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Hum Nat (2010) 21:118
DOI 10.1007/s12110-010-9079-z
The Social Strategy Game
Resource Competition within Female Social Networks among Small-scale Forager-Horticulturalists
Stacey L. Rucas & Michael Gurven &
Hillard Kaplan & Jeffrey Winking
Published online: 10 March 2010# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract This paper examines social determinants of resource competition among Tsimane Amerindian women of Bolivia. We introduce a semi-anonymous experiment (the Social Strategy Game) designed to simulate resource competition among women. Information concerning dyadic social relationships and demographic data were collected to identify variables influencing resource competition intensity, as measured by the number of beads one woman took from another. Relationship variables are used to test how the affiliative or competitive aspects of dyads affect the extent of prosociality in the game. Using a mixed-modeling procedure, we find that women compete with those with whom they are quarreling over accusations of meat theft, mate competition, and rumor spreading. They also compete with members of their social network and with those who were designated as cooperative helpers or as close kin. Women take fewer beads from desired friends, neighbors, and from those viewed as enemies. We interpret favoritism toward enemies as resulting from fear of retribution. Our results suggest that social relations among women are multifaceted and often cannot be simplified by exclusive focus on genetic relatedness, physical proximity, or reciprocity. We argue that a complex
S. L. Rucas (*)
Department of Social Sciences, California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo, CA 93401, USAe-mail: [email protected]
M. Gurven
Department of Anthropology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
H. Kaplan
Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA e-mail: [email protected]
J. Winking
Department of Anthropology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected]
2 Hum Nat (2010) 21:118
understanding of cooperation and competition among women may require important contextual information concerning relationship history in addition to typical features of resource ecology.
Keywords Experimental economics . Social networks . Resource competition . Altruism . Tsimane
Material resources and continual access to these resources are key factors limiting the reproductive success of women, whereas mens reproductive success has generally been described as being limited primarily by direct access to mates (Bateman 1948; Borgerhoff Mulder 1987; Cronk 1994; Darwin 1871)....