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re: Quite right
Robert — (archived)

I think we're basically saying a similar thing. Interesting observation about conflict resolution mechanisms. The mechanisms of the tribe naturally promote cooperation because everybody knows their place and the social rules; only deviation from the norms is a source of conflict. As tribes get larger those norms have less effect, I think, and then you see additional explicit mechanisms grafted on, like the "mocking" rituals you describe.

A theme I in places in your post was a "cellular" organization, in which interaction shifted (without necessarily having a definite threshold like 5 or 500) from directly between individuals to interactions between cells of people. In sports, I can't think of an operational team size greater than 11, as in football; and perhaps it's not possible for people to act in perfect concert in larger groups. The overall team itself usually has a much larger roster, but it organizes into subsets of "squads" to actually take action on the field; it breaks itself into cells.

Hierarchies are a useful way to scale up organizations beyond those very small cell sizes. But they have their downside, too. I happen to have just finished reading a part of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report that points out the way that NASA's hierarchy impeded communication and was one significant factor in the disaster. Among the observations apropos to this primatology discussion is that engineers with lower status than managers felt "intimidated" by the status of the managers and withheld or muted their concerns about safety. In other words, the betas deferred to the alphas simply because of rank. The Board specifically recommended that more "democratic" and "egalitarian" structures and processes should be set up whenever safety-of-flight issues might be involved, to flatten the hierarchy and empower betas to challenge alphas.

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