Peers link conflict-resolution reputation to social and cognitive capacities rather than the capacity to impose costs among Ethiopian forager-horticulturalists

Leadership emergence in socially egalitarian contexts depends on the qualities of individuals and on how others perceive their capacity to use them. Multi-Capital Leadership theory proposes that leaders deploy material, social, somatic, and neural capital to solve problems of group living by providing benefits to group members or imposing costs. Conflict resolution is one important leadership domain. We reanalyse peer rankings of 60 adults in a relatively egalitarian community of Chabu forager-horticulturalists in southwest Ethiopia. Seven peer-raters ranked participants on twelve traits identified as relevant to leadership in contemporary evolutionary theories. A previous analysis averaged rankings before modelling, obscuring differences among raters and treating positions within an ordering as continuous measurements. Here, we fitted a multivariate Plackett–Luce model directly to the individual rankings. This accounts for dependence within rankings and incorporates uncertainty into estimates. It also allows us to estimate consensus orderings and systematic variation associated with rater sex. Male and female peer-raters produced broadly similar orderings, including for conflict resolution. This could reflect actual covariation in participants’ qualities, a shared evaluative schema, or both. Peer-ranked proxies for material, social, and neural capital covaried closely and did not form clearly separable perceptual domains. The clearest descriptive contrast was between benefit-related attributes, including conflict resolution, sound decision-making, and prosociality, and cost-related attributes, including being feared and fighting. Conflict-resolution reputation was most closely associated with decision-making, kin support, respect, and intelligence, and showed no clear positive association with fighting. In these rankings, a reputation for conflict resolution was more clearly distinguished from aggression and coercion than were measures capturing the three capital domains represented in the instrument.