WHAT ABOUT THE INCREASING ADAPTIVE VALUE OF MANIPULATIVE LANGUAGE USE- COMMENTARY

Dunbar (1993) emphasizes the role of cooperative language use in the e volution of human linguistic capacity and neglects to consider the rol e that manipulative language use would have played. I argue that as gr oup size and neocortical size increased during human evolution, the ad aptive value of using language to benefit oneself at the expense of ot hers would also have increased. I discuss how selection pressures for manipulative language use would have operated in the contexts of matin g, status striving, and social exchange.