My guess is that our exposure to bad faith communication is more frequent than in the past, rather than less, because of mass media; many more messages we receive are from people who do not expect to have to get along with us in twenty years.
That may well be true, but I should clarify that neither of my hypotheticals require or suggest that bad faith communication was more common in the past. They do suggest that assumptions of bad faith may have been significantly more common than actual bad faith, and that this hypersensitivity may have been adaptive in the ancestral environment but be maladaptive now.
My guess is that our exposure to bad faith communication is more frequent than in the past, rather than less, because of mass media; many more messages we receive are from people who do not expect to have to get along with us in twenty years.
That may well be true, but I should clarify that neither of my hypotheticals require or suggest that bad faith communication was more common in the past. They do suggest that assumptions of bad faith may have been significantly more common than actual bad faith, and that this hypersensitivity may have been adaptive in the ancestral environment but be maladaptive now.