ASCAP, September, 1995 Vol 8 No 9 pp 7-15
AGONISTIC
VERSUS PRESTIGE COMPETITION
A
possible basis for a distinction between the agonic and hedonic modes
Summary
It is suggested that two types of organisation
of social competition occur in human societies.
In agonistic competition, which is the usual form of competition in
vertebrates, punishments are applied to one competitor by another, and the
result is a rank order based on dominance/submission. In prestige competition, competitors are not
allowed to reward or punish each other;
instead, rewards and punishments are applied by the social group as a
whole, resulting in a rank order based on differential prestige. Agonistic competition is based on
intimidating a rival and prestige competition on attracting a panel of
judges. The hedonic mode is said to
occur when agonistic competition is proscribed by society, so that any attempt
to gain power by agonistic behaviour is punished by loss of prestige.
In
some societies, which might be termed ultra-hedonic, even attempts to gain
influence by attracting others are punished by loss of prestige. Such societies, like the !Kung San of the
Kalahari desert, are egalitarian.
"It is just because the terms of science
are so well defined, and defined in a way which is closely tied down to the
phenomena, that questions in science can be settled: only because this is so can scientists hope
to answer definitely the questions that arise for them, by looking to see whether
things actually happen in nature in the manner the theory suggests."
Stephen
Toulmin
Michael Chance has given us an inspired
holistic vision of two types of social organisation (ASCAP Sept. & Oct.
1994, and in press), and David Stevens has provided an excellent survey of the
development and current status of the two modes concept (ASCAP August
1995). I think that two issues need
further attention in order to make the two mode concept more generally useful
to, and acceptable by, behavioural scientists.
One is a phenomenological issue and concerns whether the modes are a
categorical or a dimensional concept.
The other is a reductionist issue, and concerns whether there is some
fundamental process or mechanism which operates differently in two modes.
I
think there is an underlying dichotomous variable which underlies the two
modes, and it concerns the type of social competition which occurs. Let us ignore inter-group competition (e.g.,
warfare) and concentrate on within-group competition. It has been known for a long time that there
are two types of competition:
1.
Competition by intimidation (aggression)
2.
Competition by attraction
Michael Chance's contribution was to relate
these forms of competition to social structure.
He recognised that in most macaque species the only form of competition
was competition by intimidation. But in
chimpanzees a new form of competition could be discerned, in which the
individual displayed to the group as a whole, not to intimidate them but to impress
and attract them. In his book Social
Groups of Monkeys, Apes and Men (Chance & Jolly, 1970) he wrote:
Reynolds and Luscombe have studied the
behaviour of a group of chimpanzees in a thirty-acre enclosure at the Holloman
Air Force base in the New Mexican desert, and they found that chimpanzee
attention structure is based upon attention-demanding behaviour or display,
practised competitively between males of the colony, and is distinct from the
pattern of aggression between the same individuals. This display behaviour leads not to submission
or appeasement by a subordinate, but is a form of social solicitation, as it
leads on to forms of associative behaviour in which there is a continuing
interaction between individuals, such as grooming, play, sexual or mothering
behaviour with the displayer. (My emphasis).
This discovery of two types of competition, one
by intimidation and one by attraction, seems to me to be at the basis of the
"mode" distinction. The
behaviour of intimidating and the behaviour of attracting are, in most
situations, mutually incompatible: the
more one intimidates, the less attractive one is; and the more one sets out to attract, the
less intimidating one is. Intimidating
and attracting are alternative power-seeking strategies.
Human
competition is enormously complex, but it is immediately clear that both types
of competition occur in humans as well as in chimpanzees. Paul Gilbert (1992), Theodore Kemper (1990)
and Jerome Barkow (1975) have independently drawn attention to this
evolutionary change in method of competition.
But the ideas have not permeated mainstream social psychology.
Intimidation can vary in subtlety from punching on the nose to damning
with faint praise. Competition by
attraction is enormously elaborated in man, and can take an infinite variety of
forms from parading at a beauty contest to writing Paradise Lost. Also human competition is infused with
paradox and deceit (Footnote 1).
It is
the replacement of the intimidation by the attraction that allows the hedonic
mode to occur. When "attractant"
behaviour occurs, it may take many forms, even in chimpanzees, as the above
quotation makes clear, so even in chimpanzees we would be on difficult ground
if we defined the mode by the form of its actual manifestation. But if we define it by the underlying form of
competition, everything else follows.
This new type of competition could be called "polyadic" to
emphasise that others, apart from the members of a competing dyad, are
influential in deciding the winner; or
it could be called "externally mediated" to emphasis that relative
rank within a dyad is decided by individuals external to that dyad; but I think it would be more user-friendly to
call it prestige competition.
Before
examining the possibility of defining the modes by the type of competition
which is occurring, expected to occur, or allowed to occur, I would like to say
a bit more about the evolution of the two types of within-group competition.
AGONISTIC COMPETITION
Nothing could be more important than competition
which is, after all, the driving force of evolution, and we have known since
Darwin's time that social competition occurs alongside non-social competition
in affecting fitness (reproductive success).
In most vertebrates, and some invertebrates, social competition takes
the form of ritual agonistic behaviour, which is a dyadic interaction in which
rank (and therefore relative fitness) is decided according to criteria which
are internal to the two members of the dyad.
In most species no outside influence affects the outcome of an agonistic
encounter; the occurrence of third party
interventions in dyadic encounters does not affect the issue (Footnote 2). In the vast majority of agonistic
interactions, the encounter is decided by the characteristics of the
combatants, which may be maturational, genetic or to do with their relative
life experience, such as how well fed they are.
There are no cultural variations in the form of the agonistic encounter,
nor in the criteria for success, except in man and possibly in chimpanzees
(Footnote 3). In a society based on
agonistic competition, the qualities of size, strength, fighting skill and
alliance-formation will determine high social rank and group leadership; and, since high rank is associated with greater
reproduction, these same qualities will be selected for (Betzig, 1986).
The control of agonistic behaviour
Agonistic behaviour has advantages and
disadvantages for the individuals that manifest it in their behavioural
repertoire. Its advantages are obvious,
otherwise it would not have become so widespread in the animal kingdom. It acts as an amplifying transducer of small
genetic differences, and thus accelerates the process of natural selection
(Sloman, 1979). It transforms small
inherited differences in strength and skill into large differences in rank and
territorial occupancy. These large
differences dictate which individuals in each generation shall succumb to the
"reapers" of natural selection:
starvation and disease. It is the
homeless and low-ranking individuals who die of malnutrition and fail to
reproduce. The high-ranking individuals
and territory owners are well nourished and have high resistance, and it is
they who beget the next generation.
Thus, through the agency of agonistic behaviour, intrasexual selection
has largely replaced natural selection as the engine of evolution, and the
success of the vertebrate radiation is a testament to the efficiency of this
process.
On the
other hand, ritual agonistic behaviour has its disadvantages. It occupies the attention of individuals and
prevents them pursuing other biological goals such as feeding and preparing
shelters. The conspicuous displays of
agonistic behaviour make the combatants vulnerable to predation (Jacobsson et
al., 1995). Even worse is the agonic
mode in which attention is directed to agonistic behaviour, but nothing is
actually being decided (see Footnote 4);
then the participants are getting all the disadvantages of agonistic
behaviour and none of the advantages.
We can discern three evolutionary pathways by
which the disadvantages of agonistic behaviour have been minimised:
1. Time
is partitioned into agonistic and hedonic periods. This mechanism has evolved in many birds,
such as the red grouse, in which fighting for status and territories is
restricted to the hour or two after sunrise, and for the rest of the day the
birds feed peacefully together without any disputes or fighting (Wynne-Edwards,
1965). In many lineages fighting is
restricted to certain times of the year, usually co-incidental with the
breeding season. Thus in wolves a rigid
hierarchy is determined during about two months of the year and for the
remaining ten months this hierarchy is never disputed, there is a lot of social
behaviour but no fighting, and during this time the wolf pack is clearly
operating in the hedonic mode.
2. Agonistic
behavior is abolished by biological mechanisms. This is seen in the chimpanzee. The two mechanisms concerned are promiscuous
mating and reconciliation behaviour. By
mating promiscuously the chimpanzee has abolished the correlation between rank
and reproductive success which exists in other primates, thus reducing the
power of sexual selection. Instead of
fighting each other, chimpanzees spend their energy on growing large testicles
and huge sperm counts, thus ensuring that out of the panmixia it is their sperm
which beget the next generation. Even if
fighting occurs in the chimpanzee, their enormous (and superhuman) capacity for
reconciliation ensures that "the sun never goes down on their wrath"
and the hedonic mode is maintained for the vast majority of their time. In this way the chimpanzee is able to
maintain co-operative groups; but the
loss of sexual selection for behavioral variables probably means that, even
without competition from man, this is an evolutionary dead-end.
3. Agonistic
behaviour is abolished by cultural mechanisms. This is what we see in the majority of human
societies. It can only occur in man
because it requires language and a complex social structure to ensure the
cohesion and continuity of culture required to achieve this end. It is not an evolutionary dead-end because
the power of intrasexual selection has been maintained. But instead of being mediated by agonistic
behaviour, it is mediated by prestige competition, in which individuals display
attractive qualities to each other, giving each other pleasure, which is
returned to the giver of pleasure in the form of approbation and prestige, so
that it is those individuals in the group that are attractive to the majority
who rise to leadership positions and amass the resources that protect them and
their offspring against the depredations of starvation and disease. And in the case of men, given a polygynous
society, it may give them an extra wife and so double their reproductive
fitness (Perusse, 1993).
PRESTIGE COMPETITION
Evolutionary adjustment to prestige competition
The evolution of this new attractant type of
competition has required several developments in social behaviour. In the competitor, a hedonic "desire to
show off" or a "desire to be approved of" has come to co-exist
with the agonistic "desire to intimidate". Alongside this motivational element, there is
a cognitive apparatus for learning what type of display behaviour is likely to
be approved of. This allows the content
of the display to be culturally determined, and, indeed, human displays are
very diverse.
Then,
a whole new role of spectator/evaluator/judge has been developed, in which the
group members evaluate one or more performers and respond to them with either
approbation or disapprobation. Also, the
spectator/judges must learn the criteria on which they are evaluating the
performances, and the criteria of evaluation may be varied between groups and
handed down from generation to generation.
The role of evaluator is one that seems natural to human beings - we all
enjoy watching a performance and then either clapping or booing, giving the
thumbs up or the thumbs down. We enjoy
discussing performance with other evaluators, and in generating the systemic
variables of reputation and prestige.
The signals of approbation and disapprobation given by the evaluators to
the performers are newly evolved; they
are designed to raise and lower self-esteem, in the way that the threat and
submissive signals of agonistic competition lower and raise self-esteem. But they differ from agonistic signals in
having no comparative component; whereas
a threat signal says, "I am more powerful than you", and a submissive
signal says, "You are more powerful than me", approbation says,
"You are good" and disapprobation says "You are no good",
but there is no suggestion that the performer is better or worse than the
evaluator. The King can evaluate the
Cat, and the Cat can evaluate the King.
Then
the performers must be sensitive to approbation or disapprobation, so that
these signals come to raise or lower self-esteem, and we may say that a new
hedonic self-concept (which Paul Gilbert has called social attention holding
power or SAHP) has come to co-exist with the agonistic self-concept of
resource-holding potential (RHP). Every
group member performs simultaneously the role of performer in which he or she
is evaluated by others, and of judge/spectator, in which he or she evaluates
the others. There is no escape from
these roles. Just as one "cannot
not communicate", so, one cannot not evaluate, nor can one avoid being evaluated.
These
are enormous changes, which have modified not only social interaction but also
individual psychology.
Natural selection in the hedonic mode
The implications for social interaction theory
and role theory are obviously great, but the implications for evolutionary
theory are even greater (see my contribution to the February, 1992 ASCAP). In hedonic "competition by
attraction" it is possible to select for any quality the society chooses
to be attracted by. Attractive people
are given prestige (a systemic correlate of SAHP) and come to occupy leadership
roles and also are given more resources so their fitness increases; their children survive because they are
better fed, and in many cases a man with prestige is allowed more wives than
other men (he is given the resources which his agonic counterpart takes). Whatever qualities form the basis for the
allocation of prestige are thus selected for.
A group can select for co-operative people and weed out free-riders and
any deviates who might exploit the altruism of the majority. It is a paradox that hedonic competition can
lead to the selection of non-competitiveness;
and when it does so, people are competing to appear
non-competitive. This appears to have
happened in modern immediate return hunter/gatherer societies, for instance the
!Kung, in whom any display of ostentation is rewarded with group disapprobation
(Lee, 1979). In some societies there
appears to be an attempt to make hedonic society the very opposite of agonistic
society; for instance, among the Chewong
of Malaysia displays of cowardice receive approbation, and the boasting of old
men tells of occasions that they have run away (Howell, 1989).
In
populations practising prestige competition, the variance of culture is large,
because different groups give approbation for different qualities. In a group favouring X-type behaviour,
X-types will become leaders, X-genotypes will be selected for, and non-X-types
will be selected against. In a systemic
"runaway" effect, the more X-types are selected, the more the genetic
system will favour their selection, a situation suggested by Scott (1989): "Systems theory emphasises the fact,
implicit in Darwin's theory of natural selection, that differential survival
not only alters genotypic systems, but that the latter, through the process of
adaptation, alter the process of differential survival. Thus, the most general trend in evolutionary change is to negate natural
selection." Sexual selection is a mechanism
which negates natural selection, and, as I discuss in the next section,
intrasexual selection by attraction negates intrasexual selection by
intimidation.
It is
interesting to speculate how prestige competition arose. Gilbert (1992) discusses two
possibilities: first, that it is a
development of the recruitment of allies;
secondly, that it arose when males started to do what females in many
primate species already do, to use their influence to make sure an attractive
male wins the power struggle.
The proscription of agonistic competition
One liability of competing hedonic groups is
the extent to which rank and therefore selection is still determined by
agonistic behaviour, because this will dilute the hedonic selection for such
things as co-operativeness and unselfishness.
However much prestige competition is encouraged, the phylogenetically
old tendency to gain power by coercion is likely to persist; after all, this primitive form of competition
has been evolving for three hundred million years, and must be deeply embedded
in the genome, whereas prestige competition has probably only been around for
ten million years, one thirtieth of the time.
So competition by intimidation is going to be hard to eliminate. But groups will try to do it, because the
more the character of the group is determined by prestige competition, the more
effective it will be. Therefore we can
expect all groups to have social sanctions against agonistic competition, and
that, in fact, is what we find in all human groups except street corner gangs,
prison populations, and others that have not had time or the right conditions
to develop prestige competition.
This
then is the hedonic mode: it is a mode
in which not only is competition by intimidation not occurring, it is a mode in
which it is not allowed to occur.
The members can feel free to let their attention be diverted by whatever
interests them, secure in the knowledge that they do not have to attend to the
whims of a dominant, and also secure in the knowledge that if anyone tried to
behave like a dominant and intimidate them, he or she will have committed a
social gaffe and will receive disapprobation from the group and his or her
social rank and power in the group will decline (Footnote 5). Thus the hedonic mode is not just the absence
of the agonistic/agonic modes; it is a
formal structuring of society which outlaws agonistic behaviour and decrees
that, if any competition occurs, it is to be prestige competition.
The
proscription of agonistic behaviour begins in childhood. Vaillant (1977), in his study of normal
American young men, found that almost all of them had been subjected to strong
childhood training against the expression of aggression. The same is true of most primitive peoples
(Service, 1971). Children are allowed to
compete for attention and praise, but, as far as fighting is concerned, they
are subjected to propaganda like the following:
Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God
hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For
'tis their nature too.
But, children, you should never let
Such
angry passions rise;
Your little hands were never made
To tear
each other's eyes.
ISAAC WATTS (1674-1748) Divine songs
for children,
xvi, Against Quarrelling
As they get older, children are trained to
restrict their non-violence to members of their own group. Intimidation of the enemy brings prestige,
and the most honoured men in many tribes are those with a reputation as a good
leader in war (Service, 1971). This is
the one exception to the rule that intimidation and attraction are incompatible. Providing they are intimidating the enemy,
intimidators are attractive.
PROPOSED
DEFINITIONS
Suggested definition of two types of
competition
It is well known that many useful concepts
cannot be defined. And yet, the closer
one gets to a definition, the more useful a concept is. Here is a preliminary attempt to define the
two types of competition:
Agonistic (or dyadic, or internally
mediated) competition is said to occur when the relative social rank (and hence
reproductive success) of any pair of group members is being altered by signals
(information or messages) exchanged between the members of that pair
Prestige (or polyadic, or
externally mediated) competition is said to occur when the relative social rank
(and hence reproductive success) of any pair of group members is being altered
by signals (information or messages) exchanged between one or more other
members of the group and one or both members of that pair
Note that this definition does not mention
intimidation or attraction. It is based
on the role of the person (or persons) who administers rewards and punishments
(boosting and putting down signals) to the competitors. If the rewards and punishments are
administered by a rival, the competition is agonic; if they are administered by a non-competitive
evaluator, it is hedonic. This is
because the only way to get a reward from a competitor is to intimidate
him; and the only way to get a reward
from a non-competitor is to attract him.
So the fundamental distinction is not in the type of signal, but in who
has the power to administer rewards and punishments.
A suggested definition of the two modes
If we can accept the above definition of the
two types of competition, we then have a simple definition of the two modes:
The agonistic mode occurs when
agonistic competition is taking place or is likely to take place
The hedonic mode occurs when
agonistic competition is not taking place or likely to take place, regardless
of the degree of hedonic competition which may be occurring or anticipated
Although the hedonic mode may be defined
by the absence of agonistic competition, it is typified by the presence
of affiliative behaviour, which occurs either for its own sake, or in the
pursuit of some objective such as a group task, or courtship, or the planning
of some communal display. The crucial
point is that agonistic competition inhibits affiliative behaviour, whereas
prestige competition, if anything, promotes it.
Consequences of the definition
Any social group in which prestige competition
is sanctioned but agonistic competition is not, is bound to veer towards the
left-hand pole of the various dimensions listed by David Stevens. It is bound to be a group in which most
people would like to live; only the most
extreme authoritarian personalities, those very high in Social Dominance
Orientation (Pratto et al., 1994), are likely to prefer to live in an agonistic
society.
Apart
from anything else, the hedonic person has an enormous range of choice. Every individual has two concurrent roles in
any hedonic group: that of performer,
and that of spectator/judge. In both
roles he has choice. As performer, he
can get up on the stage or he can stay out of the limelight; as judge, he can decide whom he will applaud,
and how vigorously, and for what kind of performance.
Nevertheless, there is still a downside to the
hedonic mode. What if one's performance
is not appreciated by one's peers? What
if one receives disapprobation rather than approbation? Then one is receiving the hedonic equivalent
of "catathetic signals" or the threats and blows that characterise
agonistic competition. When this
happens, the average individual will back off, lower his sights and try to play
a more inconspicuous part in social interaction. There may be cases where such tactics are not
possible, either because of excess of ambition or shortage of resources. In these cases the individual may continue to
receive group disapprobation or even rejection, and a whole new armoury of
mental mechanisms has evolved to cope with this situation. Shame occurs when the standards of the group
are not met, guilt occurs when the rules are broken, and both these emotions
are associated with lowering of self-concept (SAHP) and dysphoria. It seems very likely that these responses to
failure in hedonic competition are evolutionary developments of the primitive
anxiety and depression which evolved to manage failure in agonistic
competition. Even when a group member is
excluded completely, is ostracised from the group, or dies as a result of
"pointing the bone", we are still seeing prestige competition and its
results, and the reason is that these social activities are the result of the
evaluation of the individual by the group as a whole, and are not the result of
mutual evaluation as occurs in agonistic or dyadic competition. Even the interaction between an executioner
and his victim may be completely hedonic, because it does not address itself to
their relative rank.
We
must acknowledge that, even in a hedonic group, prestige competition carries
with it the implication that some people do better than others, and that some
people will fail. The hedonic group
imposes sanctions, which are often formalised as customs and laws; and the implication of a sanction is that
someone, at some time, will break it. Therefore
even in the hedonic mode people are going to be afraid of error and failure,
and experience shame, guilt and humiliation, and they are going to be concerned
with their self-presentation, especially their power of attraction, and their
capacity to be sufficiently attractive to be included in the group, and this
means they may be afraid of expulsion.
Even attention and the systems-forming faculty may be impaired in the
hedonic mode; as Walter Bagehot said,
"A man doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not
much disposed to abstract meditation, or
remote enquiries."
This
is the downside of prestige competition.
Most people would agree that it is better than the effects of agonistic
competition. Nevertheless, it conflicts
with the OED meaning of the word 'hedonic' (= pleasurable).
In
fact, I think the term "hedonic" is appropriate to the type of
competition we are talking about. The
purpose of a hedonic display is to attract, to please, to give pleasure to the
recipient of the display; this contrasts
with the purpose of the agonistic display which is to threaten, intimidate,
lower, harm and basically to cause pain to the recipient. The response to a hedonic display is usually
one of approbation which gives pleasure to the displayer in return. The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that
hedonic displays designed to give pleasure do not always succeed in that aim,
and then the evaluators respond with disapprobation which causes pain in the
displayer.
Of
course, there are some occasions when no competition is occurring at all. An example is the companionable interaction
described by Heard and Lake (1986). Some
people have used the term hedonic mode in this sense - an interaction in which
there is no competition, no status differentiation and no unpleasantness. We have argued this out in the Birmingham
group. There is no disagreement about
the facts - that there are:
1. Agonistic/agonic interaction
2.
Prestige competition
3.
Companionable interaction.
The question has been whether we use the term
hedonic to cover both prestige competition and companionable interaction or
restrict it to the latter only.
I
think the crucial factor is the discreteness of the boundaries between the
different types of interaction. There is
a reasonably discrete boundary between agonistic competition and prestige
competition, but the boundary between prestige competition and companionable
interaction is blurred. It is very
difficult to tell when prestige competition is and is not occurring (Footnote
1). Evaluation goes on all the time,
whether we want it to or not. Even in
companionable interaction the participants may note outstandingly good or bad
performance on the part of other members.
Even when we seem to be cooperating most, we may be competing to be seen
as cooperative, knowing that society rewards cooperative behaviour. For this reason and others it was decided to
use the term "hedonic mode" to cover all interaction in which
agonistic behaviour was excluded, and to adopt the definitions given above.
We
recognise that a major dimension of variation of competitiveness lies
orthogonal to the hedonic/agonic distinction.
Agonistic societies may be more or less competitive, and hedonic
societies vary from those of avid status seekers to those in which negligible
competition occurs. This general level
of competitiveness is probably ultimately determined by the degree of asymmetry
of payoff between those who are successful and those who are unsuccessful in
competition, whatever the form of competition may be.
With
agonistic behaviour relegated to the street corner, the school playground and
other places where society lacks either the power or the will to intervene,
individuals can flourish in the hedonic mode, secure in the knowledge that
agonistic behaviour will not occur because it is against the cultural norms
of the society. Thus, agonistic
behaviour is not just absent and seen to be absent, it is known to be punished
by society at large (Footnote 5). This
leaves human beings free to pursue cooperative activities, and to engage in
prestige competition, which, fame being the spur, has resulted in their
devotion to art, science and all those manifold human activities which give
pleasure to others. It also means that
human beings have been selected to be co-operative, nice, loyal and devoted to
the giving of pleasure to others. Our
genes may be selfish, but prestige competition has seen to it that our
phenotypes are very different.
Or, at
least, our phenotypes have the capacity to be hedonic. The capacity for the agonistic phenotype
represented by the "authoritarian personality" is probably still
present in most human beings (Maslow, 1943).
Given the right upbringing, the child will learn to derive self-esteem from
the approbation of others; but, lacking
this lesson, he or she may well revert to the primitive source of self-esteem
which is the submission of others. This
flexibility in development adds poignancy to the fact that so many children in
the world today are being raised in families which deny them approbation and
societies which teach them to divide the world into those who are to be
intimidated and those who are to be flattered and/or induced to provide
agonistic support.
Summary of differences between prestige and
agonistic competition
1. In
prestige competition, the display of the competitor is designed to
attract; in agonistic competition it is
designed to intimidate.
2. In
prestige competition, the reward to the competitor comes in the form of
applause from a judge or evaluator; in
agonistic competition it comes in the form of submission from a rival. In prestige competition, failure to attract
results in disapprobation from the judge or evaluator; in agonistic competition failure to intimidate
results in defeat by a rival.
3.
Submission, the reward of agonistic competition, is a comparative
statement, indicating that the signaller is inferior to the recipient; applause, the reward of prestige competition,
has no implication for the relative rank of competitor and judge.
Category or dimension
Even if there is a discrete difference in type
of competition underlying the two modes, can we demonstrate categorical status,
for instance by demonstrating bimodality on some measure applied to large
numbers of groups? There are several
problems:
1. The
two mode distinction is orthogonal to other ways in which groups differ, such
as competitiveness/co-operativeness, and whether behaviour is controlled mainly
by rewards or punishments. The variation
generated by these dimensions might dwarf the agonic/hedonic distinction.
2. We
have talked of simple societies in which agonistic and prestige competition are
the only ways to compete. But in modern
societies there are many more ways, such as those based on money. Moreover, rank is determined to some extent
by inherited social position and wealth.
Also, in many human groups, people find themselves in formal hierarchies,
determined "from above", and are thus in ranking relationships other
than those which might have eventuated according to either agonistic or
prestige competition. How do such groups
and relationships develop hedonic or agonic properties?
3. I
have emphasised the difficulty of knowing whether prestige competition is
occurring, but there is also the problem of deciding when agonistic competition
is occurring. A "put-down" can
be so subtle that it may not even be recognised as such by members of the same
group. An oblique reference to some
undesirable or discreditable aspect of the other may cause severe put-down, and
will only be recognised if others have the same information about the victim.
4. In
prestige competition, the display of attraction may be to the group as a whole,
or it may be to the group leader or to a particular patron. Do these two types of display differ? For instance, a parliamentary candidate
displays to the electorate to seek votes, but he also displays to the party
leader to seek office. Will such a
difference cause inconvenient variation within the hedonic mode?
5.
Perhaps the clearest examples of hedonic relationships occur in
marriage, and marriage also offers clear examples of relationships which switch
back and forth from one mode to the other (Price, 1992). But this is a case in which two is qualitatively
different from three, because a dyad cannot satisfy our requirements for
prestige competition. A dyad is either
competing agonistically or co-operating, in which latter case it is in the
hedonic mode because agonistic interaction is not anticipated. Should we treat dyads such as married couples
separately from our treatment of groups?
I mention these problems because we must accept
that to demonstrate the two modes observationally, let alone experimentally, is
not going to be easy. Perhaps we need a
situation in which there are a large number of homogeneous groups, such as the
groups of air crew which were used to study status incongruence. But before anyone is brave enough to start
field work on the two modes, it is important for us to try to get our
definitions right.
Footnote 1.
Competition tends to be concealed both from fellow participants and from
observers. Lord Chesterton wrote to his
son: "Strive for place, but seem
not to do so". At Oxford in the
1950s (and probably at other places in other times) it was considered
prestigious to succeed without really trying.
The person who was admired was the one who got a good degree without
appearing to do much work, or who got a blue without excessive training. The film Chariots of Fire portrays the
social disapprobation which accompanies too much effort to succeed at
sport. Those who tried too hard at work
were labelled "swots" and lost prestige.
The
same, or even greater, pressure to succeed without trying occurred at Princeton
University in the USA, according to the report of one of its alumni. This is how Scott Fitzgerald described the
situation at Princeton (Mizener, 1949):
Football was the best means to social
distinction on the [Princeton] campus, and social distinction...was the main
preoccupation of an undergraduate's career.
The competition was no less fierce because its most inviolable
requirement was that the contestants should appear quite unconcerned with
social prestige. Beneath this pretence
of indifference the game of becoming a Big Man was carried on day in and day
out by everyone who had, by local standards, good sense.
This sort of comment should make us wary of
asserting that competition is not occurring in a society. And, if we think what success a Martian anthropologist
might have in studying Princeton social life, we should be cautious about
accepting the reports of anthropologists about the practices of
"primitive" tribes, who may be just as subtle and concealing as
Western undergraduates (cf. Chagnon, 1968).
Footnote 2.
In a few very social species such as some macaques, family members act
as allies and intervene in agonistic encounters to support their kin (Chapais,
1992); and some horses may intervene to
support unrelated friends (Fraser, 1992);
but on the whole the decision in agonistic encounters is reached by
mutual interaction of the dyad alone, and in those cases in which others
intervene, the intervention is entirely based on the criterion of existing
kinship relations or friendship.
Therefore third party interventions do not affect the criteria which
decide the outcome.
Among
social insects, the workers may intervene in fights between queens. "Pleometrosis" occurs when two or
more queens found the same nest. Usually
the queens cooperate until some workers are hatched, but after that their
relations are very variable. They may
continue to cooperate, or ignore each other, or maintain separate equal
territories within the nest, or form dominance hierarchies, or kill each
other. The "transition from
pleometrosis to monogyny" is the way an entomologist describes one of the
queens killing all her rivals off (Heinze, 1993). When the workers intervene in these fights,
they only kill off and remove wounded or subordinate queens; there is no species in which the workers kill
off queens which fail to please them, or which make their queens undergo some
form of psychological testing, and then kill off those who perform poorly.
Footnote 3.
In human societies, agonistic encounters are usually proscribed. But they do occur, in two main forms. In one form, they are permitted by society in
culturally ritualised varieties, such as duels, boxing matches and sports. Here, society prescribes which skills lead to
victory. Also, there is a referee to
perform functions which in biologically ritualised encounters are performed by
psychological processes (e.g., the exercise of mercy by the winner, and the
development of an "involuntary subordinate strategy (ISS)" in the
loser (Price et al., 1994)). In sports,
both agonistic and prestige competition are occurring at the same time. In Vanity Fair Thackeray gives a good
example of a fight in which the winner benefitted in terms of agonistic
competition and the loser benefitted in terms of prestige competition. The balance of the types of competition
determines whether the mode of a sporting contest is agonistic or hedonic.
The
second form of agonistic competition occurs where society lacks either the
power or the will to intervene. In the
case of street-corner gangs, prisons and the school playground, society lacks
the power to proscribe; and the effect
of the bullying which is seen in these places is reflected in high suicide
rates. In the case of the marital
bedroom, and to some extent the family home, society has neither the power nor
the will to intervene. The lack of will,
enshrined in aphorisms such as "never intervene between a husband and
wife" is basically due to the fact that in society's eyes husband and wife
are not in competition, in that, whichever wins the marital dominance struggle,
the effect on society's leadership and the selection process is zero. In other words, for purposes of social
competition, society treats the married couple as "one flesh". In broader terms, marital conflict is independent
of sexual selection.
Footnote 4.
The term agonic refers to a hierarchical group in which the dominants
are aggressive to subordinates, but the aggression is not reciprocated. The tendency to retaliate is inhibited in the
subordinates, but they remain physiologically aroused by the anticipation of
punishment by more dominant animals - as Michael Chance observed in his
long-tailed macaques. If subordinates
retaliate, we should talk of the agonistic mode, which covers a) groups which
are oriented to fighting but no fighting is actually occurring (agonic groups)
and 2) groups and dyads in which fighting is occurring.
Footnote 5.
An example of this is given in the novel The Dangerous Edge by
Tim Renton (London: Hutchinson, 1994).
The plot concerns the British cabinet's reaction to the taking of two
hostages in Lebanon. The Prime Minister
and the Foreign Secretary used to have a hedonic relationship, but recently the
Foreign Secretary has come to covet his friend's position, and the Prime
Minister is nervous of this ambition, and so their personal relationship has
become agonistic. The Prime Minister,
having won his position by prestige competition, resorts to agonistic
competition (he humiliates the Foreign Secretary in a Cabinet meeting, and he sacks
the latter's assistant in a punitive way).
These agonistic acts are unattractive to his cabinet colleagues, of whom
he soon ceases to command the support of a majority, and so he loses his place.
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