Embracing the complexity of cooperation

During the 1950s, the landmark Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that when groups must compete with one another, intergroup conflict, hostility, and even violence may result. At the Oklahoman summer camp, two troops of boys—termed the Rattlers and the Eagles—took part in a week-long tournament. During this time, their negativity culminated in derogatory name-calling, fistfights, and even vandalism and destruction of property. However, this work also revealed that such tension...

The principle of virtual work is an essential concept in the field of mechanics and engineering. This is used to solve problems related to the equilibrium of a structure or system. It is based on the assumption that if a system is in equilibrium, the work done by all the forces during a virtual displacement is zero. This principle is applied by considering virtual displacements of the system and the corresponding work done by internal and external forces.
To apply the principle of virtual work,...

Cooperative allosteric transitions can occur in multimeric proteins, where each subunit of the protein has its own ligand-binding site. When a ligand binds to any of these subunits, it triggers a conformational change that affects the binding sites in the other subunits; this can change the affinity of the other sites for their respective ligands. The ability of the protein to change the shape of its binding site is attributed to the presence of a mix of flexible and stable segments in the...

Effective problem-solving consists of two steps: 1. identifying the problem and 2. selecting the appropriate problem-solving strategy (i.e., a plan of action used to find a solution). Humans use four problem-solving strategies:

Another way in which a group presence can affect performance is social loafing—the exertion of less effort by a person working together with a group. Social loafing occurs when our individual performance cannot be evaluated separately from the group. Thus, group performance declines on easy tasks (Karau & Williams, 1993). Essentially individual group members loaf and let other group members pick up the slack. Because each individual’s efforts cannot be evaluated,...

Groups of proteins may form a complex where each protein in this complex has a different role in the overall execution of the complex’s function. Often some of the proteins in the complex can be replaced by a closely related variant to give a complex that contains many of the same components yet is functionally distinct.
The SCF ubiquitin ligase is a protein complex of five individual proteins. This complex attaches ubiquitin to other target proteins to mark them for degradation. In order...