史密斯和帕克，《自然》，第246卷，第15 - 18页，1976年）表明，生物体决定从冲突中退出是适应性的结果，这种适应性旨在通过对双方能够多快对对方施加代价（资源持有潜力）以及获胜后双方将获得多少收益的直接线索的敏感度，来整合获胜的预期价值，并减去继续竞争所产生的预期成本。当前的研究考察了人类冲突预期是否遵循该模型的形式化逻辑。向6 - 8岁的儿童展示第三方冲突的情景，然后要求他们预测可能的获胜者。在不同条件下，所有权、饥饿程度、体型、力量和联盟强度等线索被系统地改变。结果表明，即使在具有多个相互竞争线索的复杂情况下，儿童的预期也遵循AWA模型的逻辑，以至于这种冲突中实际产生的相对成本和收益反映在儿童的预期中。控制条件表明，这些对冲突预期的改变不可能是由更一般的实验假象或需求特征导致的。为了测试这些效应对冲突的选择性，还评估了搜索努力的预期。正如预测的那样，它们产生了不同的结果模式。这些研究是对人类AWA模型的首批实验测试之一，并表明进化生物学的形式化模型可能有助于未来关于所有权、冲突和价值心理学的研究。
