1996. Robin Dunbar. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. 230 pp. hardbound, $22.95.
As
anyone who’s watched social groups of monkeys and apes
for more than a passing moment can attest, primates spend
a lot of time grooming each other. It’s strange, then,
that we don’t. In fact, outside of a few special relationships
such as between spouses or parents and children, and except
for ritual greetings such as handshakes, we seldom touch one
another at all. Certainly we never spend hours each day picking
carefully through the hair of even our kids, far less our
friends and neighbors. Instead, Robin Dunbar argues in Grooming,
Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, we gossip. Just
as grooming acts to cement social relationships between individual
primates, so does gossip cement social relationships between
individual humans. And this is why spoken language evolved
in our species—so we could gossip rather than groom.
Dunbar’s argument is fairly straightforward. Grooming is the tie that binds the individuals in social groups of primates. But grooming is time-consuming, stealing precious hours from foraging for food, watching for predators, and other important activities. Moreover, grooming occurs one-on-one, so there are only so many others you can groom or be groomed by over the course of a day or a week. Finally, there is a direct relationship between time spent grooming and group size. In primate species with the largest social groups of 50 to 55, such as chimpanzees and baboons, grooming may occupy as much as 20 percent of each animal’s day. But with social group sizes of about 150, as seem to be typical for humans, grooming would take up an impossibly large part of the day, 40 percent or more. So, Dunbar argues, as human group size rose (perhaps with the increased predation risks of living in open savanna), language evolved to replace grooming. Talking has a two-fold efficiency advantage over grooming. First, we can talk and do other things, like look for food, at the same time. Second, we can talk to more than one person at a time.
But why do we gossip rather than have lofty exchanges on, say, Dunbar’s ideas on the evolution of language? For a group-living primate, having friends (who might also be relatives) and knowing who your friends are—who will support you in fights and who won’t—is all important. Equally so is knowing who other’s friends are: You’re in deep trouble if you pick a fight with the best friend of your group’s biggest, baddest member. Among non-human primates, grooming is a sign of friendship. Since grooming relationships can usually be directly observed by all members of the group, everyone knows who’s friends with whom. Group members can also directly observe interactions that indicate a change in an individual’s status. If that big, bad guy, for instance, should start losing fights, his best friend is no longer guaranteed immunity from harassment.
This social knowledge is no less important for people, but large group size precludes directly observing most of the interactions that reveal who’s who and what’s what. Language, however, enables those who have observed crucial interactions to tell those who haven’t about them. And that is fundamentally the definition of gossip. And if anyone doubts we spend that much time gossiping, Dunbar’s research in settings ranging from bars to university commons rooms reveals that about two-thirds of conversation time is devoted to social topics—gossip—no matter what the ages or backgrounds of the people talking.
To support his theory, Dunbar presents evidence from fields as diverse as behavioral ecology, neuroanatomy and physiology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, and even military history. But don’t be put off by this. His presentation of all this material is clear as well as lively and entertaining. Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language is a fascinating read, well worth the sacrifice of a Sunday afternoon you might otherwise devote to gossip or reading the newspaper, which are much the same thing it turns out. As Dunbar reports, newspapers devote between 43 and 78 percent of their editorial space to human interest stories, that is to say—gossip.
Do your own experiment. Talk to a friend about this provocative new theory to explain why we evolved language. But while you talk, keep a surreptitious eye on the clock. See how long it takes before your friend begins to gossip, somehow relating something you’ve said about the book to Gary’s new girlfriend or Caroline’s children. It took my friend just about five minutes—exactly how long Dunbar predicted people casually talk about such intellectual subjects before getting back to the conversations that matter. Ultimately, that people as a species started speaking is less interesting to us than that any two people we know stopped speaking. After reading this engaging book, you’ll know why.
—Susan Lumpkin
Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language is available in the Zoo Bookstore. To order by telephone, call 202.673.4967
