Discourse is a social behavior with cooperative (dove) and selfish (hawk) strategies. If we want discourse to be cooperative, we need to recognize, avoid, and punish discourse hawks.
For years I have been turning the phrase “the nature of discourse” over in my head, like a tumbler polishing a stone. Discourse is a verbal interaction among people. As such, it is a social behavior that might benefit from evolutionary analysis. Never mind that discourse has already been studied by great minds for centuries and even millennia. So have other major topics such as religion, morality, economics and sexual behavior.
Evolution provides a new conceptual framework for understanding these other topics, and perhaps it can do the same for the nature of discourse.
We know from general evolutionary models of social behavior that when individuals behave selfishly, the outcome is seldom good for the group as a whole. As a simple example, consider the famous hawk-dove model from evolutionary game theory.
Doves cooperative with each other, hawks exploit doves for their own selfish gain, and hawks fight with each other to their mutual detriment. Whenever the hawk strategy evolves in the hawk-dove game, the outcome is a waste of time and energy for everyone. Nothing good can come from it.
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Answer:
Discourse is a social behavior with cooperative (dove) and selfish (hawk) strategies. If we want discourse to be cooperative, we need to recognize, avoid, and punish discourse hawks.
For years I have been turning the phrase “the nature of discourse” over in my head, like a tumbler polishing a stone. Discourse is a verbal interaction among people. As such, it is a social behavior that might benefit from evolutionary analysis. Never mind that discourse has already been studied by great minds for centuries and even millennia. So have other major topics such as religion, morality, economics and sexual behavior.
Evolution provides a new conceptual framework for understanding these other topics, and perhaps it can do the same for the nature of discourse.
We know from general evolutionary models of social behavior that when individuals behave selfishly, the outcome is seldom good for the group as a whole. As a simple example, consider the famous hawk-dove model from evolutionary game theory.
Doves cooperative with each other, hawks exploit doves for their own selfish gain, and hawks fight with each other to their mutual detriment. Whenever the hawk strategy evolves in the hawk-dove game, the outcome is a waste of time and energy for everyone. Nothing good can come from it.