For linguists and evolutionary psychologists, the origins of human language are a fascinating mystery—and so seductive that the Paris Linguistic Society famously had to ban discussion of the topic in 1866 to avoid getting mired in speculative debates.1 In this chapter, however, we’ll be taking our linguistic faculties as a given in order to focus on a different (but related) question: What motivates us to actually use our language faculties—as, for example, in casual conversation? We’ll start with personal conversations, but then move on to consider conversations in the mass media and academia.
According to one estimate, we spend roughly 20 percent of our waking lives engaged in conversation,2 and we spend that time doing a great many different things. We ask questions, give commands, make promises, declare rules, and deliver insults. Often we engage in idle small talk; occasionally we tell stories or recite poetry. We also argue, brag, flatter, threaten, and joke. (And none of this includes the deceptive uses of language.3) But for most observers, one function stands out above all others: sharing information. This is arguably the primary function of language.4 It’s what we do every time we state a fact, explain a theory, or spread some news. Much of what we write also falls into this category: books, blog posts, how-to manuals, news articles, and academic papers. Even gossip is just a way to share a particular type of information, that is, social information.
There’s a nonverbal analog to the info-sharing function of speech, namely, pointing something out. Look over there, we “say” using an index finger. Isn’t that interesting? Or we can physically show an interesting object to a viewer by presenting it with our hands. These behaviors appear in human infants between 9 and 12 months of age.5 The infants aren’t asking for any kind of help; they simply want to direct the adult’s attention to an interesting object, and are satisfied when the adult responds by paying attention. And so it is with most of our speech acts.
Now, it can be tempting to overemphasize the value of sharing information. We fixate on this function of language in part because it’s the basis for all our greatest achievements, especially as modern humans living in large agrarian or industrial civilizations. It’s through language that we’ve managed to accumulate culture and wisdom, to engage in math, science, and history, to run businesses and govern nations. It’s what enables us, in the words of Isaac Newton, to “stand on the shoulders of giants,” to build off the past and improve it.
But we need to be careful not to let these awe-inspiring modern miracles cloud our thinking,6 because our instincts for using language didn’t evolve to help us do science or build empires. Language evolved among our foraging ancestors at least 50,000 years ago (if not far earlier), long before we became the undisputed masters of the planet.7 As we dig into our conversational motives, it pays to keep in mind that our ancestors were animals locked in the competitive struggle to survive and reproduce. Whatever they were doing with language had to help them achieve biologically relevant goals in their world, and to do so more effectively than their peers.
To understand any behavior, it’s essential to understand its cost–benefit structure. And since conversation is a two-way street, we actually need to investigate the costs and benefits of two behaviors: speaking and listening.
In what follows, we’re going to lean heavily on the insights of the psychologist Geoffrey Miller, whom we met in the introduction, as well as the computer and cognitive scientist Jean-Louis Dessalles. Their two books (The Mating Mind and Why We Talk, respectively) provide thoughtful perspectives on conversation as a transaction between speakers and listeners—a transaction constrained, crucially, by the laws of economics and game theory.8
Let’s start with listening, which is the simpler of the two behaviors. Listening costs very little,9 but has the large benefit of helping us learn vicariously, that is, from the knowledge and experience of others. (This isn’t the only benefit, as we’ll see, but it is important.) As listeners, we get to see through other people’s eyes, hear through their ears, and think through their brains. If your friend spots a tiger before you do, he can yell, “Watch out!” and you’ll be spared a vicious mauling. If grandma remembers what happened to the tribe 60 years ago, before the rest of us were around, she can share stories that might spare us the repetition of historical errors.
But if we focus too much on the benefits of listening, we can be seduced into thinking that the evolution of language was practically inevitable, when in fact (as far as we know), complex language evolved only in one species.10 So let’s turn our attention to the speaking side of the transaction, focusing first on the costs.
In a naive accounting, speaking seems to cost almost nothing—just the calories we expend flexing our vocal cords and firing our neurons as we turn thoughts into sentences. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. A full accounting will necessarily include two other, much larger costs:
1.The opportunity cost of monopolizing information. As Dessalles says, “If one makes a point of communicating every new thing to others, one loses the benefit of having been the first to know it.”11 If you tell people about a new berry patch, they’ll raid the berries that could have been yours. If you show them how to make a new tool, soon everyone will have a copy and yours won’t be special anymore.
2.The costs of acquiring the information in the first place. In order to have interesting things to say during a conversation, we need to spend a lot of time and energy foraging for information before the conversation.12 And sometimes this entails significant risk. Consider the explorer who ventures further than others, only to rush home and broadcast her hard-won information, rather than keeping it for herself. This requires an explanation.
In light of these costs, it seems that a winning strategy would be to relax and play it safe, lettings others do all the work to gather new information. If they’re just going to share it with you anyway, as an act of altruism, why bother?
But that’s not the instinct we find in the human animal. We aren’t lazy, greedy listeners. Instead we’re both intensely curious and happy to share the fruits of our curiosity with others. In order to explain why we speak, then, we have to find some benefit large enough to offset the cost of acquiring information and devaluing it by sharing. If speakers are giving away little informational “gifts” in every conversation, what are they getting in return?
A simple but incomplete answer is that speakers benefit by a quid pro quo arrangement: “I’ll share something with you if you return the favor.”13
Let’s call this the reciprocal-exchange theory. In this view, speakers and listeners alternate roles, not unlike two traders who meet along the road and exchange goods with each other. At first, this arrangement appears to balance the books by providing enough benefit to offset the speaker’s costs. But on more careful inspection, there are a number of puzzling behaviors that the reciprocal-exchange theory has trouble explaining.
If the act of speaking were a favor, then we would expect speakers to keep track of which listeners owed them information in return.14 This kind of bookkeeping is manageable when it comes to simple or discreet favors like sharing food, but starts to break down when things get complex and ambiguous, as it does in conversation. Is one juicy piece of gossip worth 10 pieces of trivia? 100? There’s no way to tell.
More to the point, however, is the fact that we don’t actually seem to keep track of conversational debts. We don’t resent our friends who are quieter than average, for example. Instead we speak freely, asking for little more than to be heard and understood. Similarly, we can talk to a whole roomful of people or write an article read by millions, without feeling the need for our listeners or readers to give anything back.15
If exchanging information were the be-all and end-all of conversation, then we would expect people to be greedy listeners and stingy speakers.16 Instead, we typically find ourselves with the opposite attitude: eager to speak at every opportunity.17 In fact, we often compete to have our voices heard, for example, by interrupting other speakers or raising our voices to talk over them. Even while we’re supposed to be listening, we’re frequently giving it a halfhearted effort while our brains scramble feverishly thinking of what to say next.
We’re so eager to speak, in fact, that we have to curb our impulses via the norms of conversational etiquette. If speaking were an act of giving, we would consider it polite for people to “selflessly” monopolize conversations. But in fact, it’s just the opposite. To speak too much or “hog the mic” is considered rude, while the opposite behavior—inviting someone else to take the floor, or asking a dinner guest about one of her hobbies—is considered the epitome of good manners.
These seemingly inverted priorities are reflected not only in our behavior, but also our anatomy. Here’s Miller again:
If talking were the cost and listening were the benefit of language, then our speaking apparatus, which bears the cost of our information-altruism, should have remained rudimentary and conservative, capable only of grudging whispers and inarticulate mumbling. Our ears, which enjoy the benefits of information-acquisition, should have evolved into enormous ear-trumpets that can be swivelled in any direction to soak up all the valuable intelligence reluctantly offered by our peers. Again, this is the opposite of what we observe. Our hearing apparatus remains evolutionarily conservative, very similar to that of other apes, while our speaking apparatus has been dramatically re-engineered. The burden of adaptation has fallen on speaking rather than listening.18
The takeaway from all these observations is that our species seems, somehow, to derive more benefit from speaking than from listening.
According to the reciprocal-exchange theory, conversations should be free to bounce around willy-nilly, as speakers take turns sharing new, unrelated information with each other. A typical conversation might go something like this:
A: FYI, Alex and Jennifer are finally engaged.
B: Thanks. Have you heard that the President is trying to pass a new healthcare bill?
A: Yeah, I already knew that.
B: Oh. In that case, um . . . a new Greek restaurant just opened on University Avenue.
A: That’s new information to me. Thanks.
Either listener might ask follow-up questions, of course. But as soon as their curiosity had been satisfied, they might be expected to turn around and share some new information of their own, regardless of whether it pertained to the previous discussion.
But this is not what human conversation looks like. Instead we find that speakers are tightly constrained by the criterion of relevance.19 In general, whatever we say needs to relate to the topic or task at hand. Conversations can meander, of course, but the ideal is to meander gracefully. Speakers who change the topic too frequently or too abruptly are considered rude, even if they’re providing useful information.
One final problem with the reciprocal-exchange theory is that we seem to neglect the most profitable exchanges of information. When two people meet for the first time, they rarely talk about the most important topics they know—even though this would be the biggest win from an info-exchange perspective. We rarely ask our friends and family members, “What are the biggest, most important lessons you’ve learned in life?” Nor do we spontaneously offer this information. It may come up occasionally, but most of the time we prefer to exchange news (more on this in a moment), discuss the latest TV shows, or languish in friendly, comfortable chitchat.
To resolve these puzzles, both Miller and Dessalles suggest that we stop looking at conversation as an exchange of information, and instead try to see the benefits of speaking as something other than receiving more information later down the road.20
Specifically, both thinkers argue that speaking functions in part as an act of showing off. Speakers strive to impress their audience by consistently delivering impressive remarks. This explains how speakers foot the bill for the costs of speaking we discussed earlier: they’re compensated not in-kind, by receiving information reciprocally, but rather by raising their social value in the eyes (and ears) of their listeners.
Now, in Miller’s theory, speakers are primarily trying to impress potential mates, while for Dessalles, the primary audience is potential allies. Though seemingly at odds, these two accounts are, for the most part, mutually compatible. In fact, we can treat Miller’s mating theory as a special case of Dessalles’ more general alliance theory. In other words, a mate is just a particular kind of ally—one that we team up with for making and raising children, rather than for social, professional, or political gain.21
Here’s a thought experiment that might help. Imagine that every human being carries around a magical backpack full of tools. At any point, you can reach into your backpack and pull out a tool, and (here’s the magic) it will be copied as you pull it out, so the original gets to stay in the backpack. Every time you reach in, you get a new copy — but you can only get copies of tools you already possess. In this way, tool-sharing between backpacks works like information-sharing between brains: you can give something away without losing it for yourself.
Now, suppose you meet up with an old acquaintance from school—let’s call him Henry—and the two of you start sharing tools with each other. Broadly speaking, you have two stances you can take toward Henry. You can treat him either as a trading partner or as a potential ally (whether as a mate or otherwise). If you’re looking to trade, you care mostly about the tools he can give you in any one exchange—specifically, the tools you don’t already own. But if you’re looking for an ally, you care less about the specific tools you receive from him, and much more about the full extent of his toolset—because when you team up with Henry, you effectively get access to all his tools. The ones he gives you during any individual exchange may be useful, but you’re really eyeing his backpack. And while you can’t look directly inside it, you can start to gauge its contents by the variety of tools he’s able to pull from it on demand. The more tools he’s able to produce, the more he probably has tucked away in the backpack. And again, you’re looking for a backpack full of tools that are both new to you and useful to the things you care about. If Henry can consistently delight you with new, useful artifacts, it speaks to the quality of his backpack and therefore his value as an ally.
And so it is with conversation. Participants evaluate each other not just as trading partners, but also as potential allies. Speakers are eager to impress listeners by saying new and useful things, but the facts themselves can be secondary. Instead, it’s more important for speakers to demonstrate that they have abilities that are attractive in an ally. In other words, speakers are eager to show off their backpacks.
Now, your skill as a speaker can manifest itself in a variety of ways. You might simply have encyclopedic knowledge about many topics. Or you might be intelligent, able to deduce new facts and explanations on the fly. Or you might have sharp eyes and ears, able to notice things that other people miss. Or you might be plugged into valuable sources of information, always on top of the latest news, gossip, and trends. But listeners may not particularly care how you’re able to impress, as long as you’re consistently able to do so. If you’re a reliable source of new information, you’re likely to make a good teammate, especially as the team faces unforeseeable situations in the future. In other words, listeners care less about the tools you share with them; they’re really salivating over your backpack.
Here’s another way to look at it. Every remark made by a speaker contains two messages for the listener: text and subtext. The text says, “Here’s a new piece of information,” while the subtext says, “By the way, I’m the kind of person who knows such things.” Sometimes the text is more important than the subtext, as when a friend gives you a valuable stock tip.22 But frequently, it’s the other way around. When you’re interviewing someone for a job, for example, you aren’t trying to learn new domain knowledge from the job applicant, but you might discuss a topic in order to gauge the applicant as a potential coworker. You want to know whether the applicant is sharp or dull, plugged-in or out of the loop. You want to know the size and utility of the applicant’s backpack.23
In casual conversation, listeners have a mixture of these two motives. To some extent we care about the text, the information itself, but we also care about the subtext, the speaker’s value as a potential ally. In this way, every conversation is like a (mutual) job interview, where each of us is “applying” for the role of friend, lover, or leader (see Box 12.).
Conversation, therefore, looks on the surface like an exercise in sharing information, but subtextually, it’s a way for speakers to show off their wit, perception, status, and intelligence, and (at the same time) for listeners to find speakers they want to team up with. These are two of our biggest hidden motives in conversation.
“Much of human courtship,” writes Miller about lovers, “is verbal courtship.”24 He estimates that most couples exchange on the order of a million words before they conceive a child (if in fact they do).25 That’s a lot of talking. And for a decision as high-stakes as choosing a mate, we want to learn as much as we can about our partners. Some of what we learn will be explicit information delivered through the channel of language: “So, tell me about your childhood.” But a lot of it will be information we infer about our partners by listening to what they say and how they say it. When William Shakespeare writes, “All the world’s a stage,” the poem tells us not just about the world and its staginess, but also about Shakespeare himself—his linguistic virtuosity and possibly, by extension, his genetic fitness.
Conversational and oratorical skills are also prized attributes of leaders around the world. Of course, we also value leaders who are brave, generous, physically strong, and politically well connected—but speaking ability ranks up there in importance. We rarely join companies where the CEO is the least articulate person in the room, nor do we routinely elect mumbling, stuttering, scatter-brained politicians. We want leaders who are sharp and can prove it to us.26 “In most or all societies,” writes Robbins Burling, “those who rise to positions of leadership tend to be recognized as having high linguistic skills.”27
The competition to show off as a potential lover or leader also helps explain why language often seems more elaborate than necessary to communicate ideas—what the linguist John Locke calls “verbal plumage.”28 Plain speech just isn’t as impressive as elevated diction.
This view of talking—as a way of showing off one’s “backpack”—explains the puzzles we encountered earlier, the ones that the reciprocal-exchange theory had trouble with. For example, it explains why we see people jockeying to speak rather than sitting back and “selfishly” listening—because the spoils of conversation don’t lie primarily in the information being exchanged, but rather in the subtextual value of finding good allies and advertising oneself as an ally. And in order to get credit in this game, you have to speak up; you have to show off your “tools.”
It also explains why people don’t keep track of conversational debts—because there is no debt. The act of speaking is a reward unto itself, at least insofar as your remarks are appreciated. You can share information with 10 or 100 people at once, confident that if you speak well, you’ll be rewarded at the subtextual level.
But why do speakers need to be relevant in conversation? If speakers deliver high-quality information, why should listeners care whether the information is related to the current topic? A plausible answer is that it’s simply too easy to rattle off memorized trivia. You can recite random facts from the encyclopedia until you’re blue in the face, but that does little to advertise your generic facility with information. Similarly, when you meet someone for the first time, you’re more eager to sniff each other out for this generic skill, rather than to exchange the most important information each of you has gathered to this point in your lives. In other words, listeners generally prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.
If we return to the backpack analogy, we can see why relevance is so important. If you’re interested primarily in trading, you might ask, “What do you have in your backpack that could be useful to me?” And if your partner produces a tool that you’ve never seen, you’ll be grateful to have it (and you’ll try to return the favor). But anyone can produce a curiosity or two. The real test is whether your ally can consistently produce tools that are both new to you and relevant to the situations you face. “I’m building a birdhouse,” you mention. “Oh, great,” he responds, “here’s a saw for cutting wood,” much to your delight. “But how will I fix the wood together?” you ask. “Don’t worry, I also have wood glue.” Awesome! “But now I need something to hold birdseed,” you say hopefully. Your ally thinks for a minute, rummaging through his backpack, and finally produces the perfect plastic feeding trough. Now you’re seriously impressed. He seems to have all the tools you need, right when you need them. His backpack, you infer, must be chock-full of useful stuff. And while you could—and will—continue to engage him in useful acts of trading, you’re far more eager to team up with him, to get continued access to that truly impressive backpack of his.29 We want allies who have an entire Walmart in their backpacks, not just a handful of trinkets.30
This also helps to explain why listeners aren’t tempted to deceive speakers by downplaying the quality or novelty of new information that they learn by listening. If conversation were primarily about reciprocal exchange, we’d be tempted to habitually deprecate what our partners were offering, in order to “owe” less in return. “I already knew that,” we might say (even if it wasn’t true), like a pawnbroker belittling an old ring as “worthless” (when in fact it’s worth a great deal). Because speakers can’t peer into listeners’ brains directly, they’d have no way of verifying. But listeners rarely try to shortchange speakers in this way. Instead, we’re typically happy to give speakers an appropriate amount of credit for their insightful remarks—credit we pay back not in terms of other information, but rather in terms of respect. And we’re incentivized to give them exactly as much respect as they deserve because we’re evaluating them as potential allies rather than as trading partners.31
So far we’ve been using the language of politics—shopping for allies—to explain our conversational behavior. Speakers, we’ve said, are trying to advertise their value as allies, and conversely, listeners evaluate speakers as potential allies. This is one way to talk about a more general concept we introduced in Chapter 2: prestige. And although there are many different ways to look at prestige, we can treat it as synonymous with “one’s value as an ally.”
Thus, speaking well is one way to increase our prestige—but of course there are many other ways. In fact, one of the most important “tools” that people have is the respect and support of others. So you can gain prestige not just by directly showing impressive abilities yourself (e.g., by speaking well), but also by showing that other impressive people have chosen you as an ally. You might get this kind of “reflected” or second-order prestige by the fact that an impressive person is willing to talk to you, or (even more) if they’ve chosen to reveal important things to you before revealing them to others. Even listeners stand to gain prestige, then, simply by association with prestigious speakers.
For our distant ancestors, this kind of politicking mainly happened face to face. For example, you could hear someone talk in person, and then, if you liked what you heard, you could try to form or upgrade your personal relation with the speaker right on the spot. Or if you didn’t like what you heard, you could try to distance yourself or downgrade your relationship.
In the modern world, thanks to printing, television, and the Internet, we now have far more ways to talk, listen, and associate with others. And thus a great many new kinds of conversations are now possible, along with ways to establish and gain from reflected prestige. Let’s now look in more detail at two common types of larger conversations: news and academic research. Our motives regarding each of them seem to have a lot in common with our motives in personal conversation.
“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”—Thomas Jefferson (attributed)32
People today may seem to have an unprecedented obsession with news. Rather than waiting for a daily paper or the six o’clock TV broadcast, we can get up-to-the-minute reports, 24 hours a day, from tiny computers we keep in our pockets and purses—just pull to refresh. But although the way we consume news has changed, our preoccupation with it is nothing new. Here’s Mitchell Stephens from his classic text A History of the News:
It might be surprising to learn that more than 275 years ago the English—though they had no radio, television, satellites or computers, and though men obtained much of their news at the coffeehouse—thought their era was characterized by an obsession with news… . Nor were the English the only people before us who thirsted after news. In the middle of the fourth century b.c., for example, Demosthenes portrayed his fellow Athenians as preoccupied with the exchange of news… . Observers have often remarked on the fierce concern with news that they find in preliterate or semiliterate peoples.33
Why have humans long been so obsessed with news? When asked to justify our strong interest, we often point to the virtues of staying apprised of the important issues of the day. During a 1945 newspaper strike in New York, for example, when the sociologist Bernard Berelson asked his fellow citizens, “Is it very important that people read the newspaper?” almost everyone answered with a “strong ‘yes,’ ” and most people cited the “ ‘serious’ world of public affairs.”34 And yet (according to Stephens), Berelson learned that readers
have other less noble-sounding uses for their newspapers: They use them as a source of pragmatic information—on movies, stocks, or the weather; they use them to keep up with the lives of people they have come to “know” through their papers—from the characters in the news stories to the authors of the columns; they use them for diversion—as a “time-filler”; and they use them to prepare themselves to hold their own in conversations.35
Now, it did make some sense for our ancestors to track news as a way to get practical information, such as we do today for movies, stocks, and the weather. After all, they couldn’t just go easily search for such things on Google like we can. But notice that our access to Google hasn’t made much of a dent in our hunger for news; if anything we read more news now that we have social media feeds, even though we can find a practical use for only a tiny fraction of the news we consume.
There are other clues that we aren’t mainly using the news to be good citizens (despite our high-minded rhetoric). For example, voters tend to show little interest in the kinds of information most useful for voting, including details about specific policies, the arguments for and against them, and the positions each politician has taken on each policy. Instead, voters seem to treat elections more like horse races, rooting for or against different candidates rather than spending much effort to figure out who should win. (See Chapter 16 for a more detailed discussion on politics.)
We also show surprisingly little interest in the accuracy of our news sources. While prices in financial and betting markets can plausibly give very timely, accurate, and unbiased information, we continue to let legal obstacles hinder such information on most topics outside of business.36 One of us (Robin) was told by a reliable source a few years ago that a major media firm based in Washington, D.C., had several people working for several months on a project to score prominent pundits on the accuracy of their predictions. The project was canceled, however, soon after results came back showing how depressingly inaccurate most pundits actually are. If consumers truly cared about pundit accuracy, there might well be more “exposés” like this—the better for us to find and pay attention to those rare pundits whose predictions tend to come true. Instead, we seem content with just the veneer of confidence and expertise, as long as our pundits are engaging, articulate, connected to us, and have respected pedigrees.
These patterns in behavior may be puzzling when we think of news as a source of useful information. But they make sense if we treat news as a larger “conversation” that extends our small-scale conversation habits. Just as one must talk on the current topic in face-to-face conversation, our larger news conversation also maintains a few “hot” topics—a focus so strong and so narrow that policy wonks say that there’s little point in releasing policy reports on topics not in the news in the last two weeks. (This is the criterion of relevance we saw earlier.) And for our part, as consumers of news, we compete to learn information on these hot topics before others, so we aren’t confused in conversation and so our talk can seem more impressive. We also prefer news written by and about prestigious people, as it helps us to affiliate with them.
Meanwhile, the slow decline of professional journalism has been more than offset by the army of amateurs rising to the occasion (in quantity, if not in quality). Think of all the time people spend writing blogs and sharing links on Twitter and Facebook. Few are getting paid financially for their efforts, but they’re getting compensated all the same.
“It still seems remarkable to me how often people bypass what are more important subjects to work on less important ones.”—Robert Trivers37
Researchers at universities, think tanks, and corporate labs are not shy about explaining why their work deserves funding: Research increases the world’s insight and understanding on important topics, leading to more innovation and economic growth. And it’s true that research does often help the world in these ways. But such benefits are probably overstated,38 and we have reasons to doubt whether these are in fact the main motivations that drive academia.
Like news and personal conversations, academic “conversations” are full of people showing off to impress others.39 Even if they sometimes claim otherwise, researchers seem overwhelmingly motivated to win academic prestige. They do this by working with prestigious mentors, getting degrees from prestigious institutions, publishing articles in prestigious journals, getting proposals funded by prestigious sponsors, and then using all of these to get and keep jobs with prestigious institutions. As Miller points out, “Scientists compete for the chance to give talks at conferences, not for the chance to listen.”40
But that’s all on the supply side, to explain why academics are motivated to produce research. What of the demand for research? Here we also see a preference for prestige, rather than a strict focus on the underlying value of the research. To most sponsors and consumers of research, the “text” of the research (what it says about reality and how important and useful that information is) seems to matter less than the “subtext” (what the research says about the prestige of the researcher, and how some of that glory might reflect back on the sponsor or consumer).
College students, for example, are willing to pay more to attend schools where the professors are famous for their research (and as alumni they donate more money to such schools), even though few students actually read or engage with their professors’ work. (Even fewer students study the quality of research at colleges when deciding where to go.) And of course the prestige of a professor has little to do with teaching ability.
Meanwhile, other academics consume research by reading it and citing it in their own work. And, like news and ordinary conversation, these research “conversations” tend to cluster around a few currently hot (relevant) topics. Perversely, however, the reliability of research decreases with the popularity of a field.41 Not only can these topic fashions last for decades, but research that’s done outside these clusters is often neglected (though there’s little to suggest it’s less valuable). In fact, there’s likely more insight to be gleaned where others aren’t looking—it just won’t seem as relevant to the current conversation.42 And thus, on average, researchers who are “out in the weeds” can expect fewer citations (even if a small number of them will make big, juicy discoveries).
Consider also how research sponsors might better achieve research insight at a lower cost by offering prizes for pre-specified accomplishments, like the X Prize or the DARPA Grand Challenge,43 instead of the usual up-front grants.44 One problem with prizes, from a sponsor’s point of view, is that sponsoring prizes leaves the sponsor less room for discretion; they must give money to the winners, no matter who they are. So there’s less opportunity for sponsors and researchers to develop a relationship with one another (like art patrons and artists do), so that donors can earn prestige by association.
Finally, consider the academic referees who evaluate research for publication and funding. Referees are perhaps the most important gatekeepers to academic prestige, so we might hope they’re rewarding only the most deserving papers and proposals, those whose “text” is most valuable. Unfortunately, here too we see the biases characteristic of a political species. Referees seem to care more about prestige indicators of the work they accept, and how it will reflect on them and their organization, than about the work’s substance and social value.
To start with, referees largely can’t agree on which research is good enough to accept; their judgments are highly idiosyncratic.45 But to the extent that they do agree on what’s “good,” much of it comes from a tendency to recognize and favor already prestigious insiders. (These insiders can be recognized by name or, in the case of a blind peer review process, by sleuthing and educated guesswork.) For example, when articles previously published in a journal were resubmitted soon afterward with new obscure names and institutions, only 10 percent of them were noticed as having been published before, and of the remaining 90 percent, only 10 percent were accepted under the new names.46
Of course, the peer review process does sometimes reward the work of new and/or outside researchers. But in the long experience of one of us (Robin), the judgments of referees in these cases typically focus on whether a submission makes the author seem impressive. That is, referees pay great attention to spit and polish—whether a paper covers every possible ambiguity and detail. They show a distinct preference for papers that demonstrate a command for difficult methods. And referees almost never discuss a work’s long-term potential for substantial social benefit.
Many possible reforms, such as a review process that’s blind to a paper’s conclusions, could help journals to increase the accuracy of their publications.47 But such reforms would limit journals’ ability to select papers more likely to bring prestige, so we see surprisingly little interest in them.
In case it’s not clear by now, this chapter helps explain Kevin and Robin’s “hidden” motives for writing and publishing this book. To put it baldly, we want to impress you; we’re seeking prestige. We hope the many things we’ve said so far testify to the size and quality of our “backpacks.”
As an academic, Robin will be judged by the number and influence of his publications, and we hope this book will serve as a nice line item on his resume. Meanwhile, as an academic outsider, Kevin has undertaken this book largely as a vanity project. It’s unlikely to help him much in his engineering career, and he could probably have more impact by building software—but he’s always wanted his name on the cover of a book. Of course, this project has also been fun, an excuse to read and discuss many fascinating topics. And we hope readers will enjoy and perhaps profit from the fruits of our labor. But there’s no way we would have done all this work without the hope of garnishing our reputations.48
No doubt we’ve made many trade-offs in service of this motive and at the expense of more prosocial motives like delivering maximum value to our readers. Perhaps the book is too long, for example; speakers do like to speak, after all. Certainly we could have used simpler language in many places, making the book easier to digest, though at the risk of appearing less scholarly. And of course, we could have released this as a free (or cheap) self-published e-book, but we wanted the prestige of a printed book from a respected publisher. We hope you’ll forgive us these trespasses, as we have tried hard not to moralize (too much) about the selfish motives of others.
1Corballis 2008; Stam 1976, 255.
2Dunbar 2004.
3Miller 2000, ch. 10: courtship; Locke 2011; Dunbar 2004: gossip; Flesch 2007: storytelling.
4Dunbar: “Language in freely forming natural conversations is principally used for the exchange of social information” (2004).
5Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello 1998.
6Miller: “When healthy respect for an adaptation tips over into awe, it becomes impossible to make any progress in understanding the selection pressures that shaped the adaptation” (2000, 345).
7Uomini and Meyer (2013) suggest as early as 1.75 million years ago.
8Miller: “Very few ‘theories of language evolution’ identify particular selection pressures that could favor the gradual accumulation of genetic mutations necessary to evolve a complex new mental capacity that has costs as well as benefits” (2000, 345).
9Costs include time, calories expended as a listener, and the potential distraction (i.e., the fact that it’s harder to monitor the environment for threats and opportunities while absorbed as a listener).
10Eyes, in contrast, have evolved independently in more than 50 animal lineages. See Land and Nilsson 2002.
11Dessalles 2007, 320; “The human obsession with divulging anything of interest, instead of jealously keeping the information to themselves, requires an explanation” (ibid., 321).
12Ibid., 320, 325.
13Kin selection offers another possible benefit, but a minor one in most human talk.
14Dessalles 2007; listeners (not speakers) detect against cheating.
15Ibid., 339.
16Miller 2000, 350.
17Dessalles 2007, 338.
18Miller 2000, 350–51.
19Grice 1975; Dessalles: “As a parameter of conversation, relevance is an omnipresent and necessary condition. If we take an extreme case, anyone whose utterances are consistently non-relevant is soon dismissed as mentally ill” (2007, 282).
20Dessalles 2007, 337.
21The main divergence between these theories is that Miller’s allows speakers to show off the quality of their genes, not just their value as an ally in future interactions.
22In which case, you’re liable to be grateful and consider it a favor that needs to be returned.
23This is similar to what we’ll see in Chapter 11, where there’s value in the artifacts themselves, but where there’s often more value in what the art (and the ability to produce it) says about the artist.
24Miller 2000, 351.
25Ibid., 355–6.
26Dessalles (2007, 349–55) argues that conversation skill—in particular, the consistent ability to know things first—is an especially useful criterion for choosing leaders of a coalition, since they will be making decisions that affect the whole coalition.
27Burling 1986.
28Locke 1999, 2011.
29Note that, like a listener evaluating a speaker, you don’t really care how he managed to produce relevant, useful, new tools from his backpack. Maybe, while he was rummaging around in there, he actually assembled the bird feeder from scratch (rather than pulling out a pre-assembled feeder that he had collected sometime in the past). As long as he can do this kind of thing consistently, you’ll be very happy to have him around.
30This random approach, marrying breadth and depth, is similar to the strategy used by the Israeli airport security to sniff out terrorists. If they simply asked visitors a predetermined set of basic questions—like “What’s the purpose of your visit?” or “Where are you staying?”—liars could easily prepare canned answers. Instead, security staff members are trained to interrogate their subjects randomly and deeply. “What did you do on Tuesday?” “How long was the line at the museum?” “Did the line snake back and forth, or was it straight?” By probing subjects in this way, it’s easier to tell who’s lying and who’s giving a real story.
31Dessalles 2007, 348, 352.
32BrainyQuote, s.v. “Thomas Jefferson,” BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2017. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasjeff106229.html, accessed March 3, 2017.
33Stephens 2007, 7, 8.
34Ibid., 10.
35Ibid.
36Arrow et al. 2008.
37Trivers 2002.
38Macilwain 2010.
39See Dessalles 2007, 337–8. The main difference between academia and news is that academic prestige is gained largely by earning the respect of the prestigious elites, while news prestige is gained by earning wide respect among large audiences.
40Miller 2000, 350.
41Pfeiffer and Hoffmann 2009.
42Alston et al. 2011. Like most things, research seems to suffer from diminishing returns to effort.
43The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a U.S. Department of Defense agency at the forefront of tech research that intersects with military use.
44Hanson 1995, 1998.
45Bornmann, Mutz, and Daniel 2010. Less than 20 percent of the variation in their evaluations is explained by a tendency to agree.
46Peters and Ceci 1982.
47Nyhan 2014.
48And in case you’re wondering, no, it’s not about the money; book royalties are unlikely to justify the time and effort we’ve put into this project.