A Social Network Analysis Of Hamadryas Baboons

The study of animal sociality investigates the immediate and long-term consequences that a social structure has on its group members. Typically, social behavior is observed from interactions between two individuals at the dyadic level. However, a new framework for studying social behavior has emerged that allows the researcher to assess social complexity at multiple scales. Social Network Analysis has been recently applied in the field of ethology, and this novel tool enables an approach of focusing on social behavior in context of the global network rather than limited to dyadic interactions. This new technique was applied to a group of captive hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas hamadryas) in order to assess how overall network topology of the social group changes over time with the decline of an aging leader male. Observations on aggressive, grooming, and proximity spatial interactions were collected from three separate years in order to serve as `snapshots¿ of the current state of the group. Data on social behavior were collected from the group when the male was in prime health, when the male was at an old age, and after the male¿s death. A set of metrics was obtained from each time period for each type of social behavior and quantified a change in the patterns of interactions. The results suggest that baboon social behavior varies across context, and changes with the attributes of its individual members. Possible mechanisms for adapting to a changing social environment were also explored.

Public Attitudes Toward Social Spending in the United States: The Differences Between Direct Spending and Tax Expenditures

This paper uses a survey experiment to examine differences in public attitudes toward 'direct' and 'indirect' government spending. Federal social welfare spending in the USA has two components: the federal government spends money to directly provide social benefits to citizens, and also indirectly subsidizes the private provision of social benefits through tax expenditures. Though benefits provided through tax expenditures are considered spending for budgetary purposes, they differ from direct spending in several ways: in the mechanisms through which benefits are delivered to citizens, in how they distribute wealth across the income spectrum, and in the visibility of their policy consequences to the mass public. We develop and test a model explaining how these differences will affect public attitudes toward spending conducted through direct and indirect means. We find that support for otherwise identical social programs is generally higher when such programs are portrayed as being delivered through tax expenditures than when they are portrayed as being delivered by direct spending. In addition, support for tax expenditure programs which redistribute wealth upward drops when citizens are provided information about the redistributive effects. Both of these results are conditioned by partisanship, with the opinions of Republicans more sensitive to the mechanism through which benefits are delivered, and the opinions of Democrats more sensitive to information about their redistributive effects.