Social Networks, cooperation and social status in rural Colombia
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1Within any given hierarchy, individuals differ in their social influence and decision-making authority (i.e., in social status) and these differences govern their access to the resources available to their group. Existing work has demonstrated two broad routes to achieving social status: through prestige, the perceived ability and willingness to confer benefits to others, and dominance, the perceived ability and willingness to inflict harm. I will present a study that examines whether distinct social relationships and cooperative behaviours map onto prestige and dominance. We collected data from all adults in two villages in rural Colombia. Participants nominated who a) they were friends with and b) were ostrascised from the community. We collected peer nominations of prestige and dominance, alongside nominations of whether individuals were considered a) trustworthy and b) contemptable. To capture cooperative behaviour, participants played network-structured economic games, where deciders know the identities of the targets of game-play – that captured a) resource allocation, b) exploitation and c) costly punishment. We treated our data as networks, and we developed a multiplex social relations model to analyse our data. By applying this model, we were able to examine the mechanisms that structured our networks, and estimate how these networks were associated with one another. Our main results showed that prestigious individuals received more allocations during economic games, were more trusted and had more friends within their communities. We further found that dominant individuals were more ostracised by their communities – but also had more friends – and were targets of punishment and nominated both as being trustworthy and untrustworthy. I will outline that our detailed data provides nuanced – and, at face-value, counter-intuitive – results and provides important empirical evidence that, while dominant individuals may be ostracised by many members of their communities, they are able to maintain their social standing by conferring benefits to their friend. Taken together, our study highlights the social complexity associated with status dynamics in real-world settings.
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Daniel Redhead et Cody T. Ross, « Social Networks, cooperation and social status in rural Colombia », Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris [En ligne], 37(S) | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 janvier 2025, consulté le 13 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bmsap/15302 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/133pd
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