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Rudolf Agricola School for Sustainable DevelopmentPart of University of Groningen
Rudolf Agricola School for Sustainable Development
Bringing sustainability science forward
Rudolf Agricola School Onderzoek Risk, Crises and Resilience

Call for Interdisciplinary Participation

The Evolution and Functioning of Social Groups

Call to join interdisciplinary workgroups

Social groups, such as human teams, schools of fish, or even swarms of drones, are studied across disciplines, including social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, economics), humanities (e.g., law, philosophy, international relations), and natural sciences (e.g., biology, mathematics, computer sciences). Social groups are the basic building blocks of human and animal societies, and many University of Groningen (UG) researchers are interested in topics concerning the sociality of humans and other animals. Understanding the evolution and functioning of social groups requires interdisciplinary approaches, but researchers who study similar topics are located in different disciplines and may never meet or realize the overlap or complementarity in their approaches to the study of social groups. 

To stimulate cross-disciplinary collaboration on the theme of social groups within UG, the Agricola school for sustainable development (within the theme of Risk, Crises, and Resilience) will start four interdisciplinary workgroups. The aim of these workgroups is to stimulate interdisciplinary work, including work on collaborative research projects and papers, grant proposals, and teaching. The set-up and working arrangements are open to the eventual participants of each workgroup. The workgroups are open to UG researchers with an interest in one of the four topics:

  • Cooperation

  • Opinion dynamics

  • Culture-nature dynamics

  • Emergence of social structure

More information about these the workgroups can be found below.

You can sign up for a workgroup. If you are a UG researcher and are interested in interdisciplinary work on one of these topics, you can register for a workgroup by following this link. Please sign up before the end of the month of October.

Further information can be obtained from Bernard Nijstad (b.a.nijstad rug.nl).


The four topics are:

1.Cooperation (workgroup lead: Daniel Redhead, sociology). 

Cooperation is a central feature of animal social life, yet it poses a fundamental puzzle: why and how do individuals work together when they might gain more from acting in their own self-interest? Understanding cooperation requires us to pinpoint and examine the mechanisms that motivate individuals to pay a personal cost for the benefit of another individual, and that enable individuals to align their actions in a way that will benefit the group—as well as the factors that undermine cooperative behaviour, such as competition and conflict. This workgroup will explore cooperation through an interdisciplinary lens at multiple levels of analysis, ranging from small-scale interactions (e.g., within families, teams, or friendships) to large-scale cultural and ecological challenges (e.g., climate action, global governance, and technological innovation). Relevant perspectives include psychology and behavioural economics (e.g., trust, social dilemmas, game theory, experiments), evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology (e.g., cooperation ‘in the wild’, evolutionary game theory), philosophy and law (e.g., fairness, norms, justice), and computer science (e.g., computational models of cooperation, networked systems). The aim is to understand when and why cooperation might succeed or fail, and how it can be fostered across contexts to promote resilient and sustainable societies.

2. Opinion dynamics (workgroup lead: Maja Graso, psychology). 

We are interested in exploring the meaning of truth/s, trust, and opinions at three levels: individuals, communities, and scholarship itself. At the individual level, we ask why people trust some authorities but distrust others, how personal opinions evolve, and how deception and deceptive language shape belief. We also examine how individuals defend their views, how disagreements arise, and what happens when certain opinions are legitimized while others are marginalized. At the community level, we consider how opinions, rumors, or disinformation spread, how polarization takes hold, and how groups are affected when divisions deepen. At the scholarly level, we reflect on our own practices: Are current approaches too rigid, selective, or driven by popular trends? Are we sometimes too quick to decide which views are worth prioritizing, and how can we be sure our dedication will not itself create unintended consequences? Across these levels, we are concerned with the impact of intervention: how effective are efforts to correct or redirect opinions, and do they sometimes carry hidden costs? Our group seeks to challenge one another and uncover blind spots, not only in the questions we ask but also in why and how we ask them. We welcome contributors who approach these themes with both curiosity and self-reflection. 

3.Culture-Nature dynamics (workgroup lead: Inanna Hamati-Ataya, global political anthropology). 

The functioning and evolution of human civilisation and its various societies cannot be understood independently of the parameters and processes governing human communities’ natural environments, which are in turn constantly shaped and reorganised by human cultural outputs. Culture-nature dynamics have far-ranging implications for our understanding of present social, cultural, biological, and environmental phenomena, from the emergence of particular social institutions to adaptive and maladaptive behaviours or anthropogenic environmental change. Understanding the history of such phenomena and extrapolating their future trajectories requires sustained interdisciplinary conversations and investigations across various domains of knowledge and disciplines that remain too rigidly separated in contemporary academic research and teaching. This group invites researchers interested in culture-nature dynamics operating at global, regional, or local levels to explore common themes of interest productively across disciplinary traditions, with the aim of both developing joint research projects and creating innovative pedagogical interventions to help students understand contemporary issues of human-environment relations from a richer perspective.

4. Emergence of social structure (workgroup lead: Bernard Nijstad, organizational behavior). 

When members interact within a social group, some form of structure will often emerge. For example, certain individuals obtain more influence or a higher status in the group than others do (i.e., the development of hierarchy or stratification), and individuals may specialize in certain but not in other activities (i.e., the development of role differentiation or division of labor). How do such structures form or change over time, what are their (dys)functions, and how does this relate to survival and wellbeing of social groups and the individuals within them? This relates to, for example, complexity science and self-organization, leadership and power/status, team processes, and agent-based modelling.

Last modified:08 October 2025 09.44 a.m.