{"id":438,"date":"2011-03-04T10:06:18","date_gmt":"2011-03-04T15:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/evo_psych_is_never_our_friend"},"modified":"2013-11-17T20:44:18","modified_gmt":"2013-11-17T20:44:18","slug":"evo_psych_is_never_our_friend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2011\/03\/evo_psych_is_never_our_friend.html","title":{"rendered":"Evo Psych is Never Our Friend"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Jacob Weisberg has a new article in Slate riffing on Charlie Sheen&#8217;s recent woes that lists <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2287228\/pagenum\/all\/\">eight reasons why people care about celebrities<\/a>. Reason #7:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Another version of this theory comes from a 2008 article in Scientific American, which attributed our celebrity obsession to <strong>status-jockeying<\/strong>. Some research findings: Men are mainly interested in gossip about men and women mainly interested in gossip about women; we care much more about those above us in social hierarchy than those below; we care more about people in our own age group; we care more about negative news (someone got arrested) than positive (someone won an award). According to Frank McAndrew, professor of psychology at Knox College, we instinctively collect information that can affect our social status. Negative information about higher-status, same-sex others is ammunition against biological competitors.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t normally have much truck with Evolutional Psychology, but damn, if this one paragraph doesn&#8217;t explain <a href=\"http:\/\/techmeme.com\">the entire tech press<\/a> as we know it. Of course, see also Reason #8.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some research findings: Men are mainly interested in gossip about men and women mainly interested in gossip about women; we care much more about those above us in social hierarchy than those below&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":649,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions\/649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}