|
A key part of my argument is the contention that behaviors like indirect aggression, gossip and tattling support the creation of prestige hierarchies, in which most competition take place in the realm of linguistically mediated reputation, rather than via physical means as with simple dominance hierarchies. Prestige hierarchies help to coordinate members of a large social group by reducing direct conflicts between them, which might otherwise escalate into large-scale feuds based on cycles of indirect reciprocity. It follows that dominant individuals should engage in more indirect aggression, gossip and tattling than their subordinates. Another prediction is that they will also be more frequent targets for such behaviors (cf. McAndrew, Bell, and Garcia, 2017) but I will not attempt to evaluate this hypothesis here. There is a superficial problem for this theory in that numerous studies (reviewed by Heilbron and Prinstein, 2017) have demonstrated negative links between indirect aggression (or related constructs) and peer acceptance, likeability or social preference; and positive links with apparently maladaptive sociometric measures such as rejection and exclusion. This is the case for preschoolers (e.g., Crick et al. 1997; Ostrov et al., 2017), elementary-school-age children (e.g., Crick and Grotpeter, 1995; Lancelotta and Vaughn, 1989), young adolescents (e.g., Cillessen and Mayeux, 2017), and young adults (e.g., Werner and Crick, 1999). However, as Heilbron and Prinstein (2017) have pointed out, likeability is only moderately correlated with popularity. Popularity measures, obtained by asking children who are the most popular individuals in their class, rather than whom they personally like best—or by measuring social centrality directly—may be a better indicator of children’s dominance hierarchies than likeability measures, because there is no reason why powerful individuals should necessarily be well liked (as the examples of politicians and bankers attest). The positive link between indirect aggression and popularity may also be more reliable than the negative link between indirect or relational aggression and likeability, since many of the studies ing the latter link found that it was limited to one or other gender (e.g., Crick et al., 1997; Ostrov et al., 2017), whereas this was not the case for most of the studies ing a popularity effect (e.g., Andreou, 2017; Cillessen and Mayeux, 2017; Prinstein and Cillessen, 2017; Xie, Cairns, and Cairns, 2017). And among preschoolers, where it is easier to assess dominance directly by observing physical interactions, Ostrov and Keating (2017) found associations between dominance and verbal and relational aggression (albeit mediated by gender). One way of making sense of this rather complex pattern of results is through Hawley’s (1999) “resource control theory”. According to this theory, certain individuals (termed “bistrategic controllers” or simply “bistrategics”) use a mixture of prosocial and aggressive strategies to achieve dominance within their peer group (see Hawley and Geldhof, 2017, for recent empirical examples). They may thus be simultaneously disliked and perceived as popular—unlike their peers who use only aggressive strategies, who are both disliked and unpopular. Indirect aggression is an appealing strategy for bistrategics, since it allows them to be antisocial to one peer under the guise of being neutral or even prosocial to another (e.g., by providing them with useful information in the form of gossip). And indeed, Hawley, Little, and Card (2017) found high levels of relational aggression in both girls and boys identified as bistrategic. These individuals are also predicted to have high social impact (defined sociometrically as the sum of peer acceptance and rejection), which has independently been found to be positively associated with relational aggression (Zimmer-Gembeck, Geiger, and Crick, 2017). Bistrategics are also predicted to have strong social skills—necessary for working out which type of strategy to use in particular contexts—and several studies have found socio-cognitive skills to be associated with relational aggression (e.g., Andreou, 2017; Carpenter and Nangle, 2017). The relationship between indirect aggression and social dominance may thus be driven by a subset of rather Machiavellian young people, who use socially aggressive strategies and sophisticated socio-cognitive skills to manipulate their peers into giving them what they want. In line with this idea, Ostrov, Ries, Stauffacher, Godleski, and Mullins (2017) demonstrated a link between relational aggression and deception among preschoolers, while Pellegrini and Long (2017) found that socially dominant middle-school girls were more likely to use indirectly aggressive strategies). Something similar may be going on with tattling. Although the relationship between tattling and dominance has been very little studied, Ingram and Bering (2017) found a strong correlation between the two variables in the one preschool classroom where they examined this relationship. This effect was mainly, though not exclusively, driven by a young girl who clearly fitted the picture of a bistrategic controller (see Ingram, 2017, ch. 4, for ethnographic details). Hence, Ingram and Bering (2017) argued that: “Tattling may be one of several interpersonal strategies—including relationally aggressive behavior such as saying ‘I’m not your friend,’ verbally aggressive behavior such as threats or taunts, and direct physical aggression such as pushing—which some preschool children use, to varying degrees, to achieve social dominance” (p. 954). The question then arises of whether tattling continues to be used as a strategy by dominant individuals at older ages. Friman et al. (2017) found a strong negative correlation between tattling and likeability among 12–18-year-old boys in a boys’ home; but since they did not ask about popularity, it is impossible to say for sure whether this reflects the same bistrategic pattern of high popularity and low likeability that is found for indirect aggression at the same age, or whether tattling by this age is a completely derogated strategy. However, the evidence from vignette studies (Loke et al., 2017; Piaget, 1932) on the unacceptability of tattling on peers by this age would suggest the latter interpretation, as would the harsh treatment meted out to adult “snitches” in criminal gangs (Rosenfeld, Jacobs, and Wright, 2017), and even to corporate whistleblowers (Mesmer-Magnus and Viswesvaran, 2017). The suppression of overt tattling would fit well with the idea of the creation of prestige hierarchies, in which direct conflict between individuals is gradually reduced, as some individuals come to use avoidant strategies to escape conflict with others whose reputation precedes them (cf. Laursen et al., 2017). In this article, I have argued that the presence of networks of indirect reciprocity in human societies encourages the development of strategies of indirect aggression, through which certain individuals can satisfy their inclinations to aggress against peers (for whatever reason) while reducing the risk of retaliation from more powerful associates of their victims. Reviewing the extensive literature on indirect, relational and social aggression (as already reviewed by Archer and Coyne, 2017, and Heilbron and Prinstein, 2017) offers three main lines of evidence for the contention that indirect aggression is a developmental elaboration of direct aggression rather than a strategy with completely separate motivations. Firstly, indirect aggression increases over the same age ranges at which direct, physical aggression is falling. Secondly, the same individuals are probably responsible for most instances of both direct and indirect aggression (see especially Card et al., 2017). Thirdly, indirect aggression is associated with socially dominant individuals, suggesting that it may be linked to the extension of dominance hierarchies into prestige hierarchies, maintained through oblique conversation rather than direct confrontation.()，英语论文，英语论文范文 |
