9,619 research outputs found
The evolution of leader-follower reciprocity: The theory of service-for-prestige
Copyright © 2014 Price and Van Vugt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.We describe the service-for-prestige theory of leadership, which proposes that voluntary leaderâfollower relations evolved in humans via a process of reciprocal exchange that generated adaptive benefits for both leaders and followers. We propose that although leaderâfollower relations first emerged in the human lineage to solve problems related to information sharing and social coordination, they ultimately evolved into exchange relationships whereby followers could compensate leaders for services which would otherwise have been prohibitively costly for leaders to provide. In this exchange, leaders incur costs to provide followers with public goods, and in return, followers incur costs to provide leaders with prestige (and associated fitness benefits). Because whole groups of followers tend to gain from leader-provided public goods, and because prestige is costly for followers to produce, the provisioning of prestige to leaders requires solutions to the âfree riderâ problem of disrespectful followers (who benefit from leader services without sharing the costs of producing prestige). Thus service-for-prestige makes the unique prediction that disrespectful followers of beneficial leaders will be targeted by other followers for punitive sentiment and/or social exclusion. Leaderâfollower relations should be more reciprocal and mutually beneficial when leaders and followers have more equal social bargaining power. However, as leaders gain more relative power, and their high status becomes less dependent on their willingness to pay the costs of benefitting followers, service-for-prestige predicts that leaderâfollower relations will become based more on leadersâ ability to dominate and exploit rather than benefit followers. We review evidential support for a set of predictions made by service-for-prestige, and discuss how service-for-prestige relates to social neuroscience research on leadership
E-Motion: being moved by fiction and media? : Notes on fictional worlds, virtual contacts and the reality of emotions
Our response to fictional cues is often as emotional as to occurrences in real life. Such emotional responses do not mean that each time we mistake fiction for reality; rather they are affected by our innate social behaviors and by complex neural structures. Some responses, as for instance fright or pity, take place spontaneously, comparably to a reflex act. Furthermore, emotions can be evoked by means of thoughts: some specific sorts of texts rouse the readerÂŽs ability to share in the emotional experiences of a fictional character. Other emotions can refer to a work of art as a whole or to some implicit components of meaning or allusions to facts of the case external to the text. Further ways of emotional engagement are pleasure and suspense, the affective basic processes of each reception of art or any media.Menschen reagieren auf fiktionale Ereignisse ebenso emotional wie auf das wirkliche Leben. Solche GefĂŒhlsreaktionen bedeuten jedoch keine Verwechslung von RealitĂ€t und Fiktion, sondern sind ein Produkt angeborener sozialer Verhaltensweisen und komplexer neuronaler VorgĂ€nge. Reaktionen wie Schrecken und Mitleid zum Beispiel geschehen spontan, fast reflexartig. Aber auch ĂŒber Gedanken lassen sich Emotionen hervorrufen: Bestimmte literarische Textsorten appellieren an das EinfĂŒhlungsvermögen des Lesers und lassen ihn an der GefĂŒhlswelt fiktionaler Personen teilhaben. Andere Emotionen können sich auf ein kĂŒnstlerisches Werk als ganzes oder auf werkexterne Bedeutungskomponenten beziehen. Weitere Formen emotionaler Beteiligung sind Lust und Spannung, die affektiven Basisprozesse jeder Kunst- und Medienrezeption
Proximate and ultimate factors in evolutionary thinking on art
Art is often described as an evolutionary adaptation, but not enough thought has been given to arguments in support of this claim. This can lead to a variety of explanatory issues, such as unjustly describing artmaking as an adaptation, not recognizing its complex nature, and its potentially even more complex evolutionary trajectory. This paper addresses one subject in particular, which is the conceptual distinction between ultimate and proximate levels of explanation. More specifically, this brief analysis investigates to what extent functional, adaptive explanations and proximate mechanisms might be confused, leading to strong adaptationist claims that may not be in accordance with the available evidence. In this paper, two hypotheses are discussed from this perspective, and it is argued that both of them, upon closer and more extensive analysis, might not stand the adaptationist test
Combat and Warfare in the Early Paleolithic and Medically Unexplained Musculo-Facial Pain in the 21st Century War Veterns and Active-Duty Military Personnel
In a series of recent articles, we
suggest that family dentists, military
dentists and psychiatrists with expertise
in posttraumatic stress disorder (especially in the Veterans Health Administration) are likely to see an increased
number of patients with symptomatic
jaw-clenching and early stages of tooth-
grinding (Bracha et al., 2005). Returning
warfighters and other returnees from
military deployment may be especially
at risk for high rates of clenching-
induced masticatory muscle disorders
at early stages of incisor grinding. The
literature we have recently reviewed
strongly supports the conclusion that
clenching and grinding may primarily
be a manifestation of experiencing
extreme fear or severe chronic distress
(respectively). We have recently
reviewed the clinical and paleoanthropological literature and have noted that
ancestral warfare and ancestral combat,
in the early Paleolithic Environment of
Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) may
be a neglected factor explaining the
conservation of the archaic trait of
bite-muscle strengthening. We have
hypothesized that among ancestral
warriors, jaw clenching may have
rapidly strengthened the two primary
muscles involved in biting, the masseter
muscles and the much larger temporalis muscles. The strengthening of
these muscles may have served the
purpose of enabling a stronger, deeper,
and therefore more lethal, defensive
bite for early Paleolithic humans. The
neuroevolutionary perspective presented here may be novel to many dentists. However, it may be useful in
patient education and in preventing
progression from jaw-clenching to
chronic facial pain
The effects of cheating on deception detection during a social dilemma
Research by social psychologists and others consistently finds that people are poor at detecting attempted deception by others. However, Tooby and Cosmides (cognitive psychologists who favor evolutionary analyses of behavior) have argued and shown that humans have evolved a special âcognitive moduleâ for detecting cheaters. Their research suggests that people are good at detecting cheating by group members. These two literatures seem to be at odds with one another. The hypothesis of this research was that when participants are told a lie by a fellow group member whose attempted deception involves cheating on a task that affects their outcomes, they will be good at detecting deception. In this experiment, participants played blackjack in groups using a social dilemma paradigm. Participantsâ outcomes were either interdependent or independent with a confederateâs outcomes. It was predicted that participants whose outcomes were interdependent with the confederate would be better at detecting deception by the confederate than those participants whose outcomes were independent from the confederateâs outcomes. Results indicate that when judging other participantsâ lies interdependent players were more successful at deception detection than independent players but were not more sensitive to the lies. This effect may be driven by the truth bias, people assume that their interaction partners are truthful which would explain why sensitivity measures (which remove response biases) did not show the hypothesized effect. Independent players were not more successful or sensitive when judging the confederateâs lies. The failure to find the hypothesized effect may be due to methodological factors. Both participants heard may have had their cheating detection modules activated when hearing the instructions for the experiment which implied that cheating could occur. Overall success rates support this idea because they were significantly higher than success rates reached by most deception detection research (50%) which may be indicative that both participants cheating detection modules were active. Results also indicate that as the number of lies told increases overall success decreases but success at detecting lies and sensitivity increase. Thus the more lies that are told the better people are at catching them
An evolved cognitive bias for social norms
Social norms are a widely used concept for explaining human behavior, but there are few studies exploring how we cognitively utilize them. We incorporate here an evolutionary approach to studying social norms, predicting that if norms have been critical to biological fitness, then individuals should have adaptive mechanisms to conform to, and avoid violating, norms. A cognitive bias toward norms is one specific means by which individuals could achieve this. To test this, we assessed whether individuals have greater recall for normative information than for nonnormative information. Three experiments were performed in which participants read a text and were then tested on their recall of behavioral content. The data suggest that individuals have superior recall for normative social information and that performance is not related to rated importance. We discuss how such a cognitive bias may ontogenetically develop and identify possible hypotheses that distinguish between alternative explanatory accounts for social norms
A mentalist framework for linguistic and extralinguistic communication
We outline some components of a mentalist theory of human communicative competence. Communication in our species is an intentional and overt type of social interaction, based on each agent's capability of entertaining shared mental states and of acting so as to make certain mental states shared with the other. Communicative meaning is a matter of ascription: it is not an intrinsic property of a communicative act, but is instead created here and now as the shared construction of the interlocutors. We then discuss how communicative actions are superficially realized by our species, focusing in particular on the difference between linguistic and extralinguistic (that is, gestural) means of expression. Linguistic communication is the communicative use of a symbol system, whereas extralinguistic communication is the communicative use of a set of symbols. The difference turns out to be a matter of processing rather than of intrinsic structure
The Abduction of Disorder in Psychiatry
The evolutionary cornerstone of J. C. Wakefield's (1999) harmful dysfunction thesis is a faulty assumption of comparability between mental and biological processes that overlooks the unique plasticity and openness of the brain?s functioning design. This omission leads Wakefield to an idealized concept of natural mental functions, illusory interpretations of mental disorders as harmful dysfunctions, and exaggerated claims for the validity of his explanatory and stipulative proposals. The authors argue that there are numerous ways in which evolutionarily intact mental and psychological processes, combined with striking discontinuities within and between evolutionary and contemporary social/cultural environments, may cause non-dysfunction variants of many widely accepted major mental disorders. These examples undermine many of Wakefield's arguments for adopting a harmful dysfunction concept of mental disorder
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