Monday, October 22, 2007
GOSSIP and HIERARCHY
Gossip as an evolutionary tool
Gossip as a tool for adjusting hierarchy
This paper has come to me just this morning by Google alerts It is for sure worth reading and my comments to it too as I think. The main idea of a gossip is that the social environment of a person is valued or not valued. Gossips can be destructive but also opposite they can help a person to get higher in the hierarchy of human society. So gossip is actually a means of hierarchy.
According to my personal experience hierarchy supported by gossip is always to be found in human groups that are relatively closed and “immobile”. That means e.g. a village, or a small town where people mostly know each other, or at least they know some “decisive “personalities” plus people from their own social environment. “Decisive” people are in such a case people who mean many other people, like policemen, hairdressers, teachers, local politicians, doctors, lawyers and others, people of some importance.
In a group of people where there is a huge migration, that means many new people are coming to that group while older members of that group are leaving the group, gossiping is modified. It is not the same as in relatively closed and stable community.
I have had the chance to experience both such groups, right now I live in a small village close to a small town, and some 20 years ago I worked as a contractor for US military stationed in Germany. Here the number of new Americans coming to the group and old leaving was remarkable and substantial. The village and small town I am living now in are from this point of view basically absolutely stable communities as the number of new people coming to this group is really small and so is the number of people who leave the group.
Gossip is actually only a way of passing information about one’s experiences to somebody else, but it can be misused by passing on made-up experiences, untrue experiences, which is heavily done especially in small human groups.
This approves a question why do people misuse gossip, passing of information, to speak badly about somebody? Most probably they do it because they use this way of passing information as a tool in the fight for hierarchy positions.
Sometimes I wondered how humans have found these ways, and I really do not believe that it is because of some kind of mutation. Mutation as a word is according to my understanding of evolution extremely often misused for explaining something we just cannot explain. It is like modern God. If I cannot explain something that I should explain in evolution I say it is due to some kind of mutation, exactly as most of the people explained their unexplainable experiences by God who did it.
This of course is only a misuse of the word. I see quite different way of humans and animals acquiring new type of behavior. Actually it is based on comparing situations. Just consider the following. There is a new male teacher in a school where there are 90% teachers females. The new male teacher visits the female teachers one by one and offers them his sexual service. Females do exchange their personal experiences with this new male teacher and see that he is only after his lust, he only wants to get another female to have sex with him regardless any other values, especially those that are highly valued by females. Of course, such male has basically no chance to be awarded sex by any of these hypothetical female teachers. But because he feels it as unpleasant that he could not come to his goal having sex with all of the female teachers or at least with only one of them he might use the same gossip about some other new male teacher, saying that he saw him one day with one female the next day with the other female etc. So giving him no chance for sex with theses female teachers, exactly as he had no chance.
There is one more beautiful example of gossip in German recent political history, where one politician in order to get rid of his political rival accused him of offering him homosexual contact. There is no defense against such gossip and therefore this bad guy won the political race.
So gossip can be useful to warn you about somebody who cheats, but also it can be a weapon in the hands of a cheater who wants to get rid of his fair rival. This is fully in accordance with evolution, any animal, any human being uses whatever weapons to get higher in the hierarchy and so ensure better living conditions for themselves and their offsprings. The only problem is that this weapon is not a fair one. Anybody who reaches for such an unfair weapon marks himself as a weak and cheating individual but this might be really difficult for unschooled and unprepared others to detect. Therefore gossips are believed and only few extra smart people can make them out as cheating.
The next question is why do some people use untrue gossip and some do not. If untrue gossiping would be such a perfect weapon for gaining higher position in human hierarchy everybody would make use of it. So why are there human individuals who do not make use of the untrue gossiping?
The answer seems quite easy, untrue gossiping is considered bad behavior if detected as untrue gossiping. Some people cannot make it out and so they believe it and some can make detect some gossiping as untrue and the author is discredited. Also untrue gossiping means you must keep track of your lies, you must remember what untrue information you have told to whom, and you must also know, at least at the level of probability, who might talk to whom, so that you do not say two different lies to two people who are in daily contacts with each other, as in such a case you would be extremely soon detected as a liar.
These keeping track of you lies consumes your energy, and some people just do not want to invest their resources into gossiping but they put it into real work, say scientific work. Those who cannot for whatever reason compete with these kind of people will employ gossips, after some time if their gossips work they feel awarded by their social environment for gossiping because they can get onto a higher level in the hierarchy of the particular human group.
This short paper should be considered as an attempt to explain what gossips are and how they come to existence and why some do use gossips and some do not. You may try to make your own thinking on this inte4resting topic.
Gossip as a tool for adjusting hierarchy
This paper has come to me just this morning by Google alerts It is for sure worth reading and my comments to it too as I think. The main idea of a gossip is that the social environment of a person is valued or not valued. Gossips can be destructive but also opposite they can help a person to get higher in the hierarchy of human society. So gossip is actually a means of hierarchy.
According to my personal experience hierarchy supported by gossip is always to be found in human groups that are relatively closed and “immobile”. That means e.g. a village, or a small town where people mostly know each other, or at least they know some “decisive “personalities” plus people from their own social environment. “Decisive” people are in such a case people who mean many other people, like policemen, hairdressers, teachers, local politicians, doctors, lawyers and others, people of some importance.
In a group of people where there is a huge migration, that means many new people are coming to that group while older members of that group are leaving the group, gossiping is modified. It is not the same as in relatively closed and stable community.
I have had the chance to experience both such groups, right now I live in a small village close to a small town, and some 20 years ago I worked as a contractor for US military stationed in Germany. Here the number of new Americans coming to the group and old leaving was remarkable and substantial. The village and small town I am living now in are from this point of view basically absolutely stable communities as the number of new people coming to this group is really small and so is the number of people who leave the group.
Gossip is actually only a way of passing information about one’s experiences to somebody else, but it can be misused by passing on made-up experiences, untrue experiences, which is heavily done especially in small human groups.
This approves a question why do people misuse gossip, passing of information, to speak badly about somebody? Most probably they do it because they use this way of passing information as a tool in the fight for hierarchy positions.
Sometimes I wondered how humans have found these ways, and I really do not believe that it is because of some kind of mutation. Mutation as a word is according to my understanding of evolution extremely often misused for explaining something we just cannot explain. It is like modern God. If I cannot explain something that I should explain in evolution I say it is due to some kind of mutation, exactly as most of the people explained their unexplainable experiences by God who did it.
This of course is only a misuse of the word. I see quite different way of humans and animals acquiring new type of behavior. Actually it is based on comparing situations. Just consider the following. There is a new male teacher in a school where there are 90% teachers females. The new male teacher visits the female teachers one by one and offers them his sexual service. Females do exchange their personal experiences with this new male teacher and see that he is only after his lust, he only wants to get another female to have sex with him regardless any other values, especially those that are highly valued by females. Of course, such male has basically no chance to be awarded sex by any of these hypothetical female teachers. But because he feels it as unpleasant that he could not come to his goal having sex with all of the female teachers or at least with only one of them he might use the same gossip about some other new male teacher, saying that he saw him one day with one female the next day with the other female etc. So giving him no chance for sex with theses female teachers, exactly as he had no chance.
There is one more beautiful example of gossip in German recent political history, where one politician in order to get rid of his political rival accused him of offering him homosexual contact. There is no defense against such gossip and therefore this bad guy won the political race.
So gossip can be useful to warn you about somebody who cheats, but also it can be a weapon in the hands of a cheater who wants to get rid of his fair rival. This is fully in accordance with evolution, any animal, any human being uses whatever weapons to get higher in the hierarchy and so ensure better living conditions for themselves and their offsprings. The only problem is that this weapon is not a fair one. Anybody who reaches for such an unfair weapon marks himself as a weak and cheating individual but this might be really difficult for unschooled and unprepared others to detect. Therefore gossips are believed and only few extra smart people can make them out as cheating.
The next question is why do some people use untrue gossip and some do not. If untrue gossiping would be such a perfect weapon for gaining higher position in human hierarchy everybody would make use of it. So why are there human individuals who do not make use of the untrue gossiping?
The answer seems quite easy, untrue gossiping is considered bad behavior if detected as untrue gossiping. Some people cannot make it out and so they believe it and some can make detect some gossiping as untrue and the author is discredited. Also untrue gossiping means you must keep track of your lies, you must remember what untrue information you have told to whom, and you must also know, at least at the level of probability, who might talk to whom, so that you do not say two different lies to two people who are in daily contacts with each other, as in such a case you would be extremely soon detected as a liar.
These keeping track of you lies consumes your energy, and some people just do not want to invest their resources into gossiping but they put it into real work, say scientific work. Those who cannot for whatever reason compete with these kind of people will employ gossips, after some time if their gossips work they feel awarded by their social environment for gossiping because they can get onto a higher level in the hierarchy of the particular human group.
This short paper should be considered as an attempt to explain what gossips are and how they come to existence and why some do use gossips and some do not. You may try to make your own thinking on this inte4resting topic.
# posted by Dalibor @ 7:50 AM 
