|
Article Excerpt
In seeking to investigate the social nature of memory, Bartlett (1932) formulated the 'transmission chain method', in which material, typically a text, is passed through a chain of participants, in a manner similar to the children's game 'Chinese whispers' or 'broken telephone'. The first participant reads the material, and is later asked to recall it. The resultant recall is then given to the second participant to reproduce, whose recall is in turn given to the third, and so on along the chain. Using this method, Bartlett demonstrated that traditional folk tales were transmitted more fully than a range of other stimuli, such as a newspaper report, a description of a scene and a scientific text. In the following two decades, a series of transmission chain studies were published in the British Journal of Psychology investigating various hypotheses and participant groups (Hall, 1951; Klugman, 1944; Maxwell, 1936; Northway, 1936; Ward, 1949).
Following this initial period of research activity, the transmission chain method fell from favour within psychology, perhaps due to the rise of behaviourism, and then of cognitive psychology, both of which have tended to ignore social processes. However, a handful of recent studies have sought to reintroduce the transmission chain method, updating it according to modern standards of experimental psychology by reporting standardized instructions, using multiple parallel chains and introducing the statistical analysis of quantifiable data.
For example, Bangerter (2000) found that a description of conception from a biology textbook was gradually distorted according to the participants' gender stereotypes, with the sperm cell given an active role and the ovum a passive role in the reproduced descriptions. Kashima (2000a) found that when a description of male and female behaviour was transmitted, stereotype-inconsistent behaviour was reproduced more than stereotype-consistent behaviour by the first few generations, while later generations reversed this trend and recalled more stereotype-consistent behaviour. Finally, Mesoudi and Whiten (2004) found that descriptions of everyday routine events, such as getting up or going shopping, were gradually transformed from low-level details into high-level global propositions, consistent with hierarchical script models of event knowledge representation.
These recent studies demonstrate that the transmission chain method can be uniquely effective in revealing cumulative and systematic biases in recall that affect cultural transmission. The present study used this method to investigate the cultural transmission of information regarding third party social relationships, including what is commonly called gossip. As acknowledged by Emler (2001), there has been very little social psychological theory developed in this area, and even less systematic hypothesis testing. In contrast, we have approached the topic from an evolutionary and comparative perspective, in which there is a large body of work devoted to the social function of human intelligence. We believe that such an approach can add theoretical rigour to a traditionally underdeveloped and under-researched topic.
The Machiavellian intelligence/social brain hypothesis
The Machiavellian intelligence (Byrne & Whiten, 1988; Whiten, 1999b; Whiten & Byrne, 1997) or social brain (Dunbar, 1998, 2003) hypothesis asserts that primate intelligence evolved primarily to deal with complex social problems, rather than nonsocial ecological or technological problems such as locating food, extractive foraging or using tools. Support for the hypothesis comes from correlational analyses of a number of primate species showing a link between a proxy of intelligence, the ratio of neocortex to the rest of the brain and various measures of social complexity, such as group size (Barton & Dunbar, 1997), frequency of tactical deception (Byrne & Corp, 2004) and frequency of social play (Lewis, 2001). Measures of non-social complexity, such as range size or foraging style, show no such correlation with neocortex ratio (Dunbar, 1995).
Although such analyses encompass the entire primate order, the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis should not be taken as excluding the evolution of human intelligence, and the studies cited above include data from several ancestral hominid species (as well as modern humans). Indeed, Whiten (1999a) outlines how social factors may have shaped cognition during human evolution to produce what he terms a deep social mind, exhibiting faculties such as mind-reading and coordinated cooperation. Dunbar's (1993, 1996) social gossip theory argues that language evolved in humans in response to social selection pressures, in order to track complex social relationships and ensure their coherence in the unusually large social groups characteristic of modern humans.
The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis can also be taken to imply that, as a result of selection pressures in the past favouring social cognitive complexity, the cognition of modern-day humans should exhibit certain specializations to deal with social problems (Whiten, 2000). If modern-day human cognition is indeed moulded to deal with social problems, then people should preferentially attend to, recall and transmit social information over equivalent non-social information. Observational evidence consistent with this claim was provided by Dunbar, Duncan, and Marriott (1997), who found that freely forming conversational groups spent approximately two-thirds of their time discussing social topics (personal relationships, personal experiences or social activities)--more than work, leisure, politics and the arts combined.
To date, there has been no equivalent experimental test of the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis with regard to cultural transmission. However, an earlier memory study by Owens, Bower, and Black (1979), while not intended to be such a test, can be considered relevant. Participants in Owens et al.'s (1979) study read and recalled descriptions of a female student involved in five everyday events: making a cup of coffee, going to the doctor's, buying some milk, attending a lecture and going to a party. The experimental group, but not the control group, was also told of a motive for the character (that she is pregnant by her professor) that could be used to make sense of and connect the five episodes, in effect turning the neutral events into gossip. The result was that the experimental group recalled significantly more episodes than the control group.
The present study
The aim of the present study was to extend Owens et al.'s (1979) findings in two ways, in order to provide an explicit test of the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis with regard to human cultural transmission. First, rather than having single participants reading and recalling experimental material (i.e. social and non-social material), here we used Bartlett's (1932) transmission chain method to pass the material along chains of participants, in order to investigate the longer-term persistence of any 'social bias' in cultural transmission. If an effect can be demonstrated to have a degree of stability or persistence along chains of multiple participants, we can more confidently extrapolate from this necessarily simplified experimental setting to a larger group or population level and draw wider conclusions regarding human culture as a whole.
Second, we explicitly draw on the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis in order to provide precise definitions of social and non-social information, as shown in Table 1. The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis holds that it is not merely being 'social' in the sense of 'living in groups' that has been a key factor in the evolution of primate intelligence, but rather the degree of social complexity, characterized by frequently changing coalitions and alliances (Whiten, 1999b). Hence, we define social information as information concerning interactions and relationships between a number of third parties. This social category is subdivided according to the quality of those interactions or relationships: gossip involves particularly intense and salient social interactions and relationships, such as the illicit affair and the pregnancy of Owens et al.'s (1979) material, while social non-gossip involves more everyday interactions and relationships. This social category is contrasted with non-social information, which we divide into...
|
