Dienstag, 6. Februar 2018

The Status Competition Model of Cultural Production

The Status Competition Model of Cultural Production
Bo M. Winegard, Ben M. Winegard, David C. Geary (2018)


"After years of arduous study and labor, Immanuel Kant, then in his upper 50’s, published his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Few people could understand his abstruse book (Kuehn, 2001). More mysterious perhaps than Kant’s genius and indefatigable effort is a simple question: why would evolution craft a creature who would devote an inordinate amount of time to writing a recondite book about human knowledge (epistemology)? Darwin’s (1859/1958) theory of natural selection suggests that such effort should not be dedicated to the production of a book that does not improve one’s ability to survive. To our knowledge, developing an expertise in epistemology does not allow one better to navigate the environment, avoid predators, or discover patches of valuable resources. One currently popular answer, the cultural courtship model (CCM) , argues that cultural productions like Kant’s book are designed to enthrall the other sex—that they function like the brilliant plumage of a peacock to capture the attention and tap into the aesthetic preferences of potential mates (Miller, 1999; 2000). 
In this article, we argue that the cultural courtship model, although a marked improvement over the often vague functionalist theories propounded by some cultural anthropologists and sociologists, explains only a special subset of cultural productions. We propose an alternative model, the social competition model (SCM) of cultural production, which contends that men and women produce cultural artifacts and displays chiefly to obtain status and prestige from peers and high status others (see also Irons, 1979, and Price & Van Vugt, 2014, for similar analyses). Prestige and status, once achieved, can be traded for a variety of resources, including, but not limited to, other mates (Perusse, 1993). We argue that the SCM allows a more complete understanding of cultural production and the subsequent mating decisions that such displays affect than current theory affords."

2 Kommentare:

  1. One should be carefull not to deviate from the explanatory power of the evolutionary model(s) too quickly. Socio-Cultural models are often not more than a god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanation, especially if there's not much evidence. Evolutionary Biology and Evo-Psych will probably give us much better evidence-based models, we just might have got them not completely correct - yet.

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  2. I think the authors make a good point that success in the cultural domain increases social status. And these increases in social status make men more attractive to potential mates. But obviously cultural skills can also attract females directly.
    I observed some professors who were successful in the cultural domain but had a hard time at attracting females. So it's quite clear that cultural success alone doesn't guarantee that a man is highly desirable to the opposite sex.

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