Abstract
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have argued that individual-selection accounts of human cooperation flounder in the face of the free-rider identification problem. Kim Sterelny has responded to this line of argument for group selection, arguing that the free-rider identification problem in fact poses no theoretical difficulty for individual-selection accounts. In this article, I set out to clarify Bowles and Gintis’ argument. As I see matters, the real crux of their argument is this: solving the free-rider identification problem, even in modestly sized social groups, requires that group members are disposed to share social information with one another. The difficulty for individual-selection accounts, according to Bowles and Gintis, is that these accounts have no explanation for why individuals should be disposed to behave in this way. Having clarified their argument, I then turn to Sterelny’s criticism, and argue that Sterelny underestimates the challenge being raised by Bowles and Gintis. More specifically, I argue that it is unclear whether the expected benefits of having a disposition to share social information would have outweighed the expected costs for an individual belonging to a Pleistocene social group. Importantly, this is not to say that I am persuaded by Bowles and Gintis’ argument; on the contrary, what I claim is that more theoretical (and in particular) empirical work is necessary before the issues under discussion can be settled. I formulate some specific questions which I think future research in this area should aim to address.
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Notes
By “construed broadly” here, I simply mean explanations revolving around repeated interaction (in the case of reciprocal altruism) and ones revolving around reputation (in the case of indirect reciprocity). Below, we will look at a third type of individual-selection mechanism, namely, partner choice, which also relies crucially upon reputation. In this regard, partner choice is closely tied to indirect reciprocity, and I wait until later on in this article to fully distinguish the two.
All page numbers following block quotes in this section refer to Bowles and Gintis (2011).
Ideally, one would like to see claims about the frequency of (more or less) private cooperative interactions buttressed by concrete ethnographic evidence. Unfortunately, there is not space to consider the ethnographic literature on this issue here. I set aside skepticism over Bowles and Gintis’ claim going forward as my impression is that they are on relatively firm ground.
In what follows, I drop the qualifier “truthful.” The reader should assume that when I talk of sharing information, I mean sharing truthful or accurate information, unless I explicitly say otherwise.
I use the term “social information” rather than “gossip” so as to avoid the negative connotations associated with the latter.
Ultimately, one will want to see a more detailed group-selection explanation for the evolution of the disposition to share social information. The motivation for such a desire is that there would seem to be another “subversion from within” problem lurking in the background. If this disposition is, on the whole, individually costly, then those who lack the disposition will have a higher fitness than those who possess it when each belongs to the same group. What, then, is to prevent individuals who lack this disposition from overtaking the group? (I thank an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to this issue.)
I think there are a couple of things proponents of group selection can say at this point, though I do not deny that matters are complicated. Here, for example, is a sketch of one line of response which I find to be prima facie plausible. On the reasonable assumption that the costs of possessing this disposition (if indeed there are some) aren’t too significant, then the difference in fitness between an individual who lacks this disposition and one who possesses it cannot be too significant either. To provide a point of contrast: this fitness difference is bound to be much smaller than that between an individual who, say, lacks the disposition to share food (and yet is not punished/ostracized by group members) and one who is disposed to share food. Hence, in the case of the disposition to share social information, it may not be that difficult for selection operating at the level of the group to offset the process of subversion from within, despite the slower pace of the former process.
On the other hand, one might think that the only fair-minded thing to say in this context is that the evolution of this disposition is actually a theoretical difficulty for both individual-selection and group-selection accounts (though for different reasons). (This is the view suggested to me by the above-mentioned referee.) On this view, Bowles and Gintis’ argument would still be seen as raising an important evolutionary question (i.e., how could this disposition evolve?), just not one which group-selection accounts have an obviously easier time answering. I’m inclined to think that this view is a bit too strong, but I will not argue for that claim here.
See, for example, Emler (1992, 1994), Dunbar et al. (1997), and Wiessner (2005). Emler sampled from a wide range of conversational contexts and found that about 70 % of time spent conversing involves the transmission of social information. Following this study up, Dunbar et al. examined the content of conversations taking place between students in a university refectory. They found that about 60 % of conversational time is spent on social information. Finally, based on 308 multi-hour recordings of conversations between Ju/’hoansi!Kung individuals, Wiesnner reports that 56 % of conversations included criticism of group members, and (only!) 7 % praise of group members.
It should be noted that Sterelny is not in general opposed to the idea that group selection has played a role in human evolution (see 2012, p. 178, for example); he simply rejects the idea that we need to appeal to group selection to explain how the disposition to cooperate evolved in humans.
All page numbers following block quotes in this section refer to Sterelny (2012).
Sterelny does not claim that this is the only honesty-enforcing mechanism, of course. In particular, he approvingly cites the work of Sperber (e.g., Sperber 2000, 2001) on the role of folk epistemology in helping us to evaluate the reliability of various sources. What Sterelny disagrees with Sperber (and many others) on is that epistemic vigil against deception is the primary means of keeping deception in check. Sterelny’s point is that the shape of human communication networks already does much of this work for us.
The communal meetings which many hunter-gathers hold at the end of each day provide us with a vivid illustration of a communicative situation involving very many receivers. For example, Hames and Vickers (1982) report that, “When [Siona-Secoy hunters, an indigenous Amazonian people] return from the forest, they gather to discuss their various successes and failures, the signs of game encountered, the location of fruiting plants favored by particular species, and the difficulties of tracking, stalking, and pursuit” (p. 368). Other examples can be found in Ray (1963), Marshall (1976), and Tanner (1978).
For state-of-the-art work on partner choice in the human domain, see Baumard et al. (2013).
I am indebted to an anonymous referee for this insight. Without his/her detailed comments, I would not have appreciated the importance of partner choice in this context. The material presented in the remainder of this section draws heavily upon those comments. The main way in which my discussion goes beyond that suggested to me by the referee is in showing how the precise content of the information that is shared can signal the possession of specific personality traits (e.g., is very knowledgeable about animal behavior).
To be clear: I here assume that the hunter is perfectly capable of bagging the prey without enlisting the help of others. If he weren’t, then his sharing of such information, at least with some of his group members, wouldn’t be at all surprising. I thank an anonymous referee for this clarification.
Of course, even if meat is typically shared amongst the group, it is not hard for us to imagine reasons why each hunter prefers to be the one who actually bags the prey. For example, he who bags the prey may enjoy an uncontested claim to some especially highly valued portion of the meat.
Marlowe (2010), for example, relates how Hadza people attempt to signal that they have “good eyesight, coordination, strength, knowledge, endurance, [and] bravery” (p. 231). Marlowe’s discussion concerns the sharing of particular foods (it may take great bravery, say, to secure a certain food type), but shared information (if true) could serve essentially the same purpose.
The fondness which we show for sharing social information certainly stands out in comparison with our feelings towards sharing other kinds of information. One might think that this constitutes strong evidence that our disposition to share such information has been shaped by one or another selective force. Put differently, one might think that it is very unlikely that we would show such a fondness for sharing social information by chance alone or as a by-product of some other psychological trait. If this is correct, then we should obviously be quite skeptical of any nonadaptive explanation for our disposition to share social information. This is really a topic deserving of an in-depth treatment of its own, however. I take no definite stance on the relative plausibility of adaptive versus nonadaptive explanations for this disposition in the present work.
The possibility that acts of sharing social information might be “paid back” by acts of sharing other kinds of information (e.g., ecological information), or just information more generally, is an important one. There is not room to consider this possibility here, however, and so I set it aside in what follows. What I want to focus on is the possibility that, in sharing social information, an individual gains access to a specific domain of information (social information) that she would lack access to if she did not herself share social information.
The reason I did not include these expected costs earlier in the discussion in this section is that they flow from a rather extreme form of the disposition to share social information.
I construe “empirical” broadly, so as to include, for example, looking to preexisting ethnographic accounts to gain a better understanding of how social information is exchanged in small-scale societies.
The experimental work of Turner et al. cited in the foregoing paragraph did look at how perceptions of the sharer were affected by relation to the sharer (i.e., whether the sharer was a friend or a stranger). Surprisingly, they found that sharing social information, regardless of whether it was positive or negative, tended to adversely affect perceptions of the sharer for both types of relationships. What I am asking about here is different, though. I am asking how individuals factor in their relationship to their communicative partner(s) in deciding what social information, if any, to share with the latter. A more general question here is how such decision making is sensitive to the personality traits of one’s communicative partner(s).
I have more in mind than simply whether the information is positive versus negative.
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I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for this journal whose excellent feedback greatly improved this article.
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Planer, R.J. On the Free-Rider Identification Problem. Biol Theory 10, 134–144 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-015-0206-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-015-0206-2