Pieter Van den Berg

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Department of Biology

In this chapter, we discuss the links between evolutionary game theory and personality research. Evolutionary game theory is a set of research methods used to investigate the evolution of social behavior, whereas personality research is mainly focused on comprehensively describing individual differences and their correlates. Until recently, these r...

Significance We report on a two-step decision-making experiment. The first part shows that humans differ consistently in the way they learn from others. Some individuals are success-based learners, who try to identify successful peers and mimic their behavior. Others are frequency-based learners, who tend to adopt the most frequent behavior in thei...

Social learning has allowed humans to build up extensive cultural repertoires, enabling them to adapt to a wide variety of environmental and social conditions. However, it is unclear which social learning strategies people use, especially in social contexts where their payoffs depend on the behaviour of others. Here we show experimentally that indi...

In human societies, parents often have a strong influence on the mate choice of their offspring. Moreover, empirical studies show that conflict over mate choice between parents and offspring is widespread across human cultures. Here we provide the first theoretical investigation into this conflict, showing that it may result from an underlying evol...

Lab experiments on punishment are of limited relevance for understanding cooperative behavior in the real world. In real interactions, punishment is not cheap, but the costs of punishment are of a different nature than in experiments. They do not correspond to direct payments or payoff deductions, but they arise from the repercussions punishment ha...

Candida auris is an emergent human fungal pathogen of growing concern due to common drug resistance to all major antifungal drug classes. Although resistance to amphotericin B (AMB) has been detected in 30 to 60% of clinical isolates of C. auris , mechanisms of AMB resistance remain poorly characterized. Here we present a large-scale investigation...

The increased prevalence of antifungal drug resistance and emergence of multidrug-resistant species such as Candida auris represent a global public health threat. By mapping drug susceptibility responses of experimentally evolved C. auris across diverse antifungals, we found trends of cross-resistance (XR) and collateral sensitivity (CS) and show t...

Human ecological success is often attributed to our unrivalled capacity for social learning, which facilitates the spread of adaptive behaviours through populations. All humans rely on social learning to acquire culture, but there is substantial variation across societies, between individuals and over developmental time. However, it is unclear why...

Social insects owe their widespread success to their ability to efficiently coordinate behaviour to carry out complex tasks. Several leaf-cutter ant species employ an advanced type of division of labour known as task partitioning, where the task of retrieving leaves is distributed between workers that cut and drop and those that collect the fallen...

Cooperative behaviour can evolve through conditional strategies that direct cooperation towards interaction partners who have themselves been cooperative in the past. Such strategies are common in human cooperation, but they can be vulnerable to manipulation: individuals may try to exaggerate their past cooperation to elicit reciprocal contribution...

Cultural evolution requires the social transmission of information. For this reason, scholars have emphasized social learning when explaining how and why culture evolves. Yet cultural evolution results from many mechanisms operating in concert. Here, we argue that the emphasis on social learning has distracted scholars from appreciating both the fu...

When humans engage in social interactions, they are often uncertain about what the possible outcomes are. Because of this, highly sophisticated cooperation strategies may not be very effective. Indeed, some models instead predict the emergence of ‘social heuristics’: simple cooperation strategies that perform well across a range of different situat...

Enmeshed in various social structures, humans must often weigh their own interest against the interest of others—including the common interest of groups they belong to. The Public Goods Game (PGG), which succinctly pits individual interest against group interest, has been a staple of research into how people make such decisions. It has been studied...

Individuals are faced with a number of major decisions throughout their lives, including the choice of a suitable education, career, and life partner. Making such major life decisions is challenging, as is evidenced by substantial rates of divorce and drop-out from higher education. Although poor major life decisions can lead to considerable costs...

Paternity testing using genetic markers has shown that extra-pair paternity (EPP) is common in many pair-bonded species [1, 2]. Evolutionary theory and empirical data show that extra-pair copulations can increase the fitness of males as well as females [3, 4]. This can carry a significant fitness cost for the social father, who then invests in rear...

Individuals face many types of social interactions throughout their lives, but they often cannot perfectly assess what the consequences of their actions will be. Although it is known that unpredictable environments can profoundly affect the evolutionary process, it remains unclear how uncertainty about the nature of social interactions shapes the e...

The migration of people between different cultures has affected cultural change throughouthistory. To understand this process, cross-cultural psychologists have used the‘acculturation’framework, classifying‘acculturation orientations’along two dimensions: the willingness tointeract with culturally different individuals, and the inclination to retai...

The success or failure of human collective action often depends on the cooperation tendencies of individuals in groups, and on the information that individuals have about each other’s cooperativeness. However, it is unclear whether these two factors have an interactive effect on cooperation dynamics. Using a decision-making experiment, we confirm t...

Determinants of cooperation in fixed groups. Both models present estimates of a Linear Mixed Model fit to individual contributions in stage 2, with ‘subject nested in group’ as a random effect. Model 1 focuses on the effects of assortment by comparing the Uniformed Assortment and the Uniformed Random treatments. ‘Uninformed Random’ and ‘tier 4’ are...

Objective Evolutionary theory has shown that seeking out extrapair paternity (EPP) can be a viable reproductive strategy for both sexes in pair-bonded species, also in humans. As yet, estimates of the contemporary or historical EPP rate in human population are still rare. In the present study, we estimated the historical EPP rate in the Dutch popul...

Making a suitable career choice is a difficult task. Every year, many adolescents prematurely end their studies, commonly citing “having made the wrong choice” as the main reason. This is a problem, both for the adolescents making these choices, and for society, which bears at least part of the cost of higher education. A thorough understanding of...

In many cultures, parents have a strong (if not complete) influence on the mate choice of their offspring. Arranged marriages are a clear example of this. Research across cultures has shown that parents and their offspring do not agree about the importance of various characteristics in a mate. For example, offspring find it more important that thei...

In many modern societies adolescents are expected to make crucial choices for their future career path. In order to develop suitable career commitments it is necessary to explore both broadly and in-depth, and determine how well an option could fit with own interests and capabilities. Recently, the negative side of exploration processes has been em...

Human social behaviour changes over the generations. Those changes are either genetic or cultural in nature. Both can be studied as evolutionary processes, in which innovations spread through the transmission between individuals. This thesis an an exploration, in which the genetic and cultural evolution of social behaviour is studied in mutiple way...

Many experiments on human cooperation have revealed that individuals differ systematically in their tendency to cooperate with others. It has also been shown that individuals condition their behaviour on the overall cooperation level of their peers. Yet, little is known about how individuals respond to heterogeneity in cooperativeness in their neig...

Making a suitable career choice is a difficult task. Every year, many adolescents prematurely end their studies, commonly citing 'having made the wrong choice' as the main reason. This is a problem, both for the adolescents making these choices, and for society, which bears at least part of the cost of higher education. A thorough understanding of...

Studies aimed at explaining the evolution of phenotypic traits have often solely focused on fitness considerations, ignoring underlying mechanisms. In recent years, there has been an increasing call for integrating mechanistic perspectives in evolutionary considerations, but it is not clear whether and how mechanisms affect the course and outcome o...

Evolutionary computer simulations are an important part of the theoretical biologist's toolkit (Peck, 2004; DeAngelis & Mooij, 2005; Kokko, 2007), offering insights into a range of fundamental evolutionary processes, not least sexual selection (e.g. van Doorn & Weissing 2004, 2006; Fawcett et al., 2007, 2011; van Doorn et al., 2009; reviewed in Kui...

Repression of competition (RC) within social groups has been suggested as a key mechanism driving the evolution of cooperation, because it aligns the individual's proximate interest with the interest of the group. Despite its enormous potential for explaining cooperation across all levels of biological organization, ranging from fair meiosis, to po...

Selection on grandparental investment is more complex than Coall & Hertwig (C&H) propose. Patterns of investment are subject to an intergenerational conflict over how resources should be distributed to maximize fitness. Grandparents may be selected to distribute resources unevenly, while their descendants will be selected to manipulate investment i...