Abstract Religious rituals often entail significant investments of time, energy, and money, and can risk bodily harm. Instead of being evolutionarily inexplicable, such costly religious acts have ...been argued to be honest signals of commitment to the beliefs and values of the community, helping individuals establish good reputations and foster trusting, cooperative relationships. Most tests of this hypothesis have evaluated whether religious signalers are more prosocial; here I investigate whether signal receivers actually perceive religious signalers as such. I do this with data collected over 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two villages in South India, where Hindu and Christian residents engage in different modes of religious practice, including dramatic acts of firewalking and spirit possession as well as the more subtle but consistent act of worshipping at a church or temple each week. Each mode of religious practice is found to be informative of a distinct set of reputational qualities. Broadly speaking, in the long term, individuals who invest more in the religious life of the village are not only seen as more devout, but also as having a suite of prosocial, other-focused traits. In the short term, individuals who perform greater and costlier acts in the annual Hindu festival show a slight increase in the percent of villagers recognizing them as physically strong and hardworking. These results suggest that people are attending to the full suite of religious acts carried out by their peers, using these signals to discern multiple aspects of their character and intentions.
Social hierarchies and social networks in humans Redhead, Daniel; Power, Eleanor A
Philosophical transactions - Royal Society. Biological sciences,
02/2022, Letnik:
377, Številka:
1845
Journal Article
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Across species, social hierarchies are often governed by dominance relations. In humans, where there are multiple culturally valued axes of distinction, social hierarchies can take a variety of forms ...and need not rest on dominance relations. Consequently, humans navigate multiple domains of status, i.e. relative standing. Importantly, while these hierarchies may be constructed from dyadic interactions, they are often more fundamentally guided by subjective peer evaluations and group perceptions. Researchers have typically focused on the distinct elements that shape individuals' relative standing, with some emphasizing individual-level attributes and others outlining emergent macro-level structural outcomes. Here, we synthesize work across the social sciences to suggest that the dynamic interplay between individual-level and meso-level properties of the social networks in which individuals are embedded are crucial for understanding the diverse processes of status differentiation across groups. More specifically, we observe that humans not only navigate multiple social hierarchies at any given time but also simultaneously operate within multiple, overlapping social networks. There are important dynamic feedbacks between social hierarchies and the characteristics of social networks, as the types of social relationships, their structural properties, and the relative position of individuals within them both influence and are influenced by status differentiation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies'.
The scholarship on religion has long argued that collective worship helps foster social cohesion. Despite the pervasiveness of this contention, rigorous quantitative evaluations of it have been ...surprisingly limited. Here, I draw on network data representing the ties of social support among Hindu residents of a South Indian village to evaluate the association between collective religious ritual and social cohesion. I find that those who partake in collective religious rituals together have a higher probability of having a supportive relationship than those who do not. At the structural level, this corresponds to denser connections among co-participants. At the individual level, participants are more embedded in the local community of co-religionists, but are not disassociating themselves from members of other religious denominations. These patterns hold most strongly for co-participation in the recurrent, low-arousal monthly worships at the temple, and are suggestive for co-participation in the intense and dysphoric ritual acts carried out as part of an annual festival. Together, these findings provide clear empirical evidence of the lasting relationship between collective religious ritual and social cohesion.
Helping behaviour is thought to play a major role in the evolution of group-living animals. Yet, it is unclear to what extent human males and human females use the same strategies to secure support. ...Accordingly, we investigate help-seeking over a 5-year period in relation to gender using data from virtually all adults in two Tamil villages (
= 782). Simulations of network dynamics (i.e. stochastic actor-oriented models) calibrated to these data broadly indicate that women are more inclined than men to create and maintain supportive bonds via multiple mechanisms of cooperation (e.g. reciprocity, kin bias, friend bias, generalized exchange). However, gender-related differences in the simulated dynamics of help-seeking are modest, vary based on structural position (e.g. out-degree), and do not appear to translate to divergence in the observed structure of respondents' egocentric networks. Findings ultimately suggest that men and women in the two villages are similarly social but channel their sociality differently. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cooperation among women: evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives'.
Abstract Community detection in networks is commonly performed using information about interactions between nodes. Recent advances have been made to incorporate multiple types of interactions, thus ...generalizing standard methods to multilayer networks. Often, though, one can access additional information regarding individual nodes, attributes, or covariates. A relevant question is thus how to properly incorporate this extra information in such frameworks. Here we develop a method that incorporates both the topology of interactions and node attributes to extract communities in multilayer networks. We propose a principled probabilistic method that does not assume any a priori correlation structure between attributes and communities but rather infers this from data. This leads to an efficient algorithmic implementation that exploits the sparsity of the dataset and can be used to perform several inference tasks; we provide an open-source implementation of the code online. We demonstrate our method on both synthetic and real-world data and compare performance with methods that do not use any attribute information. We find that including node information helps in predicting missing links or attributes. It also leads to more interpretable community structures and allows the quantification of the impact of the node attributes given in input.
Evolutionary ecologists have shown that relatives are important providers of support across many species. Among humans, cultural reckonings of kinship are more than just relatedness, as they interact ...with systems of descent, inheritance, marriage and residence. These cultural aspects of kinship may be particularly important when a person is determining which kin, if any, to call upon for help. Here, we explore the relationship between kinship and cooperation by drawing upon social support network data from two villages in South India. While these Tamil villages have a nominally male-biased kinship system (being patrilocal and patrilineal), matrilateral kin play essential social roles and many women reside in their natal villages, letting us tease apart the relative importance of genetic relatedness, kinship and residence in accessing social support. We find that people often name both their consanguineal and affinal kin as providing them with support, and we see some weakening of support with lesser relatedness. Matrilateral and patrilateral relatives are roughly equally likely to be named, and the greatest distinction instead is in their availability, which is highly contingent on post-marital residence patterns. People residing in their natal village have many more consanguineal relatives present than those who have relocated. Still, relocation has only a small effect on an individual's network size, as non-natal residents are more reliant on the few kin that they have present, most of whom are affines. In sum, marriage patterns have an important impact on kin availability, but the flexibility offered by the broadening of the concept of kin helps people develop the cooperative relationships that they rely upon, even in the absence of genetic relatives. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals'.
Abstract Among immediate-return societies, cooperative social relationships are maintained despite the lack of centralized authority, strong norms of ownership and the punishment of free-riders. The ...prosocial signaling theory of cooperation solves the puzzle of social cohesion in such societies by suggesting that costly forms of generosity can function as an honest signal of prosocial intent, and that the reputations for prosociality signalers build generate trust between individuals, supporting the formation of cooperative partnerships. However, not all forms of costly generosity are prosocial: we contrast two types of generosity, aggrandizing and prosocial, and suggest that only prosocial generosity provides benefits through cooperation. Prosocial generosity is accompanied by pecuniary distancing: the payment of a higher relative cost to share, and a manner of sharing that disengages the acquirer from ownership over the rights to benefit from his or her harvest. We test the prosocial sharing hypothesis among Martu hunters and find that there is a significant association between the propensity of an individual to share a higher proportion of her income and centrality in the cooperative hunting network. Those who consistently pay higher costs to share, not necessarily those who are better hunters, are preferred partners for cooperative hunting. While many have emphasized the direct, status enhancing, competitive aspects of generosity, we suggest here that prosocial generosity produces benefits indirectly, through the formation of trusting, cooperative partnerships.
Performing a dramatic act of religious devotion, creating an art exhibit, or releasing a new product are all examples of public acts that signal quality and contribute to building a reputation. ...Signalling theory predicts that these public displays can reliably reveal quality. However, data from ethnographic work in South India suggests that more prominent individuals gain more from reputation-building religious acts than more marginalized individuals. To understand this phenomenon, we extend signalling theory to include variation in people's social prominence or social capital, first with an analytical model and then with an agent-based model. We consider two ways in which social prominence/capital may alter signalling: (i) it impacts observers' priors, and (ii) it alters the signallers' pay-offs. These two mechanisms can result in both a 'reputational shield,' where low quality individuals are able to 'pass' as high quality thanks to their greater social prominence/capital, and a 'reputational poverty trap,' where high quality individuals are unable to improve their standing owing to a lack of social prominence/capital. These findings bridge the signalling theory tradition prominent in behavioural ecology, anthropology and economics with the work on status hierarchies in sociology, and shed light on the complex ways in which individuals make inferences about others. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.
ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have long been concerned with how reputations help people gain the support of others. Here, we study the support ties among adult residents of two Tamil villages, asking how ...reputational standing in each village mediates access to social support. We find that a reputation for influence has the weakest effect on support ties with others, while a reputation for generosity has the strongest. Further, a reputation for influence is not associated with greater connections to people of “high position” outside the village. Given the weak effects of a reputation for influence, we turn to a network measure of social capital, weighted PageRank centrality. While persons who are recognized as influential often also have an influential network position, there are many others who have similarly high centrality—including, notably, many women. Consequently, we suggest that much of the anthropological evidence for the benefits of prominence may actually reflect the returns to greater social capital and that both may be shaped in large part by acts of generosity and mutual support. By studying social capital, we can achieve a more complete accounting of the many different social strategies employed by all persons, not simply the few who achieve prominence. reputation, social capital, network analysis, prominence, India
RESUMEN
Los antropólogos han estado preocupados por largo tiempo acerca de cómo las reputaciones ayudan a las personas a ganar el apoyo de otros. Aquí, estudiamos los lazos de apoyo entre los residentes adultos de dos comunidades Tamil, preguntando como la posición en términos de reputación en cada comunidad media el acceso al apoyo social. Hallamos que una reputación por influencia tiene el efecto más débil en lazos de apoyo con otros, mientras una reputación por generosidad tiene el más fuerte. Además, una reputación por influencia no está asociada con mayores conexiones a personas de “alta posición” por fuera de la comunidad. Dados los efectos débiles de una reputación por influencia, recurrimos a una medida de red de capital social, la centralidad ponderada del Page Rank. Mientras personas quienes son reconocidas como influyentes también tienen una posición de red influyente, hay muchas otras quienes tienen similarmente centralidad alta —incluyendo, notablemente, muchas mujeres—. Consecuentemente, sugerimos que mucha de la evidencia antropológica sobre los beneficios de la prominencia puede reflejar actualmente los beneficios de un mayor capital social, y que ambos pueden ser estructurados en gran parte por actos de generosidad y apoyo mutuo. Al estudiar el capital social, podemos lograr una enumeración más completa de las diferentes estrategias sociales empleadas por todas las personas, no simplemente las pocas que logran prominencia. reputación, capital social, análisis de red, prominencia, India
Reputation has been shown to provide an informal solution to the problem of cooperation in human societies. After reviewing models that connect reputations and cooperation, we address how reputation ...results from information exchange embedded in a social network that changes endogenously itself. Theoretical studies highlight that network topologies have different effects on the extent of cooperation, since they can foster or hinder the flow of reputational information. Subsequently, we review models and empirical studies that intend to grasp the coevolution of reputations, cooperation and social networks. We identify open questions in the literature concerning how networks affect the accuracy of reputations, the honesty of shared information and the spread of reputational information. Certain network topologies may facilitate biased beliefs and intergroup competition or in-group identity formation that could lead to high cooperation within but conflicts between different subgroups of a network. Our review covers theoretical, experimental and field studies across various disciplines that target these questions and could explain how the dynamics of interactions and reputations help or prevent the establishment and sustainability of cooperation in small- and large-scale societies. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.
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