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,象征性的方式沟通，人类交际信号并不总是指直接刺激,但可以引用其他符号的组合。递归的使用符号意味着,除了关注世界事务的现状,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,制造反事实的状态。下面的paper代写范文将进行详述。

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.

Conclusion 
In this chapter, we have presented the hypothesis that one of the reasons why propositional theory of mind evolved in humans was to inhibit behaviour in response to the selective pressure of absent third-party punishment. Participants in our dictator game experiment (Piazza & Bering, forthcoming) used ToM to model (i) the carrying of two different pieces of information (the identity of the giver, and the amount that he or she gave) by two individuals, and (ii) the combined effect of this information in the mind of the recipient as a result of communication between recipient and confederate. The three-to-four-year-old children in our observational study (Ingram & Bering, forthcoming) either did not possess such highly developed mind-reading abilities, or they were not yet accustomed to using these abilities strategically, to inhibit the selfish behaviour that would once have been adaptive in a world without language, in favour of the cooperative behaviour that would now be adaptive. 

In support of the latter interpretation, it is notable that when confronted directly with the possibility of absent third-party punishment (when an aggrieved peer said something like "I'm going to tell the teacher on you") children sometimes reversed their selfish behaviour, e.g. by handing over a toy that they had previously refused to share. Despite this, they showed little anticipation of the likelihood of tattling unless directly threatened with it. This suggests that they are missing a crucial competence which would allow them to model the spread of information within their social group – a fully developed propositional theory of mind. However, the linguistic reports of preschoolers possess important properties – truthfulness and negative bias – that would support the development of systems of indirect reciprocity and altruistic punishment. Without wanting to argue that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, it is tempting to speculate that early humans might at some stage during our ancestral past have made use of similar kinds of language in their reports of conspecifics’ behaviour. Recent developmental research has emphasized that language and theory of mind are inextricably linked (e.g., Astington, 2006, and chapters in Astington & Baird, 2005). We have presented one out of many possible evolutionary hypotheses which helps to explain why these two unique human competences are linked. 

The hypothesis that ToM evolved as an adaptive response to the threat of absent third-party punishment, inflicted on individual humans because of the spread of strategic social information via language, is no “just so story.” Our hypothesis is falsifiable, and we hope that future research will attempt to disprove it. For example, neuropsychological work needs to be done to flesh out the links between the neural pathways supporting ToM and executive control and those supporting language and social cognition. If neural pathways supporting ToM are shown to be more evolutionarily ancient than those supporting language, this would pose a major problem for our account. A similar problem would arise if animal species lacking language are shown to possess higher-order ToM skills or rudimentary systems of indirect reciprocity: there may be animals, other than humans, for which observing an individual behave antisocially towards a conspecific (which is not closely related to the observer) sometimes causes the observer to withhold cooperation from the antisocial individual. We hope that our hypothesis will inspire future research in these and other areas.(paper代写)

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