Monday, November 19, 2007
Gossip and hierarchy II
I was inspired to write this short article by this work from internet where there are findings that I can support and some I must disagree with.
Gossip and human evolution
Many scientists write about gossip as necessary social habit. The tendency to gossip is at the heart of the social life of many people, and most casual conversations are concerned with matters of social importance (Dunbar, 1996).
I think that many scientists dealing with humans and humanity have the problem of language. They take some word from normal language and implement this into their studies, and get mislead by this word or by some others. Language is very often a barrier to understanding. Therefore I believe it is absolutely necessary to give phenomena correct names. Gossip for sure is not a proper scientific description of that what people call gossip. One must get the idea how gossiping may have developed.
I prefer to call the environment of any organism its Informational Environment. I call it informational as everything, all the signals that organism perceives from its environment is information for this organism, and it plays absolutely no role whether we speak ok bees, bears, sharks, apes or humans. This is of course also valid for much smaller organisms as viruses or bacteria. It is always information from the outside world that reaches organism and organism processes this information.
There are thousand of thousands of examples one might use to illustrate this idea. One of these examples, well-known to basically everyone is car driving. I have described this example already many times in my other short works. Just imagine yourself or some other young person in the situation of learning driving. Mostly these people sit unrelaxed, their eyes wide open, their hands holding the steering wheel firmly and the speed is usually not higher than some 30kmh.. A skill car driver offers a completely different picture, he is relaxed, leaned back in his seat, his hands are loosely on the steering wheel and there is no sign of fear of unease in his eyes and he drives 160kmh on German autobahn.. The reason is the ability of coping with the amount of information approaching the driver. The brain of the skilled driver is used to deal with the speed with which the information is approaching his eyes. He has learned that by mere repetition of driving. The more one drives and the higher the seed at which he drives the faster one learns to drive.
Of course, it is not the only example. We can speak of all games like basketball, ice-hockey, soccer, football, volleyball, tennis or table tennis; all these games are illustration of how human brain can learn to cope with the speed at which it must make decisions.
Most probably gossip has developed from originally useful passing information to somebody else, or even requiring the passing of such information by questions. It can be viewed as reasonable to ask your neighbor whether he knows a good plumber if some tubes went broken in your house. It saves time, you do not have to test all the plumbers form your neighborhood. The same logic goes with car repairs, doctors, teachers, hairdressers and all others who offer some service.
It may have happened that one of such craftsmen was not too god and people from his neighborhood kept saying that and this information got even to his own ears. Most probably he felt abused but he learned his lecture and started the same saying about the other craftsmen so increasing his chances to get jobs form other people by gossiping about the others.
I believe it is necessary to make a precise definition of gossip. There might be two of them right now. One saying that gossip is passing over false information, the other that gossip is passing over whatever information. In such a case teacher would have to be gossiping gall the time. The second definition could be refined to get rid of teachers, and it may say this: gossip is passing over some socially important information. Well, did we get rid of teachers? No, we did not. Teachers pass over only socially necessary information, if it were not so, some of that they say would be absolutely unnecessary and would be deleted from the teaching plans,
So I believe that the real definition of gossip is passing over the untrue information. There might be many reasons for doing so. It does not have to necessarily be only telling that some craftsman is not good enough in order to get him out of job and get all his customers. It can also be used for supporting one’s own position in the hierarchy of the group one is living in as well as decreasing the position of somebody else which in turn again increases one’s own position.
So gossiping was most probably at first only passing over of useful and helpful information. But soon it was discovered that this can be used for other purposes also. Gossiping is a sort of cheating; it is passing over false information. In the studies of chimpanzees it was found out that even chimpanzees do cheat when the want to get some advantage. They pretend danger, everybody runs away, and the get really easy access to the thrown away food. This might be taken as evidence that it is not only people who cheat, cheating is everywhere in the nature, only the means of cheating are different, humans can use language and pass over deliberately false information. And that is gossip.
Gossip and human evolution
Many scientists write about gossip as necessary social habit. The tendency to gossip is at the heart of the social life of many people, and most casual conversations are concerned with matters of social importance (Dunbar, 1996).
I think that many scientists dealing with humans and humanity have the problem of language. They take some word from normal language and implement this into their studies, and get mislead by this word or by some others. Language is very often a barrier to understanding. Therefore I believe it is absolutely necessary to give phenomena correct names. Gossip for sure is not a proper scientific description of that what people call gossip. One must get the idea how gossiping may have developed.
I prefer to call the environment of any organism its Informational Environment. I call it informational as everything, all the signals that organism perceives from its environment is information for this organism, and it plays absolutely no role whether we speak ok bees, bears, sharks, apes or humans. This is of course also valid for much smaller organisms as viruses or bacteria. It is always information from the outside world that reaches organism and organism processes this information.
There are thousand of thousands of examples one might use to illustrate this idea. One of these examples, well-known to basically everyone is car driving. I have described this example already many times in my other short works. Just imagine yourself or some other young person in the situation of learning driving. Mostly these people sit unrelaxed, their eyes wide open, their hands holding the steering wheel firmly and the speed is usually not higher than some 30kmh.. A skill car driver offers a completely different picture, he is relaxed, leaned back in his seat, his hands are loosely on the steering wheel and there is no sign of fear of unease in his eyes and he drives 160kmh on German autobahn.. The reason is the ability of coping with the amount of information approaching the driver. The brain of the skilled driver is used to deal with the speed with which the information is approaching his eyes. He has learned that by mere repetition of driving. The more one drives and the higher the seed at which he drives the faster one learns to drive.
Of course, it is not the only example. We can speak of all games like basketball, ice-hockey, soccer, football, volleyball, tennis or table tennis; all these games are illustration of how human brain can learn to cope with the speed at which it must make decisions.
Most probably gossip has developed from originally useful passing information to somebody else, or even requiring the passing of such information by questions. It can be viewed as reasonable to ask your neighbor whether he knows a good plumber if some tubes went broken in your house. It saves time, you do not have to test all the plumbers form your neighborhood. The same logic goes with car repairs, doctors, teachers, hairdressers and all others who offer some service.
It may have happened that one of such craftsmen was not too god and people from his neighborhood kept saying that and this information got even to his own ears. Most probably he felt abused but he learned his lecture and started the same saying about the other craftsmen so increasing his chances to get jobs form other people by gossiping about the others.
I believe it is necessary to make a precise definition of gossip. There might be two of them right now. One saying that gossip is passing over false information, the other that gossip is passing over whatever information. In such a case teacher would have to be gossiping gall the time. The second definition could be refined to get rid of teachers, and it may say this: gossip is passing over some socially important information. Well, did we get rid of teachers? No, we did not. Teachers pass over only socially necessary information, if it were not so, some of that they say would be absolutely unnecessary and would be deleted from the teaching plans,
So I believe that the real definition of gossip is passing over the untrue information. There might be many reasons for doing so. It does not have to necessarily be only telling that some craftsman is not good enough in order to get him out of job and get all his customers. It can also be used for supporting one’s own position in the hierarchy of the group one is living in as well as decreasing the position of somebody else which in turn again increases one’s own position.
So gossiping was most probably at first only passing over of useful and helpful information. But soon it was discovered that this can be used for other purposes also. Gossiping is a sort of cheating; it is passing over false information. In the studies of chimpanzees it was found out that even chimpanzees do cheat when the want to get some advantage. They pretend danger, everybody runs away, and the get really easy access to the thrown away food. This might be taken as evidence that it is not only people who cheat, cheating is everywhere in the nature, only the means of cheating are different, humans can use language and pass over deliberately false information. And that is gossip.
# posted by Dalibor @ 12:58 AM 
