Robin Dunbar is amazing. I just finished his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, and it was an eye-opening, insightful and compelling read. The main points of the book are that language evolved as a result of the pressure to keep and maintain social ties in larger primate groups. Once that begins to happen, personal information becomes a means of trade not only for identifying bad behavior but also in lauding good behavior. This certainly supports why praise and blame are such powerful social motivators.
Dunbar and his graduate students did a lot of eavesdropping in order to get to the heart of what people talk about, in order to get to the why. From this field evidence, he begins to weave in the narratives of biological anthropology, archeology and neuro-linguistics to get to the heart of the matter. His propositions are compelling in regards to human group sizes, social cohesion and even how the very same knowledge has come upon abuse by individuals in the modern media.
Considering we’re in the middle of the age of facebook, I think the explosion of digital social networking is a confirmation on a certain level of Dunbar’s theorizing in the book. Although, it would require some neurological studies to nail down whether or not the endorphins released during touching or talking are activated by “facebooking”. That would certainly be an Orwellian consideration on some level. This book has definitely revealed another amazing layer of human interaction for me.
In regards to improvisation, it’s compelling to note why learners and performers have a natural tendency to talk about things or people who are not in their scene. According to Dunbar, that’s how we can win favor with people we’re unfamiliar with. It’s our way to triangulate the values, knowledge and concerns of the person we’re interacting with in order to find out how we can bond.
There was another tidbit that I found fascinating. It was how the different genders communicated. In mixed social interaction, women talk about themselves only about 1/3 of the time, whereas men talk about themselves about 2/3 of the time. Dunbar proposes that this is because the genders have different goals in the evolutionary scheme of things. Women seek to create networks to share knowledge and seek aid in birth and child rearing. Men are advertising their availability and potency in order to find mates. For men, language has become a display like the tail feathers of a peacock. For women, language is the glue for their communities. With a little reflection, there might be some insight into dating in this paragraph.
Brad Fortier 