Buckets of Steam and Left-handed Hammers. The Fool’s Errand as Signal of Epistemic and Coalitional Dominance

Bibliographic Data

ID12822943
AuthorsRadu Umbres (0000-0002-6121-4518, National School of Political Science and Public Administration, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume22
Issue1-2
Pages1-19
Publication date2022-03-11
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Cognition and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1567-7095 • E-ISSN: 1568-5373
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/15685373-12340122
OpenAlexW4226365407
LanguageEN
Citations received2

In various professional groups, experts send rookies on absurd tasks as a joke. The fool’s errand appears in factories and hospitals, in elite schools and scout camps, among soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Why are newcomers deceived and humiliated, and why are pranks relatively similar and remarkably persistent over time? I propose that the cultural success and the recurrent features of the fool’s errand are based on evolved cognitive mechanisms activated by apprenticeship as social learning and group induction. Epistemic vigilance explains how novices are reliably deceived by experts using opaque statements erroneously perceived as pedagogical. Furthermore, coalitional psychology explains why insiders use the prank as strategic signalling of hierarchies based on epistemic asymmetry. The intersection of cognitive mechanisms and patterns of professional recruitment maintains a tradition of ritualised pranking in which insiders coordinate to humiliate newcomers to assert epistemic and coalitional dominance

Apprenticeship · Cognition · Dominance (genetics · Elite · Epistemology · Joke · Norwegian · Political science · Sociology · Critical Realism in Sociology · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Philosophy · Psychology · Social and Cultural Dynamics · Social Psychology

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