VisszaAbstract:
Why do the status values of social distinctions often vary widely across geographic regions? For example, why are the elderly more respected than the young in some parts of the world, but are less respected in others? Social scientists have hitherto mostly focused on regional variation in sociocultural factors that create power and resource differences between social groups, which ultimately lead to status differences between them. Combining status construction theory with insights from social network research, in this paper we explore a new mechanism that can account for regional variation in status values, even in the absence of variation in sociocultural factors that much earlier research has focused on. Status construction theory, on the one hand, holds that goal directed interactions among members of different categories (e.g. between men and women) can induce status beliefs among them that imbue the social distinction with status value. Social network research, on the other hand, suggests that goal directed interactions are often spatially clustered, so that they occur more often within geographic regions than between geographic regions. We argue that the constraints that spatial clustering of interactions imposes on the behavioral processes that status construction theory describes can lead to regional variation in status values.
The mechanism that we describe is based on a complex interplay of interaction and influence processes among a large number of autonomous individuals. The outcomes of such complex interaction systems are difficult to assess by mere verbal reasoning. We therefore develop an agent-based computational model that enables us to rigorously assess the logical consistency of our theoretical argument. Systematic computational experimentation with our model suggests that spatial clustering of goal directed interactions can indeed account for regional variation in status values.