The Adaptive Problem of Absent Third-Party Punishment--论文代写范文精选

仅在动物中,人类使用一个额外的和象征性的方式进行沟通，人类交际信号并不总是指直接刺激,还可以引用其他符号的组合。使用符号意味着关注世界事务,人类可以使用语言来描述过去的事务的状态,预测未来状态，下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Abstract 
  Language is a uniquely human behaviour, which has presented unique adaptive problems. Prominent among these is the transmission of information that may affect an individual’s reputation. The possibility of punishment of those with a low reputation by absent third parties has created a selective pressure on human beings that is not shared by any other species. This has led to the evolution of unique cognitive structures that are capable of handling such a novel adaptive challenge. One of these, we argue, is the propositional theory of mind, which enables individuals to model, and potentially manipulate, their own reputation in the minds of other group members, by representing the beliefs that others have about the first party’s intentions and actions. Support for our theoretical model is provided by an observational study on tattling in two preschools, and an experimental study of giving under threat of gossip in a dictator game. 
Keywords: Evolution of Language; Gossip; Indirect Reciprocity; Reputation; Theory of Mind

  Language makes humans unique. Other animals employ complex systems of communication (Hauser, 1997), but their communicative signals are indexical in reference (Deacon, 1997). As with non-verbal communication in humans, the reference of animal signals inheres in the drawing of attention to the presence of a stimulus. The stimulus referred to may be internal, such as dominance/submission displays in dogs (Lorenz, 1966, Figure 3) or emotional signals in humans (Ekman, 1999). Or the stimulus may be external, such as predator alarm calls in vervet monkeys (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1990), the waggle dance in honeybees (Dyer, 2002), or pointing in humans (Kita, 2003). 

  Alone among animals, humans employ an additional, symbolic mode of communication in the form of language: human communicative signals do not always refer to stimuli directly, but may refer to other combinations of symbols (Deacon, 1997). The use of recursive symbols means that, in addition to drawing attention to a present state of affairs in the world, humans can use language to describe past states of affairs, predict future states, and fabricate counterfactual states. This important design feature of language is called displacement (Crystal, 1997, pp. 400–401, following Hockett, 1960). Language has doubtless helped humans to produce great cultural achievements: information about past innovations, for example in the production of stone tools, can be stored in the form of language and fed into the development of new innovations. 

  Less obvious, perhaps, are the adaptive problems that language has created. Displacement means that individuals have to be concerned not only with the reactions of direct witnesses to their actions, but also with the potential reactions of many other individuals to whom the witnesses may communicate information about their actions. In this paper, we present the hypothesis that another uniquely human competence – our highly developed theory of mind – evolved in response to this adaptive problem. We argue that language enabled the development of systems of indirect reciprocity, in which absent third parties punished individuals for negative behaviour towards others. We briefly present two recent studies by the authors that offer supporting evidence for this hypothesis. Young children’s language when they report other children’s behaviour shows design features, such as honesty and negative bias, which ensure that absent third-party punishment is effective. And in adults, selfish behaviour in the dictator game is inhibited by the threat of gossip about such behaviour. We surmise that a sophisticated, propositional theory of mind is responsible for implementing this inhibition.

  Gossip and indirect reciprocity Recently, two important areas of scientific research have opened up in relation to the evolution of uniquely human behaviour. One area of research has focused on the role of language in the expansion of human group sizes; the other has examined the theoretical conditions necessary for the evolution of cooperation in large groups. Our main aim in this section is to show that these two independent areas of research are systematically related. As Nowak and Sigmund (2005, p. 1295) put it: “The co-evolution of human language and cooperation by indirect reciprocity is a fascinating and as yet unexplored topic.” Dunbar (1993; 2004a; 2004b) proposes that a propensity towards a specific kind of language – namely, gossip about other social agents – enabled the evolution of complex human societies. 

  The size of other primate societies, according to Dunbar, is limited by the amount of time that they can devote to the practice of social grooming, which serves to reinforce social bonds and communicate emotional information between allies. In humans, a selective pressure towards larger group sizes led to the evolution of language as an adaptation which could perform similar functions to grooming, in maintaining group cohesion, but which was better suited to being deployed in a distributed manner across a large social group. This was partly because language enabled our ancestors to communicate social information to more than one individual at a time, and partly because it enabled our ancestors to communicate strategic information about the behaviour of absent third parties. 

  In this chapter we focus on the latter activity, which we consider to be broadly synonymous with gossip. Communication about absent third-parties allowed our ancestors to stay in touch with group members who were physically distant, enabling early human groups to spread out over far wider areas than were occupied by other primates, and enabling individuals to maintain wider networks of contacts. Such communication would also have helped to encourage cooperation within groups by spreading information about free riders and other norm violators (see also Dunbar, 1999). In Dunbar’s words:

  [Language] allows us to exchange information about other people, so short-circuiting the laborious process of finding out how they behave. For monkeys and apes, all this has to be done by direct observation. I may never know that you are unreliable until I see you in action with an ally, and that opportunity is likely to occur only rarely. But a mutual acquaintance may be able to report on his or her experiences of you, and so warn me against you – especially if they share a common interest with me. Friends and relations will not want to see their allies being exploited by other individuals, since a cost borne by an ally is ultimately a cost borne by them too.

  Language dramatically expanded the scope of the second form of resistance. Early humans did not have to rely on a powerful third party directly witnessing an act of aggression: the victim themselves, or any other witness, could spread information about the aggression around an entire social network. Furthermore, third parties who heard about the aggression did not have to punish the aggressor single-handedly, but could use language to recruit others to support them, as well as to justify to others the action that they took. Boehm (1999; 2000) argues that the use of language to punish or deter aggression led to the evolution of human (hunter-gatherer) societies that were highly egalitarian compared to the rigid hierarchies of chimpanzee societies. Another way of looking at the same process is in terms of indirect reciprocity (Alexander, 1987; Nowak & Sigmund, 2005). Systems of direct reciprocity (Trivers, 1971) rely on the return of a positive or negative payback for an action to the individual A who performed that action, by the recipient B of the action. （essay代写)

  The potential of direct reciprocity for enhancing cooperation is limited by the scope for future interactions between these two individuals A and B. In contrast, in systems of indirect reciprocity payback may be returned either by the recipient B, by those with whom B shares genetic material, or even by unrelated group members who learn about the incident (Alexander, 1987, p.85). Indirect reciprocity can therefore lead to cooperation even in cases where A and B are unlikely to meet again. While direct reciprocity may be exhibited by some (though perhaps not many) other animals, indirect reciprocity appears to be exhibited only by humans (Alexander, 1987; Richerson, Boyd, & Henrich, 2003, p. 379). It seems plausible that systems of indirect reciprocity are responsible for the unique ability of humans to cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals (but see Richerson, et al., 2003, for a different view). We contend that the novel possibilities offered by indirect observation through language greatly expanded the scope of indirect reciprocity for maintaining cooperation.（essay代写)

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