Phenotype and History Warps The Performance of Agreement And Disagreement

Right now as a reader you presumably are unaware of my phenotype or much of my history. But if you knew these details, it seems likely to me that it would warp your performance of agreement or disagreement with me. In part that's because we communicate in the context of an audience. For example, if we're both males, and that audience consists in part of females, you may be motivated to perform disagreement with me so as not to signal to those females that I'm higher status than you. In part, it may also be because we're both manipulated by people smarter than us (and perhaps due to evolutionary psychological mechanisms) to situationally agree and disagree with people of the same phenotype as us. For example, if we're both overweight women, and I blog an agreement with a third overweight woman in her dispute with two skinny women, you may be motivated to perform agreement with me.

I think there's lots of opportunity for microsociological experimentation to suss out these factors and their elasticity better.

Comments

[TGGP]

I believe with high probability you are neither a woman nor overweight. I think the audience may occasionally be overweight, but a greater proportion are male.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

TGGP, the focus of this post isn't on my phenotype. As for audience, I'm thinking more about specific audience. For example, imagine the 1st example occurs in a private space with just 2 men and 1 woman, and the second example occus in a private space with just 4 women. Completely private spaces seem to be common instances of human interaction, in contrast to blogosphere discussions, where the audience can be assumed to potentially include the range of phenotypes.