Communication, Conflict, and Culture

Abstract

This study examines the role of complex language in the evolution of communication, conflict, and culture. The main thesis is that language, conflict, and communication initially arose from pressures built in to the critical life-or-death situations our ancestors were compelled to share with one another. From such a perspective, communication is viewed as a world-analyzing, reality-testing, sutvival-oriented mechanism. Complex language enables humans to transform the cultural inheritance and fulfill basic ecological tasks associated with individual security and collective well-being.Neither our kinship with other animals, nor the shortcomings of our culture, of our customs and our social institutions, can be overlooked without loss. (Agassi, 1983, p. 237) The Study of OriginsIt is important to understand what made it possible for our human ancestors to learn to talk with one another after the vast expanse of unrecorded history. After all, what happened 10 to 50 thousand years ago is not all that far removed from what transpires within our own time and place in recorded history. Moreover, our ancestors constitute the living legacy for life in the 20th century. Contemporary communicative practices, however they may or may not be related, are manifestations of cultural systems related by the principle of descent with modification (Durham, 1990). Humans, unlike other animals, have developed, as Smillie (1985) states, "the capacity to transmit information, not just laterally, within generations, but vertically across generations" (p. 80). From an ecological standpoint, then, the invention of complex language is only a flicker, a flashpoint, in time removed from the stream of contemporary events. To understand elements of stress, strain, struggle, and strife in the social fabric, we must be prepared to take into account a written legacy that measures the full magnitude of our inheritance.The essential task is to study face-to-face interaction in a way that seeks to demonstrate how the conduct of various individuals, and the systems and structures that support or threaten their collaborative endeavors, are all historically constituted, both at the (micro) level of given types of exchange relations and at the larger (macro) level of the diverse institutional conditions in which they are embedded. This study seeks to reexamine a body of scholarly literature that 273

Interpersonal eye-tracking reveals the dynamics of interacting minds

“…Mayo and Gordon (2020) suggest that the tendencies to synchronize with one another as well as act independently both exist during social interaction, and that flexibly moving between these two states is the hallmark of a truly adaptive social system. It is possible that several conversational mechanisms prompt this mental state-switching (e.g., topic changes; Egbert, 1997), turn taking (David Mortensen, 2011), and segments of conversation that communicate complete thoughts or Turn Construction Units (Sacks et al, 1978;Clayman, 2012). Future work should investigate how fluctuations of pupillary synchrony, eye blinks and other nonverbal cues help coordinate the coupling-decoupling dynamics between minds that optimize the goals of social interaction.…”

Avatar and Dialog Turn-Yielding Phenomena

“…The requests are very frequently accomplished by simultaneous talking. It has been experimentally shown that these turn requests are likely to be displayed if the speaker has the turn for more than twenty seconds (Mortensen, 2007).…”