Associate Professor, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics & Political Science

I am an anthropologist studying how belief, practice, and identity interact with and shape interpersonal relationships. I look at how people work to discern something of the character, moral being, and intentions of their peers through their actions – particularly their religious action. And, I look at how people strive to communicate something of themselves to others, both in dramatic and in subtle ways. I want to know how such actions and reactions form the basis not only of people’s perceptions of one another, but also form the substance of their relationships and the emergent structure of their social world. When such bonds are crucial to our ability to navigate and get by in the world, this ultimately is an investigation into how people’s religious lives shape their social and economic lives as well.

I do this with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis. My work is informed by signaling theory and the wider scholarship of human behavioral ecology. I am interested in the dynamics of social networks, especially relative to the factors that influence cooperation, competition, trust, and prestige. More generally, I am interested in investigating questions regarding: the role of religion in society, the interaction between costly signaling and cooperation, gender differences in prestige and social status, and the dynamics of punishment.

I am the co-director of the ENDOW project, a collaborative network of social scientists undertaking cross-cultural comparative work. Right now, our main focus is a project investigating the dynamics of social networks and wealth inequality in small communities around the world, funded by the US NSF and UKRI.

I also lead the Rep²SI project, funded by a Research Leadership Award from the Leverhulme Trust.

I am currently an associate professor in the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics & Political Science. Prior to that, I was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (and am now a member of the external faculty). My PhD is from Stanford University, MSc from University College London, and BA from Brown University. See more at my departmental website.

Publications

In Progress

  • 2026. Eleanor A. Power, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Samuel Bowles, Matthew O. Jackson, Jeremy Koster, Daniel Redhead, Thomas Rutter, Sahana Subramanyam, Justin Weltz, Nurul Alam, Sarah Alami, Alexandra Alvergne, Curtis Atkisson, Michele Barnes, Bret Beheim, Christine M. Beitl, Madeline Brown, Mark Caudell, Wendy Chávez-Páez, Komal Chauhan, Joshua Cinner, Siobhán Cully, Augusto Dalla Ragione, Angelina L. DeMarco, Ivan Deschenaux, Federico Fernandez, Juan Pablo Ferreiro, Drew Gerkey, Matthew Gervais, Christopher Golden, Gianluca Grimalda, Werner Hertzog, Paul L. Hooper, Karen Kramer, Geoff Kushnick, Banrida Langstieh, Rodrigo Lazo, Sheina Lew-Levy, Shane Macfarlan, Emmanuel Maliti, Karl J. Mertens, Madalena Monteban, Rafael Morais Chiaravalloti, Daniel Murphy, Kathryn Oths, Alejandro Pérez Velilla, Emily Post, Sean Prall, Cody Ross, Anirudh Sankar, Brooke Scelza, Michael Schnegg, Edmond Seabright, Mary K. Shenk, Kathrine E. Starkweather, Chun-Yi Sum, Bram Tucker, Bapu Vaitla, Vivek Venkataraman, and John P. Ziker. Social Network Structure, Wealth, and Wealth Inequality Across Cultures. arXiv.

  • 2025. Daniel Redhead, Ben Kawam, Jean-Gabriel Young, Dan Franks, Connor S. Philson, Marijtje van Duijn, Jordan Hart, Mary Brooke McElreath, Richard McElreath, Eleanor A. Power, Cody Ross, Sebastian Sosa, Christian Steglich, Michael Weiss, and Lauren J. N. Brent. Five misunderstandings in animal social network analysis. EcoEvoRxiv.

Published

Grants

Code & Data

Researchers interested in getting access to the data used in the papers listed below should email me!

Details

Eleanor A. Power
Department of Methodology
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE

e.a.power [at] lse.ac.uk

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ORCID

CV

My Erdős number is 3. (I co-authored with Cris Moore, who co-authored with Leonard Schulman, who co-authored with Erdős.)