Social and economic consequences of prestige and dominance in rural Colombian social networks

Social status regulates influence and well-being in most social-animals. In humans, social status can be attained via two distinct routes: prestige (freely-conferred deference, typically tracking the ability of individuals to confer benefits) and dominance (fear-based deference, typically tracking the ability of individuals to inflict costs). While prestige and dominance are well-studied from a psychological perspective, their influence on dyadic behavior, including social leveling, remains under-explored---especially in small-scale communities. Here, we present data from four Colombian communities (N_ind=496), where we collected peer nominations of prestige, dominance, trust, affinity, fear, and friendship, and ran network-structured economic games measuring altruistic giving, exploitation, and costly punishment. Applying a multiplex network model to these data (N_obs=865,944; N_ties=76,427), we analyze how perceptions of status relate to dyadic game behavior. More-prestigious individuals were more trusted, had more friends, received more cooperative transfers, and were less frequently punished or exploited. More-dominant individuals experienced discrepant outcomes: they too had more friends and received more cooperative transfers, but they were also more feared and distrusted, and were preferential targets of exploitation and costly punishment. In short, prestige conferred clear social and economic advantages, while dominance carried net costs. Our work provides the first large-scale test of dyad-level dominance leveling in real-world networks, and yields support for the idea that dominance in human communities is a precarious strategy. Although dominant individuals may be targets of friendship and cooperation, perhaps due to a linkage between dominance and local authority, they are more heavily leveled and face difficulty in obtaining positive, community-wide standing.