Communality, Authority and Exchange

Steven Pinker is a philosopher of science, evolutionary psychologist, and explainer of behaviors through neuroscience. He describes three types of human interaction in The Stuff of Thought: Language and a Window Into Human Nature.  He describes the theories proposed by the anthropologist Alan Fiske which identifies three types of human bonds or societal interaction modes. There are three modes of interaction, Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking and Exchange which define most interaction within a society, culture or civilization and the maintenance of behaviors embedded in each. Each type of social interaction is characterized by unique attributes across history and geography. Also, each mode of interaction serves to preserve a fuzzy entity known as "face" for most citizens. The medium of exchange for each type take together elucidates most of our acts of social exchange.

1. Communal Sharing

The first relationship type is Communal Sharing or Communality. Kinship bonds, marriage contracts and other intimate personal relationships set the meets and bounds of communal sharing. The implicit rules of behavior offer a rich tableau of communal or tribal exchange. The overarching structure of these relationships depends on unstated but common practices unique (or presumed unique) to shared family or kinship bonds. This is the mother's milk of folk-knowledge about in-group interaction.

Communality rests on folk biology which drives myth-making regarding the history and provenance of cultural norms. This brings us to Steven Pinker's notion that human minds are not blank slates at birth but are endowed with a cohort of common folk intuitions about fairness and status within a group.

Dietary rules and restrictions represent a universal commonality for restricted communal behavior. People who eat the same stuff are made of the same stuff. Shared ritual gestures and behaviors are normative and, except for young children, learning the ropes of cultural practice, failure to comply with a communal gestalt results in collective pressure to conform to societal norms. These modes of behavior are unstated and often unnoticed - in fact pointing out the rules or flaunting the rules may be cause to put me outside the community, tribe or nation. I can become a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

These shared rules are not talked about or even thought about - the relationships I have are too personal to invoke open negotiation of rank or status. Thus we have the pre-nuptial paradox. Any engaged couple would rationally describe a range of mutual behaviors and shared results from a discussion of a very plausible outcome - divorce. But even broaching this subject puts separation and divorce "on the table". Thus neither side can save face and would rather talk about the honeymoon anyway. In other words, rational ignorance drives communal exchanges.

2. Authority Ranking

The second type of relationship, Authority Ranking, describes each individual's place in a status hierarchy. This is a more open to negotiation but since we are constantly aware of each parties "face saving" motives, the rules for effective negotiation in Authority Ranking are quite strict; the big man in a tribe, your boss at work, the strict ranks in the military and the maitre d at a fine restaurant all possess strict rules or powerful behavior norms for authority. Authority Ranking binds the members of corporations or armies into non-zero outcomes - the emergent energy and power flowing from these strict relationships means the the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But Authority Ranking is amenable to negotiation. I can accept a job offer on the terms described, I can negotiate a more favorable status (more money, a title, a role in the organization, etc.) for either or both parties. Both dominate individuals and subservient individuals must follow the rules of the tavern since these relationships are usually embedded in laws and mediated by attorneys, law enforcement and the courts.

3. Market Exchange

The third type of social interaction is Market Exchange. These relationships are most open to negotiation and ad hoc rule making. I can sell my cousin a chicken or goat but I must step outside of my communal relationship to participate. This I believe but cannot prove - the science of economic theory has been myopically focused on this mode of behavior to the near exclusion of the other two types of human interaction. Communality is not accessible or even useful as a model for how classic macro economic theory work. We are in the province of evolutionary psychology, game theory and empirical fact only when we participate in Market Exchange. But our folk economic machinery seems to tell us that even unregulated markets will return to some fair balance. Note that our sense of fairplay comes from a poisoned well of intuitive justice - our intuitions may remain in a state of pre-cognitive or unexamined notions of fairness in markets. Meat puppet notions of fairness and economic balance can emerge from our minds as unexamined truthiness about market exchange. That's how we roll.

Conjecture

Using his holiness Sir Karl Popper as my guide, we now participate in the game of conjecture followed by plausible refutation. Note that this is a softened form of the falsification criterion for sound theories. The progression that Popper describes is myth to conjecture to hypothesis and finally to theory. Myths emerge from culture and tradition but are valuable as metaphors for agency in the real world. Thunder followed by lighting conjures myths of sky gods dueling or punishment for the faithless. These are reasonable explaination given the material reality of the phenomena has an explaination that comprehends all of the observable facts. People throw stones and sticks so gods throw really big 'light sticks'. Beginning with Kepler and Galileo, many conjectures or improvements to refutable myths emerged. Maybe starlight and lightning are made of the same stuff and don't need the agency of gods. Faraday and Franklin using the emerging methods of natural philosophy grounded in Bacon's 'natural paradigm' to generate powerful a hypothesis about electricity which had even greater explanatory power. The Enlightenment created an emergent quality of 'the stuff of science'. Finally Maxwell provided a theory which explained all aspects of electromagnetism in a solid theory which was embedded in falsifiable 'basic statements' about light visible to the eye and extending down past the infra-red and up past the ultra-violet.

My conjecture is that most human interaction represents the result of operant conditioning. Again and again I find evidence that homo sapiens are not rational actors or rationalization choosers. We are mostly on autopilot.

Refutation
Go for it Paco.