Over the last few months I have been working at 2 PBS TV Stations in the US on how they might intensify their relationship with their viewers. We are just a few of many that seek this Holy Grail.But as we struggle to discover what the new external relationship should be and how we may enable it, one surprising new point is emerging as key to everything. That point is how can we develop a trusted and authentic relationship with the external world if we don't enjoy this inside?Until now, each department could be separate, little worlds to themselves, and it would be OK. But as we struggle to bring the web and a genuinely interactive relationship into play - something new and radical has entered our lives. All the different parts of the station who could in the past integrate in the Presidents office - have to now work seamlessly with each other on a day to day basis. Programming has to be connected to Marketing but also to Development and to Production and so on. All have to be fitted into a participative web context.This demands a high, a very high level of trust inside the station. It demands the all the staff know each other well. And the surprise is .... That we don't know each other that well.Why not? It turns out that few people spend almost any time in person with each other. Even inside a department it is customary to send an email to the person next door. When we interact it is often only about work. We can work for years with someone and know next to nothing about the larger self that exists outside of work.How do people, or any primate, know the other well enough to have the trust required? Primates have to Groom each other!Might Twitter or Pownce be able to help us do this?I read a very helpful article on Trust and Grooming today in a New York Times Article on the Williams Syndrome (No I had never heard of it either until today) called The Gregarious BrainIt makes the point as to why grooming is essential - so in this context, let's give Pownce a try. I think that the casual updates that might be about anything are very close to Grooming. I have certainly felt the effects of an increase in Trust as I have participated in Twitter and Pownce. Pownce has the added feature that we can set up groups and that we can send files etc.So here are the "good bits" - makes for me a convincing case:"But why should casual friendships and group membership depend on smarts? One possible answer a comes from the rich literature of nonhuman primate studies. For 40 years or so, primatologists like Jane Goodall, Frans de Waal and Robert Sapolsky have been studying social behavior in chimps, gorillas, macaques, bonobos and baboons. Over the past decade that work has led to a unifying theory that explains not only a huge range of behavior but also why our brains are so big and what their most essential work is. The theory, called the Machiavellian-intelligence or social-brain theory, holds that we rise from a lineage in which both individual and group success hinge on balancing the need to work with others with the need to hold our own â€" or better â€" amid the nested groups and subgroups we are part of.It started with fruit. About 15 or 20 million years ago, the theory goes, certain forest monkeys in Africa and Asia developed the ability to digest unripe fruit. This left some of their forest-dwelling cousins â€" the ancestors of chimps, gorillas and humans â€" at a sharp disadvantage. Suddenly a lot of fruit was going missing before it ripened.To find food, some of the newly hungry primate species moved to the forest edge. Their new habitat put more food in reach, but it also placed the primates within reach of big cats, canines and other savanna predators. This predation spurred two key evolutionary changes. The primates became bigger, giving individuals more of a fighting chance, and they started living in bigger groups, which provided more eyes to keep watch and a strength of numbers in defense. But the bigger groups imposed a new brain load: the members had to be smart enough to balance their individual needs with those of the pack. This meant cooperating and exercising some individual restraint. It also required understanding the behavior of other group members striving not only for safety and food but also access to mates. And it called for comprehending and managing one's place in an ever-shifting array of alliances that members formed in order not to be isolated within the bigger group. How did primates form and manage these alliances? They groomed one another. Monkeys and great apes spend up to a fifth of their time grooming, mostly with regular partners in pairs and small groups. This quality time (grooming generates a pleasing release of endorphins and oxytocin) builds strong bonds. Experiments in which a recording of macaques screaming in alarm is played, for instance, have shown a macaque will respond much more strongly to a grooming partner's cries than to cries from other members of the group. The large time investment involved seems to make a grooming relationship worth defending.In this and other ways a group's members would create, test and declare their alliances. But as the animals and groups grew, tracking and understanding all those relationships required more intelligence. According to the social-brain theory, it was this need to understand social dynamics â€" not the need to find food or navigate terrain â€" that spurred and rewarded the evolution of bigger and bigger primate brains.This isn't idle speculation; Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist and social-brain theorist, and others have documented correlations between brain size and social-group size in many primate species. The bigger an animal's typical group size (20 or so for macaques, for instance, 50 or so for chimps), the larger the percentage of brain devoted to neocortex, the thin but critical outer layer that accounts for most of a primate's cognitive abilities. In most mammals the neocortex accounts for 30 percent to 40 percent of brain volume. In the highly social primates it occupies about 50 percent to 65 percent. In humans, it's 80 percent. According to Dunbar, no such strong correlation exists between neocortex size and tasks like hunting, navigating or creating shelter. Understanding one another, it seems, is our greatest cognitive challenge. And the only way humans could handle groups of more than 50, Dunbar suggests, was to learn how to talk."The conventional view," Dunbar notes in his book "Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language," "is that language evolved to enable males to do things like coordinate hunts more effectively. . . . I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip."Dunbar's assertion about the origin of language is controversial. But you needn't agree with it to see that talk provides a far more powerful and efficient way to exchange social information than grooming does. In the social-brain theory's broad definition, gossip means any conversation about social relationships: who did what to whom, who is what to whom, at every level, from family to work or school group to global politics. Defined this way, gossip accounts for about two-thirds of our conversation. All this yakking â€" murmured asides in the kitchen, gripefests in the office coffee room â€" yields vital data about changing alliances; shocking machinations; new, wished-for and missed opportunities; falling kings and rising stars; dangerous rivals and potential friends. These conversations tell us too what our gossipmates think about it all, and about us, all of which is crucial to maintaining our own alliances.For we are all gossiped about, constantly evaluated by two criteria: Whether we can contribute, and whether we can be trusted. This reflects what Ralph Adolphs, a social neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, calls the "complex and dynamic interplay between two opposing factors: on the one hand, groups can provide better security from predators, better mate choice and more reliable food; on the other hand, mates and food are available also to competitors from within the group." You're part of a team, but you're competing with team members. Your teammates hope you'll contribute skills and intergroup competitive spirit â€" without, however, offering too much competition within the group, or at least not cheating when you do. So, even if they like you, they constantly assess your trustworthiness. They know you can't afford not to compete, and they worry you might do it sneakily."technorati tags:Grooming, Trust, Dunbar, Culture, PublicTV, Pounce, Twitter, SocialmediaBlogged with Flock
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