Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. Most people like to gossip, to talk about other people and so that is today’s topic.
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), like most other primates, are social animals which means that they live in groups in which social alliances are important. Chimpanzees spend a lot of time grooming each other. This tactile activity helps to create the social bonds which tie the group together. With regard to grooming, Christopher Seddon, in his book Humans: From the Beginning, reports:
“This is a social activity in which animals remove fleas, dead skin, leaves, dirt, twigs, and other detritus from each other’s fur.”
Chimpanzees, of course, are our closet living relatives, but unlike chimpanzees, humans—Homo sapiens—don’t spend a lot of time in removing fleas and dead skin from one another. Like chimpanzees, humans are social animals, but the groups they live in are much larger than the chimpanzee groups. Furthermore, living in groups is far more critical to humans as we need to cooperate with one another in order to survive. Maintaining group harmony and reinforcing social alliances are essential to humans, but we don’t engage in a lot of physical grooming.
Looking at the idea of grooming from an evolutionary perspective, the lineages leading to chimpanzees and to humans separated about six million years ago. At some time in the distant past, the lineage leading to humans abandoned physical grooming and increased its group size. Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar, in their book Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind, write:
“At some point fingertip grooming had to be abandoned as the principal means of interaction between the majority of social partners. In its place we find a form of vocal grooming, but not necessarily language as we know it at first. Indeed, humans are distinctive even now in having remnants of several communications systems—gestures, exclamations (as in ‘ouch’), laughter and spoken language.”
Human social alliances tend to be formed, strengthened, and reinforced by linking minds through the medium of language. Humans spend a lot of time doing this through a type of social grooming known as gossip—i.e. talking about other people, places, and things. In his book The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, Thomas Suddendorf writes:
“Our urge to link our minds permeates much of what we do. We spend a lot of our social lives exchanging gossip, opinions, and advice. We listen to stories, read books, or watch shows that let us see the world from someone else’s perspective.”
With regard to gossip, Robin Dunbar once proposed that one of the important factors in the evolution of language was the need for the exchange of information about social relationships, information which is vital in the larger human groups. In his book Human Evolution, Robin Dunbar writes:
“The gossip hypothesis is very simple. It suggests that language evolved to allow the exchange of information that could be used to create and foster social relationships, enabling individuals to maintain a level of knowledge about others in large, dispersed networks that would be simply impossible if this had to be done only by face-to-face interaction.”
Robin Dunbar also writes:
“Language has considerable advantages over grooming as a bonding mechanism because it allows more efficient communication. Its efficiencies include allowing us: (1) to interact with several individuals at once; (2) to time share on other activities (we can talk while walking, cooking and eating, all of which are incompatible with grooming); (3) to acquire information about the state of the social network (on a scale that is impossible if such knowledge depends, as it does for monkeys and apes, on personal observation); and (4) to promote our interests (by advertising our good qualities or denigrating those of other individuals).”
Gossip, as a form of social grooming, is one of the factors that allow humans to live in larger groups than chimpanzees. Gossip contributes to the social cohesion of the group and provides the group with a shared sense of empathy. In modern societies, gossip goes beyond the face-to-face chitchat and emerges in news programs, newspapers, magazines, and social media.
Gossip provides a form of social control, particularly with regard to negative gossip. Gossip is a way of pointing out behaviors in others which do not have social approval. In many cases, the fear of negative gossip provides a deterrent to behaviors which are disapproved by the group. In many societies, the idea of scandal can be a powerful tool for conformity to group norms. In his book The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, Nicholas Wade writes:
“People in a small community gossip all the time and maintain elaborate mental dossiers on one another’s behavior. Any infraction of social norms may be remembered for years. Guarding one’s reputation would have become critical.”
While gossip can provide a sense of “we”, it also provides a sense of “other’. Gossip is a way of reinforcing negative views of other people, particularly in racist societies.
Open Thread
This is an open thread—all topics are welcome.
