Variation in extra‐pair paternity (EPP) among individuals of the same population could result from stochastic demography or from individual differences in mating strategies. Although the adaptive value of EPP has been widely studied, much less is known about the characteristics of the social environment that drive the observed patterns of EPP. Here, we demonstrate how concepts and well‐developed tools for the study of social behaviour (such as social network analysis) can enhance the study of extra‐pair mating decisions (focussing in particular on avian mating systems). We present several hypotheses that describe how characteristics of the social environment in which individuals are embedded might influence the levels of EPP in a socially monogamous population. We use a multi‐level social approach (Hinde, 1976) to achieve a detailed description of the social structure and social dynamics of individuals in a group. We propose that the pair‐bond, the direct (local) social environment and the indirect (extended) social environment, can contribute in different ways to the variation observed in the patterns of EPP, at both the individual and the population level. A strength of this approach is that it integrates into the analysis (indirect) interactions with all potential mates in a population, thus extending the current framework to study extra‐pair mating behaviour. We also encourage the application of social network methods such as temporal dynamic analysis to depict temporal changes in the patterns of interactions among individuals in a group, and to study how this affects mating behaviour. We argue that this new framework will contribute to a better understanding of the proximate mechanisms that drive variation in EPP within populations in socially monogamous species, and might ultimately provide insights into the evolution and maintenance of mating systems.

中文翻译：

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将精细社会环境与交配决定联系起来：研究额外对父权的未来方向

同一种群个体之间的额外对亲子关系 (EPP) 的差异可能源于随机人口统计学或交配策略的个体差异。尽管 EPP 的适应性价值已被广泛研究，但人们对驱动 EPP 观察模式的社会环境特征知之甚少。在这里，我们展示了用于研究社会行为（例如社会网络分析）的概念和完善的工具如何增强对额外配对决策的研究（特别关注鸟类交配系统）。我们提出了几个假设，这些假设描述了个体所嵌入的社会环境的特征如何影响社会一夫一妻制人群中 EPP 的水平。我们使用多层次的社交方法（Hinde，1976) 以实现对群体中个人的社会结构和社会动态的详细描述。我们提出，直接（本地）社会环境和间接（扩展）社会环境可以以不同的方式对在个体和群体层面观察到的 EPP 模式的变化产生影响。这种方法的一个优势在于它整合到与种群中所有潜在配偶的分析（间接）相互作用中，从而扩展了当前的框架来研究额外的交配行为。我们还鼓励应用诸如时间动态分析之类的社交网络方法来描述群体中个体之间互动模式的时间变化，并研究这如何影响交配行为。