Meeting Abstract
Conflict is an inherent part of social life in group-living species. In many species, there is strong selection for group members to manage conflict through the use of submissive and affiliative behaviours, which can stabilize the dominance hierarchy and foster group cohesion. The amount of conflict present in a group, as well as the way in which conflict is managed, likely varies with the personality of the individuals in the group and the extent to which group members are willing to engage in aggressive interactions and to resolve such interactions. To investigate the role of personality in intragroup behavioral interactions, we conducted boldness, aggression, and exploration assays on individual Neolamprologus pulcher, a cooperatively breeding fish. We then put these fish into small groups to understand how individual personality influences behavioural dynamics among dominant and subordinate group members. We found that both aggression and exploration/boldness were correlated with interactions among group members. For example, dominant females who scored higher in the mirror-directed aggression trials were less aggressive and more submissive to their mate, whereas dominant male personality was not significantly correlated with his behavioral interactions with other group members. Similarly, subordinates who scored higher in the aggression trials were more submissive to dominants in the group. This suggests that mirror-directed aggression assays may be poor measures of how aggressive individuals actually are within social groups, but instead may measure social competence: socially competent individuals are highly aggressive when interacting against a perfectly matched opponent (i.e. themselves), but more submissive when interacting with dominant individuals.
