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Adult humans are characterized by low rates of intra-group physical aggression, relative to both human children and non-human animals. I propose that the suppression of physically aggressive tendencies has been achieved partly through the replacement of dominance hierarchies by prestige hierarchies, driven by indirect reciprocity and mediated by indirectly aggressive competition and linguistic transmission of reputations. Reviewing the developmental literature on indirect aggression and related constructs provides three pieces of evidence that evolutionarily old impulses towards physical aggression are gradually socialized into indirect aggression: physical aggression falls in early childhood over the same age range during which indirect aggression increases; (ii) the same individuals engage in both physical and indirect aggression; and (iii) dominant individuals practice indirect aggression more frequently. Consideration of the developmental course of indirect aggression is complemented by analysis of similar developments in verbal behaviors that are not necessarily aggressive, namely tattling and gossip. Two developmental transitions in indirect aggression and related behaviors are postulated. The first occurs in early childhood as children become aware of norms against physical aggression. The second occurs in preadolescence with the development of increasingly covert forms of reputational competition, as children try to renegotiate their status within peer social networks. Keywords: dominance, evolution of cooperation, indirect reciprocity, language, prestige, reputation Introduction Aggression and Indirect Reciprocity Humans are a remarkably cooperative species, able to live in much larger societies than other mammals (Dunbar, 2017; Hrdy, 2017). One aspect of this cooperativeness is that most humans show low rates of physical aggression towards other individuals (Hrdy, 2017; Pinker, 2017). A particularly striking feature of human societies, at least compared to chimpanzees, is the relative absence of direct physical aggression between same-sex males within the same group, who are after all potentially in fierce competition over mates (Boehm, 1999; Wrangham, Wilson, and Muller, 2017). Yet it is noticeable that in young children, intrasexual physical aggression is much more common than in older children and adults (Tremblay, 2017). Given that children share a higher propensity for aggression with our closest living relatives, an evolutionary developmental account holds promise for explaining how directly aggressive behavior is socialized out of children, leading to the evolutionary novelty of relatively peaceful behavior in most human adults. Most aggressive interactions in both human and non-human societies are caused by conflicts over resources: particularly mates, but also food and territory (which can lead to access to both food and mates). Within other social mammals such as chimpanzees, such interactions tend to be suppressed and regulated by means of dominance hierarchies, which lead to low-ranking individuals backing off without a fight when threatened by highranking individuals (De Waal, 2017; Lorenz, 1966; Watts, 2017). As with non-human animals, so with human children: preschoolers tend to organize themselves into welldefined dominance hierarchies; and most agonistic interactions are transient and one-sided, because dominant individuals are more likely to initiate aggression, and their subordinates tend not to retaliate (Hawley, 2017; Ingram and Bering, 2017; Strayer and Strayer, 1976). However, the preschool is a small social world, and young children do not have many acquaintances. At least in the modern world, adult groups are too large, complex, and anonymous to be regulated by dominance hierarchies alone: some other mechanism must be responsible for helping to reduce conflict and promote cooperation in adult populations. One possible mechanism of this kind is indirect reciprocity (Alexander, 1987; Nowak and Sigmund, 2017). This is an extension of Trivers’s (1971) idea of direct reciprocity, based on the idea that if you scratch my back, someone else (perhaps a relative or other associate of mine) will scratch yours. Conversely, if you scratch my associate’s back, I will scratch yours; and if you stab me in the back, my associate may stab you in yours. Indirect reciprocity may be unique to humans, since its power is greatly amplified by language (Flinn and Alexander, 2017; Nowak and Sigmund, 2017): there may not be many direct witnesses to an aggressive interaction who can retaliate on behalf of the victim; but as long as the victim survives, information about the perpetrator’s identity can be spread throughout a social group through acts of linguistic communication—often glossed as gossip—leading to a downgrading of the latter’s reputation (Dunbar, 2017; Ingram, Piazza, and Bering, 2017). Similarly, Boehm (1999) argued that in small groups of humans—most notably in hunter-gatherer societies—language is used to build coalitions that inhibit the formation of rigid hierarchies led by a dominant male, as are characteristic of chimpanzee societies (De Waal, 2017). Given that indirect reciprocity greatly expands the scope of potential retaliators to aggression, it may well be adaptive to inhibit direct aggression, in which the author of the aggression is easily identifiable and the effects are unambiguously damaging to the victim, in favor of indirect aggression, in which both author and effects are more ambiguous. The two senses of “indirect” used in these two concepts are not the same, since indirect reciprocity may involve repayment to a different target from the one from whom one received an initial positive or negative action; whereas indirect aggression implies action against the same target towards whom aggressive impulses are felt. Nevertheless, I argue that the inhibition of directly aggressive strategies relies on a developmental process in which direct forms of aggression in children are “socially selected” against (cf. Boehm, 2017) by both adults and peers, by means of indirect reciprocity, and gradually replaced by indirect forms of aggression. In turn, the simple dominance hierarchies mediated by physically aggressive interactions that are characteristic of children and chimpanzees are replaced in adult humans by prestige hierarchies (see Henrich and Gil-White, 2017) based on competition over reputation, mediated by indirect aggression. Development of Indirect Reciprocity and Indirect Forms of Aggression The implication of indirect reciprocity in the socialization of aggression is plausible because from a very young age—perhaps as early as 5 months (Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, and Mahajan, 2017)—infants and young children prefer to interact with toys or puppets that have exhibited prosocial rather than antisocial behavior (Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom, 2017; Kenward and Dahl, 2017; Vaish, Carpenter, and Tomasello, 2017). Such responses have been argued by these authors to be early forms of indirect reciprocity. Moreover, in a demonstration of the potential of language to mediate third-party punishment, children as young as 2 reliably tattle—i.e., a peer’s misbehavior to an adult or a more powerful peer—on individuals who violate social norms, in home, preschool and experimental settings (Den Bak and Ross, 1996; Ingram and Bering, 2017; Schmidt, Rakoczy, and Tomasello, 2017; Vaish, Missana, and Tomasello, 2017). Hence children may quite early in life become aware of the potential for their antisocial actions to be punished by third parties, who may even be absent at the time of the transgression: Ingram and Bering (2017) found that tattling was far more often linked to punishment of the child who was tattled on than of the child who did the tattling. Recent research indicates that by the age of 5, this incipient concern with reputation may lead children to be more generous and less likely to violate social norms in settings where their actions are public, compared to settings where they are anonymous (Engelmann, Herrmann, and Tomasello, 2017; Leimgruber, Shaw, Santos, and Olson, 2017; cf. Piazza, Bering, and Ingram, 2017). Note however that all these authors acknowledge that their results do not necessarily indicate an explicit form of reputation management: with such young children, indirect reciprocity is likely to work only at an ultimate rather than a proximate level. Naturally, children continue to be motivated to aggress against peers, for various reasons, whether reactively retaliating against a perceived offence by the other child, or proactively enforcing or contesting their position in the dominance hierarchy (see, e.g., Prinstein and Cillessen, 2017, for a discussion of proactive and reactive aggressors). Hence they will gradually learn that aggressing indirectly, rather than directly, is less likely to result in unfavorable outcomes such as punishment or escalated retaliation. Similar arguments have been made outside of an explicitly evolutionary theoretical framework by Björkvist, Lagerspetz, and Kaukiainen (1992), and by Berkowitz (2017); while Goldstein, Tisak, and Boxer (2017) found that preschoolers rated relationally aggressive responses to provocation as more acceptable than physically or verbally aggressive responses. The relative benefits of indirect aggression will apply even in cases in which, were it not for indirect reciprocity and the spread of reputationally relevant information relevant via language, dominant individuals might feel quite secure in aggressing (e.g., when retaliating against a lower-ranking individual; cf. Boehm, 1999). So far I have referred to ‘indirect forms of aggression’ without defining this construct explicitly. An issue is that there are three separate research traditions in this area, which have investigated three related theoretical constructs, under the names of indirect, relational and social aggression (Archer and Coyne, 2017; Heilbron and Prinstein, 2017). In an integrative review, Archer and Coyne (2017) argued that all three constructs draw on essentially the same form of aggression, suggesting that they each represent “an alternative aggressive strategy used for individual or situational reasons when the costs of direct confrontation are high” (p. 213). This approach seems reasonable, but it is important also to keep in mind the differences between the constructs. The construct that best fits Archer and Coyne’s definition is indirect aggression, where “the aggressor may remain unidentified, thereby avoiding both counterattack from the target and disapproval by others” (Lagerspetz, Björkqvist, and Peltonen, 1988, p. 404). This form of aggression is often, but not necessarily, covert—it can include behaviors such as telling someone that one is not their friend (Björkqvist et al., 1992)—and may be either verbal (e.g., spreading rumors about someone) or non-verbal (e.g., putting chewing-gum on someone’s chair; see Goldstein et al., 2017). Relational aggression, defined as “harming others through purposeful manipulation and damage of their peer relationships” (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995, p. 711) is typically verbal and does not always involve a third party, but is sometimes based on a direct threat to the victim’s own relationship with the aggressor (termed relational manipulation; see, e.g., Ostrov and Godleski, 2017). Social aggression (Cairns, Cairns, Neckerman, Ferguson, and Gariépy, 1989; Galen and Underwood, 1997) is similar to relational aggression, except that it can include non-verbal, but also non-violent, means of direct aggression such as gestures and facial expressions, which are not usually considered to be forms of relational aggression. Here I follow Archer and Coyne (2017) in using the term “indirect aggression” to refer to behavioural data gathered by all three research traditions, since this was the first of the three terms to appear in the scientific literature (dating back at least to Lesser, 1959).()，英语论文范文，英语论文范文 |
