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

Abstract Social status regulates influence and well-being in most social animals. In humans, social status can be attained via distinct routes: prestige (tracking the ability of individuals to confer benefits) and dominance (tracking the ability of individuals to inflict costs). Although prestige and dominance are well studied from a psychological perspective, their influence on social behaviours, including social levelling, remains under-explored—especially in close-knit, rural or subsistence-based communities. Here, we present data from four rural Colombian communities (Nind=496), where we collected peer-nominations of prestige, dominance and interpersonal sentiments, and ran network-structured economic games measuring giving, exploitation and punishment. Applying multiplex network models to these data (Nobs=865944; Nties=76427), we analyse how status perceptions relate to dyadic game behaviour. 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 had more friends and received more cooperative transfers, but were more feared and distrusted and were preferential targets of exploitation and punishment. Our work provides a large-scale test of dominance levelling in real-world networks, and supports the idea that dominance in human communities is a precarious strategy, often carrying net costs.