by Robin Hanson
The takeaway from all these observations is that our species seems, somehow, to derive more benefit from speaking than from listening.
Puzzle 3: The Criterion of Relevance
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.
Puzzle 4: Suboptimal Exchanges
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.
RESOLUTION: SEX AND POLITICS
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.
Box 12: Lovers and Leaders
“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 t
hey 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.
PUZZLES REVISITED
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
PRESTIGE
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.
NEWS
“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 lo
ng 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.)