A statistical procedure for testing social reciprocity at group, dyadic and individual levels

Abstract

This paper examines statistical analysis of social reciprocity, that is, the balance between addressing and receiving behaviour in social interactions. Specifically, it focuses on the measurement of social reciprocity by means of directionality and skewsymmetry statistics at different levels. Two statistics have been used as overall measures of social reciprocity at group level: the directional consistency and the skew-symmetry statistics. Furthermore, the skew-symmetry statistic allows social researchers to obtain complementary information at dyadic and individual levels. However, having computed these measures, social researchers may be interested in testing statistical hypotheses regarding social reciprocity. For this reason, it has been developed a statistical procedure, based on Monte Carlo sampling, in order to allow social researchers to describe groups and make statistical decisions.

Changes in social dominance in a group of subadult white rhinoceroses (Ceratotherium simum) after dehorning

“…For a hierarchy to be strictly linear, all dyads must have a 'transitive' dominant-subordinate relationship, where if individual 'A' dominates 'B', and 'B' dominates 'C', then 'A' must also dominate 'C' (Shizuka and McDonald 2012). To compute this, the 'getimplandau' function in the R package 'DyaDA' (Leiva et al 2010) was run on win-loss matrices collected pre-and post-the second dehorning procedure (Appendix A). The index ranges from 0 or no linearity (where every individual dominates the same number of other individuals) to 1 or perfect linearity (where every individual dominates all animals ranked below and none of those ranked above) (Klass and Cords 2011).…”