by Robin Hanson
To give an even more disturbing example, consider how often we joke and laugh about prison rape—“Don’t drop the soap!” for example. On sober reflection, we may realize these jokes are distasteful, if not morally odious; rape should be universally condemned, no matter who the victims are. And yet, when the victims are convicted criminals, our brains don’t send us the same “danger!” signals that they would send if the victims were innocent citizens. People behind bars are remote, both socially and psychologically, and we tend not to empathize with them to the same degree we empathize with our friends and neighbors.
When the popular girls laugh at Maggie, then, their brains are running the same algorithm that ours are running when we laugh at prison rape or the Darwin Awards.48
If we insist on moralizing about what the popular girls are doing, we should focus on the fact that their laughter itself contributes to further suffering. Most of us strive to laugh only in situations where our laughter is harmless, or even (on occasion) helpful. When a friend spills wine on her shirt, we want to laugh, ideally, only after she’s given us the “all clear” by laughing herself. Or we might take a risk and laugh preemptively, hoping that our laughter will help her to appreciate the non-seriousness of the situation. But such laughter needs to be very gentle indeed, and we’ll want to back off if she shows any sign of taking offense, lest our laughter be the cause of further suffering.
Teasing hinges on a similar dynamic. To tease is to provoke a small amount of suffering in a playful manner, often accompanied by laughter. The interesting cases lie between good-natured teasing, which strengthens a relationship, and mean-spirited teasing, which weakens it. Teasing is good-natured when it provokes only light suffering, and when the offense is offset by enough warmth and affinity that the person being teased generally feels more loved than ridiculed. The fact that it’s hard to tease strangers—because there’s no preexisting warmth to help mitigate the offense—means that the people we tease are necessarily close to us. Knowing and sensing this is partly what gives teasing its power to bring people closer together.
Teasing can become mean-spirited, however, when it provokes too much suffering, or when it’s not offset with enough good, warm feelings. And when there’s no affinity whatsoever, teasing turns into bullying or simply abuse. This kind of bullying can be especially effective (for the bully) or frustrating (for the victim), because the bully has a built-in excuse: “I’m only kidding! Can’t you take a joke?” (more on this in the next section).
It’s worth reiterating that our brains do most of this on autopilot. We rarely make conscious calculations about the strength of our relationships, or how much suffering is too much to laugh at—but our brains perform these calculations all the same, automatically and unconsciously. As Provine points out, it’s precisely because laughter is involuntary that it’s such a powerful probe into social relationships.
* * * * *
Thus we use laughter to gauge and calibrate social boundaries—both behavioral boundaries (norms) and group membership boundaries (who deserves how much of our empathy). But this calibration is a delicate act. We need deniability.
DENIABILITY
“Laughter in no way strives to be verbalized or explained; in fact, it goes all out to avoid verbalization and explanation.”—Alexander Kozintsev49
“The meaning of a wink depends on it not being common knowledge.”—Michael Chwe50
Try to imagine (or remember) what it’s like to be a wide-eyed 14-year-old anxious to learn about sex. Beyond the basic mechanics covered in sex education, the topic has remained pretty murky for you, and you have a lot of pressing questions. When are you allowed to talk about sex? How explicit can you be in front of different audiences (friends, grandparents, younger children, mixed company)? Which aspects of sex are truly dangerous, and which are merely taboo? Which practices are considered appropriate versus slightly deviant versus beyond the pale?
Amid all this uncertainty, it’s clear that the adults aren’t giving you the full story. So where should you turn?
One thing you’ve noticed is that while the adults may not talk openly about sex, they’re willing and even eager to joke about it. So if you keep your ears open and pay careful attention, you might be able to glean enough hints to piece together a reasonably accurate picture.
You might be especially intrigued, for example, by the Seinfeld episode “The Contest” in which the characters wager to see who can hold out the longest without masturbating. The dialogue is careful to dance around the actual word “masturbate,” but you weren’t born yesterday; you know what they’re talking about. And the fact that masturbation is played for laughs tells you most of what you need to know about the topic: first, that it’s a taboo, not something you’ll want to discuss in front of grandma; and second, that it’s commonplace and more or less acceptable, at least in the eyes of mainstream TV-watching Americans. Society may not fully condone it, but it won’t get you labeled a deviant. It’s a norm violation, but also benign.
Laughter, then, shows us the boundaries that language is too shy to make explicit. In this way, humor can be extremely useful for exploring the boundaries of the social world. The sparks of laughter illuminate what is otherwise murky and hard to pin down with precision: the threshold between safety and danger, between what’s appropriate and what’s transgressive, between who does and doesn’t deserve our empathy. In fact, what laughter illustrates is precisely the fact that our norms and other social boundaries aren’t etched in stone with black-and-white precision, but ebb and shift through shades of gray, depending on context.
For this task, language just doesn’t cut it. It’s too precise, too quotable, too much “on the record”—all of which can be stifling and oppressive, especially when stated norms are too strict. In order to communicate in this kind of environment, we (clever primates) turn to a medium that gives us “wiggle room” to squirm out of an accusation, to defy any sticklers who would try to hold us accountable.
Laughter may not be nearly as expressive as language, but it has two properties that make it ideal for navigating sensitive topics. First, it’s relatively honest. With words, it’s too easy to pay lip service to rules we don’t really care about, or values that we don’t genuinely feel in our gut. But laughter, because it’s involuntary, doesn’t lie—at least not as much. “In risu veritas,” said James Joyce; “In laughter, there is truth.”51 Second, laughter is deniable. In this way, it gives us safe harbor, an easy out. When someone accuses us of laughing inappropriately, it’s easy to brush off. “Oh, I didn’t really understand what she meant,” we might demur. Or, “Come on, lighten up! It was only a joke!” And we can deliver these denials with great conviction because we really don’t have a clear understanding of what our laughter means or why we find funny things funny. Our brains just figure it out, without burdening “us” with too many damning details.
The comedian Bill Burr has preemptively used the “lighten up” defense on a number of occasions. On the topic of comedians getting attacked for their jokes, Burr said:
I’m worried every time I see a comedian apologize. [Addressing a hypothetical attacker:] Just because you took what I said seriously doesn’t mean I meant it. You don’t get to decide that you’re in my head and that you know my intent. If I’m joking, I’m joking.”52
In another interview he says, “I don’t think it’s fair to get offended by comedians.”53 And yet what fans say they love about Burr is that he’s honest—“refreshingly,” “brutally,” “devastatingly” honest.
So which is it? Is he just joking or telling the truth?
The beauty of laughter is that it gets to be both. The safe harbor of plausible deniability is what allows Burr and other comedians to get away with being honest about taboo topics. As Oscar Wilde said,54 “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.”
9
Conversation
For linguists and evolutionary psychologists, the ori
gins 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.
SHARING INFORMATION
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.
COSTS AND BENEFITS
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?
THE BENEFITS OF SPEAKING: RECIPROCITY?
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.
Puzzle 1: People Don’t Keep Track of Conversational Debts
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
Puzzle 2: People Are More Eager to Talk Than Listen
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 I
nstead, 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