That goes well with common sense, but how would you go about giving it predictive value?
Well, the first approach that comes to mind would be looking for some actual metric of status… preferably one that doesn’t interrupt the conversation. My guess would be that how often a person is interrupted vs. allowed to finish a statement, patterns of eye contact, and participants’ physical orientation relative to one another, and other indicators of attention are all correlates of status of the kind we’re talking about here. (This is, of course, only useful for determining relative status of individuals within a conversation, and possibly within a culture; different cultures reflect status differently.)
Then measure it, and look for speech patterns that correlate with it. Anthropologists (and in a sense, ethologists) do this sort of thing all the time.
Certainly from a evo psych theoretical standpoint, it’s odd to gain status by talking about how unhealthy and unfit you are.
Well, if low-status players all start talking themselves up as a way of gaining status, they create a context where someone can ostentatiously refuse to talk themselves up as a way of signaling that they are too high-status to care, which in turn creates a context where someone can ostentatiously talk themselves down as a way of one-upping that. If something like this is going on, then it’s possible that talking about how unfit I am becomes a way of signaling how fit I am.
OTOH, talking about how unhealthy I am can also be a form of malingering, which has certain immediate practical benefits. That is, it might not be an evolved trait at all, and its prevalence in a particular culture might just be historically contingent.
One way of teasing this apart would be to see, in communities that do this sort of status-jockeying, whether the people who most claim illness are in fact perceived as ill by their peers.
Well, the first approach that comes to mind would be looking for some actual metric of status… preferably one that doesn’t interrupt the conversation. My guess would be that how often a person is interrupted vs. allowed to finish a statement, patterns of eye contact, and participants’ physical orientation relative to one another, and other indicators of attention are all correlates of status of the kind we’re talking about here. (This is, of course, only useful for determining relative status of individuals within a conversation, and possibly within a culture; different cultures reflect status differently.)
Then measure it, and look for speech patterns that correlate with it. Anthropologists (and in a sense, ethologists) do this sort of thing all the time.
Well, if low-status players all start talking themselves up as a way of gaining status, they create a context where someone can ostentatiously refuse to talk themselves up as a way of signaling that they are too high-status to care, which in turn creates a context where someone can ostentatiously talk themselves down as a way of one-upping that. If something like this is going on, then it’s possible that talking about how unfit I am becomes a way of signaling how fit I am.
OTOH, talking about how unhealthy I am can also be a form of malingering, which has certain immediate practical benefits. That is, it might not be an evolved trait at all, and its prevalence in a particular culture might just be historically contingent.
One way of teasing this apart would be to see, in communities that do this sort of status-jockeying, whether the people who most claim illness are in fact perceived as ill by their peers.