Academic discussion on gossip, social evolution, and environmental activism

Forthcoming (August 2011) Future Science edited by Max Brockman, Vintage Press, New York. accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be, according to the social grooming hypothesis put forward by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, why we learned to speak.'* Then, 5,000 years ago, another tool: writing. Language, both oral and written, allowed for gossip, a vector for social information. Research carried out by Ralf Sommerfeld of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and his colleagues demonstrated that in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another’s performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation. Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players’ perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information."* Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains. We have an increasing number of people and norms. What tool could help us gossip in a group this size? Nowadays we keep track of and distribute unprecedented amounts of information via our computers: for example, citizens, journalists, and interest groups can access the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory database online to identify and shame polluters. Between the database’s inception in 1988 and 1995, releases of 330 toxic chemicals on the list have declined by 45 percent.'* After the retailer Trader Joe’s was unresponsive to requests by the nonprofit group Greenpeace to stop selling unsustainable seafood, Greenpeace coordinated singing fish telephone calls or demonstrations at every Trader Joe’s across the nation using the Internet. The Trader Joe’s CEO decided to comply with Greenpeace demands by dropping several overfished species and agreeing to source all seafood from sustainable sources by the end of 2012. We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need ” See esp. his Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). "SR. H. Sommerfeld, et al., “Gossip as an alternative for direct observation in games of indirect reciprocity,” Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 104:44, 17435-40 (2007). “ Fung, A. & D. O’Rourke. 2000. Reinventing environmental regulation from the grassroots up: Explaining and expanding the success of the Toxics Release Inventory. Environmental Management 25(2):115-127. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023727