|
The answer may be connected with fundamental shifts in social networks that take place during preadolescence and early adolescence (Krebs, 2017). A reduction in identification with adult authority figures seems to be part of this realignment, as Piaget (1932) showed with his vignette studies of tattling. The increasingly covert nature of indirect aggression at this age may thus be driven by motivational changes—an increased concern with peer reputation, rather than with upholding adults’ rules. As Krebs (2017) has pointed out, there may be evolutionary reasons for this realignment: for young children who are entirely dependent on adults, it makes sense to ‘play by the rules’ and even to have adults’ interests to heart; but for preadolescents who are potentially approaching their first mating, peer reputation suddenly becomes much more important, as it mediates the negotiation of new coalitional and mating opportunities in social networks. This realignment, and associated upheaval in (and expansion of) preadolescent dominance hierarchies, may also explain why physical aggression spikes and indirect aggression peaks at this age. Note that this is unlikely to be due simply to the transition from primary to secondary levels of education (cf. Pellegrini and Long, 2017), since physical aggression actually falls around the time of entry to primary education (Côté et al., 2017). In order to highlight the potential contributions of an evolutionary approach to developmental accounts of indirect aggression, I will now consider an interesting and apparently transitional phenomenon in the social behavior of certain young people in this same preadolescent age group. Goodwin (1990) analyzed a specific pattern of discourse among black American young people that she called the “he-said-she-said dispute.” In the “he-said-she-said”—which can occur among boys but was primarily observed by Goodwin among preadolescent girls—one girl accuses another of saying something about her behind her back. A third girl (known as the “instigator”) plays a key role in engineering this confrontation by relaying to the first girl what the second girl allegedly said. During the confrontation, the first and second girl—sometimes joined by the “instigator”—go back and forth in argument for some time, each trying to save face by painting what was said in a more favorable light to herself. Goodwin argued that this kind of dispute was sometimes used explicitly to rearrange social relationships within the girls’ peer group. Since the hesaid-she-said centers on private s to a third party but is played out in a very public arena (typically the neighborhood street or school playground), it may represent an intermediate stage between overt tattling and covert negative gossip. Although Goodwin herself was not writing from an evolutionary perspective, reflecting on her work suggests two ways in which researchers studying the development of indirect aggression (and related constructs) might benefit from a consideration of evolutionary ideas. Firstly, the category of covert aggression is theoretically critical, because a successfully covert aggressor cannot be retaliated against. The “he-said-she-said” only arises because the instigator chooses to betray a secret that she has been given by a gossiper. This suggests that an accurate assessment of the strength and trustworthiness of social relationships—an assessment that is perhaps less available to preadolescents than to older individuals—may determine whether a gossiper is secure in confiding in a peer. Yet covertness is not a category that is captured by current distinctions between indirect, relational and social aggression: while indirect aggression is often conceptualized as covert (e.g., by Heilbron and Prinstein, 2017), it can include some overt relationally manipulative behaviors such as telling a peer that one is not their friend (Archer and Coyne, 2017; Björkqvist et al., 1992). Instead of arguing about definitional boundaries between these three constructs, it might be more productive if researchers in these areas adapted their instruments, or even perhaps reanalyzed their data, to examine the transition from overt relational manipulation to covert indirect aggression. Secondly, Goodwin (1990) was describing a form of indirectly aggressive ritual contest that was particularly associated with preadolescent girls, but also on occasions practiced by boys. It is not hard to guess why this form of competition was less associated with boys: the latter have their own, more direct, forms of competition at this age group, namely sports, games, and play-fighting (cf. Ingram et al., 2017). There is little mystery here if indirect aggression is viewed as a form of competition within a prestige hierarchy: the intra-female preference for indirect over direct forms of aggression is easily explained by parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972), which leads women to avoid physical confrontations that might affect their ability to nurture offspring (Archer, 2017; Campbell, 1999). Evolutionary theory makes no firm predictions about whether females would actually be more indirectly aggressive than males (Archer, 2017). Yet, perhaps because these forms of behavior are so often viewed as maladaptive (see Heilbron and Prinstein, 2017)—and hence there may be a desire to show that girls are more at risk from them than boys—a large proportion of the literature on indirect, relational and social aggression seems preoccupied with demonstrating just this gender effect. Most reviews have concluded that there is a slight tendency for girls to be more indirectly aggressive than boys (Archer, 2017; Card et al., 2017; Heilbron and Prinstein, 2017). However, this effect is far from universal: it varies according to the local peer context and method of measurement (Archer, 2017), and is associated with different effects on adjustment for both boys and girls from different backgrounds and in different settings (Ostrov and Godleski, 2017; Putallaz et al., 2017). Given that there are huge, reliable differences in frequency of physical aggression between girls and boys (Archer, 2017; Card et al., 2017), it may be less interesting that girls practice relational aggression slightly more than boys, than that boys practice it about as much as girls. Rather than being concerned with small gender effects across hundreds of participants, it might be more fruitful to focus on the microdynamics of indirect aggression as it is used in particular contests for dominance in localized peer contexts. Initial research on indirect aggression has been well served by peer-rating and other forms of questionnaire studies, but it might be time to engage with the phenomenon using more in-depth methods. It is encouraging that there has been some interest in observational (e.g., Ostrov et al., 2017) and narrative methods (e.g., Xie et al., 2017). For maximum effect, such studies could be combined with analyses of the effects of social network position on indirect aggression (as in Xie et al., 2017, for social aggression). Longitudinal studies might be used to confirm the predicted decrease in overt relational manipulation and increase in covert aggression from preadolescence onwards. Contextual studies could examine the local drivers of links between indirect aggression and dominance. Finally, experimental studies might test whether transitions in attitudes towards anonymity occur at about the same ages as the theorized transitions in indirect aggression: it might be predicted that sensitivity to anonymity when cheating might arise at around the age of 3, and sensitivity to anonymity when punishing at around the age of 10 years. Conclusion In this article, I have provided an evolutionary rationale for the existing observation (e.g., Berkowitz, 2017; Björkqvist et al., 1992) that certain individuals might alter their behavioral strategies from direct to indirect aggression over the course of development, due to the greater likelihood of punishment for the former. Aggression is of course a multifaceted phenomenon, without any single cause: it is not all about competition within a dominance hierarchy. Nevertheless, aggression between mutual acquaintances in a preschool classroom, as in a group of male chimpanzees, always takes place in the context of a dominance hierarchy. Whatever the reason for the aggression, the actors’ relative positions in the hierarchy help to determine whether, and how, retaliation takes place. I have argued that the evolution of systems of indirect reciprocity, mediated by language, has fundamentally changed the game of dominance in human societies. An expanded potential for retaliation has led to the replacement of dominance hierarchies by prestige hierarchies (cf. Henrich and Gil-White, 2017), mediated by indirect rather than direct aggression. Again, this expanded potential for retaliation applies whatever the reasons for the aggression in the first place. There are a couple of interesting theoretical directions in which the ideas in this article might be taken. One follows from the point that engaging in conflict through indirect, rather than direct, aggression makes it less adaptively risky for females as well as males to participate in prestige hierarchies. This might have far-reaching consequences for the potential size of human societies, since groups of female chimpanzees tend to be much smaller and based on looser, more egalitarian arrangements (Watts, 2017). Another direction would be to look at gossip and the formation of cliques from preadolescence onwards. If, as I have suggested here, tattling to teachers becomes derogated in preadolescence because it implies a betrayal of the peer group, then this suggests that gossip might also be prevented from crossing clique boundaries as defined by social identity. This in turn suggests that certain prestigious individuals might be insulated from indirectly aggressive retaliation by people outside their cliques, allowing them to rise to positions of power within the wider society. Yet over the long run, as societies become more integrated, cliques and other social groupings may be subject to the same reputational dynamics as individuals, contributing to a possible reduction in violence over the course of cultural evolution (cf. Pinker, 2017). 网站原创范文除特殊说明外一切图文作品权归所有；未经官方授权谢绝任何用途转载或刊发于媒体。如发生侵犯作品权现象，英语论文范文，保留一切法学追诉权。()，英语论文网站 |
