Mitchell Centre Seminar Series, Eleanor Power London School of Economics The Dynamics of Social and Economic Inequality in Cross-Cultural Perspective: the ENDOW and Rep2SI Projects
| Dates: | 22 April 2026 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Understanding the drivers and dynamics of social and economic inequality is of core interest to social scientists, policy makers, and the public. I will introduce two projects that are part of an effort to bring new empirical data to facilitate that understanding. The ENDOW project (for Economic Networks and the Dynamics of Wealth inequality) focuses on the role that social networks play in exacerbating or mitigating inequality. It brings together a large team of anthropologists, working in ~50 communities in over 30 countries around the world, to gather extensive demographic, economic, and social network data, across two points of time. Cross-sectional analyses with our first wave of data that highlight the important role of economic connectedness. Next, the Rep2SI project (for Reputation and the Reproduction of Social Inequality) draws on data gathered as part of ENDOW to facilitate the running of experimental games where participants play not with unknown strangers, but with community co-residents, presented via photos. Participants in eight communities in five countries played a series of Dictator Games where we varied the reputational stakes of people's decisions, to see how social connection and social exposure shape people’s actions and the subsequent evaluations of those actions and actors. Despite substantial cross-site variation in how much players give, we find remarkably consistent effects for social proximity and the anonymity (or not) of people's allocation decisions. Ending with some further results on the participants' reputational assessments of one another, I'll discuss what these findings collectively imply about how social connection and social position shape how people are perceived, how they choose to act in the world, and so their prospects for social and economic mobility.
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Humanities Bridgeford Street
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