Grooming, Gossip, and Conversation Flashcards
What is the evolutionary history of gossip?
Hunting for food on the ground exposed us to predation, so we needed an affective way to communicate and find food within larger social networks
What is gossip (evolutionary perspective?)
It is an evolved adaptive mechanism to maintain social coordination
Why is human communication more sophistiacted than other organisms?
Our brain is large enough to be powerful and flexible without requiring extensive energy usage
Historically, are humans better at sharing social information or accurate information?
More efficient at sharing social information
How does communication lead to politics?
It creates power dynamics based on status
Describe how we’ve evolved to find status markers and identify lying and deciet
We evolved the ability to recognize status markers because those who didn’t were eaten by predators
Status markers such as being able to tell if someone is telling the truth about how much you like me or are you just trying to get ahead
Status refers to the degree to which I feel secure in a community
What does gossip communicate?
Who is an in-group versus out-group and behavioral norms (e.g. gossiping about what someone is wearing)
Language and gossip evolved out of grooming to allow us to exhange info about the state of our tribe
Describe gossip and free riding
In times of scarcity, free loaders causes a threat to the survival of your tribe. Gossip grew as a solution to selection pressure by recognizing and idenitfying people who pose a threat to the group’s survival
Evolutionarily, how do alliances form?
Through grooming
Explaing the scientific process of how grooming leads to alliances
grooming releases endorphins – leads to relaxation – leads to being more open and vulnerable – can lead to feelings of trust
Grooming can convey or regulate…
- Social status
- Emotional state
- Affiliation
- Trust
Grooming and social status
- can assess physical characteristics (body size, age, strength) – can be used to leverage status by grooming a member who was fit
- establish dominance hierarchies (in group vs out group)
- maintains social order (whose friends)
e.g. chancellor shook Professor Jones’ hand, alpha male monkey being groomed
Limitations of grooming
- grooming is generally a one on one activity (how much info is received or sent depended on being there- made it more difficult to convey trust)
- conversation groups typically contain up to 4 people
- language allows us to exchange information, and its role in social bonding allows us to keep track of what’s going on in our social networks and use that information to service those relationships
What two processes is sociality dependent on?
- Increase in group size - had to manage relationships
- Exploitation of grooming based pharmolological mechanisms that facilitate bonding
In what ways has gossip taken over the social function of grooming?
- facilitating social bonding
- reducing stress
- regulating social behavior
- building and maintaining social relationships
- transmitting information
Conversation
small interacting groups whose members engage in carefully ordered sequences of exchanges that follow well established rules
Social functions of conversation:
- Allows speakers to convey to other individuals information about themselves
- Facilitates the acquisition of knowlegde about other indviduals within the social group
What is a unique charcteristic of the human brain?
We evolved brains to be able to predict other people’s behavior or what might happen
We can predict what another person will thing to about three layers
Other ways language can be used to exchange social information
- seek advice or discuss hypothetical situations
- policing funvtion to control those who fail to abide by formal and informal rules
- self promote
- decieve others
How language is used to facilitate social relationships in a group
- keep track of other individuals in the network
- advertising one’s own advnatages to an ally or the disadvantages to a rival
- seeking advice on personal problems
- policing free riders who risk eroding social compact
Social Compact
the unspoken values and behaviors we do to keep society functioning
