网范文：“The coalitional use of gossip” 托比和德斯认为男性行为可能是建立在心理适应方面。在前一节中讨论，英语论文范文，英语毕业论文，女性有更强的选择压力，配合使用流言蜚语攻击和维护声誉。这篇社会范文讲述了八卦新闻的作用。虽然类似论点也应该适用于男或混合性别组。与其他灵长类动物相比,人类女性因其形成很强的亲和关系，甚至不具有亲属关系。女性强调和夸大的八卦新闻重复或陈述他们的方式，把人的注意力吸引他们。
通过合理的推论插入故事，或通过添加事件的描述,让事情看起来更糟。八卦报道不止一个人可能是更可信。多个独立的来源为特定的信息大大增加其可靠性。下面的范文进行详述。
Abstract
Tooby and Cosmides (1988), among others, have suggested that male coalitional behavior may be grounded in psychological adaptations for physical warfare. We propose that coalitional behavior may also be grounded—in part—in psychological adaptations for informational warfare. For the reasons discussed in the previous section, there may have been stronger selection pressures on females to cooperate in attacking and defending reputations using gossip; we therefore focus here on the female coalitional use of gossip (although similar arguments should also apply to male or mixed sex groups). In contrast to other primates, human females are notable for forming strong affiliative relationships even with non-kin (Rodseth et al. 1991).
Why do women have such strong affiliative relationships with non-kin? We propose that female coalitions (and by coalitions we mean dyads or cliques within a community) might have been more effective than solitary females in both the offensive and defensive dimensions of informational warfare for several reasons. First, coalitions could have provided more eyes and ears through which to collect accurate information on competitors. The more individuals there were trying to collect information that was rare and difficult to obtain, the more likely it was to be found. Second, coalitions could more thoroughly analyze information.
Multiple individuals could have (a) provided additional, relevant information; (b) offered different interpretations of the same piece of information; (c) more effectively synthesized various pieces of information into a complete account; (d) more effectively assessed the costs and benefits of disseminating the information; (e) devised better strategies for disseminating the information, by, for example, emphasizing or exaggerating aspects of a gossip item by repeating them or stating them in a way that draws attention to them, by inserting plausible inferences into a story such as “she was smiling too much at your husband...she may want to steal him,” by strategically omitting information, or by adding descriptions of events that, when compared to the gossip, make the gossip look worse. Third, coalitions could also have provided more vectors (mouths) to strategically disseminate information to more group members.
Further, some coalition members might have had special relationships with key individuals that allowed them to help coalition members by passing information to those key individuals. Fourth, gossip ed by more than one person may have been more believable. Information can be degraded during communication due to random error (noise). Any account of an event can contain a random error, but the probability that multiple accounts contain the same random error decreases rapidly. Thus, multiple, independent sources for a particular piece of information greatly increase its reliability. Gossip ed by more than one person may also have been more believable because the costs and benefits of lying were unlikely to be equal for different individuals. Whereas the benefits of lying might have outweighed the costs for one person, it was less likely that they did so for more than one person. The probability that two people benefited by telling the same lie was smaller than the probability that one person did so. Consequently, if two individuals told the same story, it was more likely to be true. We test the hypothesis that believability of gossip increases with the number of informants.
Fifth, coalitions may have protected individuals by providing alibis and by providing evidence against accusations. Coalitional threats of gossip could have also deterred an individual from competing with a member of a coalition in the first place. The distinction between collecting and analyzing information on the one hand, and disseminating information on the other, is important, and can be illustrated by drawing on an analogy between physical warfare and informational warfare. In physical warfare, groups rarely actually fight because group violence can be so costly to both sides. Groups spend considerable time preparing for physical warfare, however, by building weapons, patrolling boundaries, solidifying coalitional ties, sharing information about enemies, and reviewing past battles.
A well-prepared group can effectively deter attacks, and therefore not have to fight at all. Similarly, because informational warfare can be so costly, we would expect coalitions to rarely engage in reputational battles. Rather, we expect coalitions to spend considerable time readying themselves for informational warfare by collecting and analyzing relevant information. We expect that much, if not most, coalitional activity related to informational warfare will consist of the collection and, particularly, the analysis of information. We also expect that one of the essential benefits of belonging to a coalition is that it will effectively deter attacks on one’s reputation, another hypothesis tested here.
Although there are some important parallels between informational and physical warfare, there are also some important differences. In informational warfare, in order for every member to equally contribute to, and benefit from, membership in the coalition, each member must process collected information and recent events with respect to the life circumstances of every other coalition member. This information processing load cannot easily be divided among coalition members—everyone has to have the full story in order to make a worthwhile contribution. Despite the improved ability of larger coalitions to collect and disseminate information, the substantial amount of time it takes to process new information from, and about, each coalition member places a severe constraint on coalition size—there are only 24 hours in a day. In contrast, in physical warfare there is no fixed resource like time that must be divided among each and every coalition member. If the potential benefits of warfare and the local resource base are large enough, the advantages of large coalitions will outweigh the disadvantages.
This difference between physical and informational warfare, as well as the fact that we conceive of informational aggression as primarily a within-community competitive strategy, suggest that coalitions formed for the purpose of informational warfare will be considerably smaller than those formed for the purpose of physical warfare. Researchers have consistently found that girl’s play groups are smaller than boy’s play groups (Laosa and Brophy 1972, Omark and Edelman 1973, Lever 1974; cited in Eder and Hallinan 1978; Goodwin 1990b:38-39; Waldrop and Halverson 1975). And, at least for females, we would expect outsiders to be frequently viewed as threats to existing friendship dyads rather than as potential contributors to a larger coalition. In a study of children, Eder and Hallinan (1978) found that, because of the exclusivity of dyadic female friendships, newcomers had a hard time making friends. Eder and Hallihan also that girls’ triadic friendships were more exclusive than boys’ triadic friendships, and that girls had more exclusive triadic friendships than they did nonexclusive triadic friendships.
The coalitional use of gossip requires that coalition members agree on their interpretations of, and attitudes towards, gossip items. Describing gossip among Polynesian Nukulaelae, which is most commonly a female activity, Besnier (1989) wrote, “In order to create a successful gossip session, gossips must ensure that their audience shares their own feelings and attitudes toward the specific topic of the gossip.” Besnier argued that collusion was a main feature of gossip among the Polynesian Nukulaelae, and showed how gossipers delayed the introduction of a key element of the gossip so that their listeners took an active role in the co-production of gossip. Similarly, Eder and Enke (1991) found that a supporting response to an initial negative gossip statement about another resulted in other participants in the conversation subsequently making only negative comments in agreement with this evaluation (early challenges to the evaluation, which were relatively infrequent, led to less conformity). Eder and Enke note that this pattern “helps to explain the overwhelmingly negative tone of most gossip episodes.” In sum, existing research shows that women and girls clearly compete with one another, both singly and in small groups, using non-physical forms of aggression such as attacks on reputation and ostracism, and collude in these activities starting at a very young age. This competition can be over mates, resources, reputation, or female allies, and it has negative consequences for victims.
Self disclosure
Because, within coalitions, every individual is potentially a competitor with every other, and because effective attacks upon, and defenses of, reputation require frank discussion of information that could be damaging to the reputations of coalition members, a mechanism is required to prevent one coalition member from using ‘proprietary’ information against another (a problem that bears obvious resemblance to the ‘commitment problem’, e.g., Frank 1988). Holland and Eisenhart (1990), for example, provided several examples from their ethnographic work among women in US colleges of how women have “fragile ties” with other women, and how they competed with each other over men. Gossip played an important role in this process. One girl they interviewed said “Girls are better off if they don’t talk about their business to other girls...if [others] know, they can boss you” (p. 114).
The authors suggested that the need to avoid being manipulated may have actually prevented many female friendships from becoming solid, and that “[t]here was a collective assumption that others—even some who posed as friends—might use information against a woman to take advantage of her if they could” (p. 116). Goodwin has also ed that “when girls talk about other girls they frequently do so in a guarded fashion, being mindful of the possibility that the present listener could to the talked-about party what was said in her absence” (1982:803). Proveda (1975) noted that “[t]he senior girls who were part of my research constantly complained about the ‘back-stabbing’ and about the other ‘two-faced’ girls. There was a conspicuous absence of such expressions among the senior boys.”
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，保留一切法学追诉权。()
更多范文欢迎访问我们主页 当然有需求可以和我们 联系交流。-X()
|
