Buckets of steam and left-handed hammers. The fool’s errand as a signal of epistemic and coalitional dominance
In various professional groups, experts send rookies on absurd tasks as a prank. 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 fool’s errands similar in structure despite various contexts and remarkably persistent over time? Here I propose that the cultural success of this social institution and its recurrent features across history and cultures are based on evolved cognitive mechanisms activated by apprenticeship as social learning and group induction. I will show that evolved mechanisms of epistemic vigilance explain how novices are reliably deceived by experts using opaque statements erroneously perceived as pedagogical. Furthermore, evolved capacities for coalition building explain why insiders use the prank as strategic signaling of hierarchies based on epistemic asymmetry. The intersection of cognitive mechanisms and patterns of professional recruitment create a tradition where insiders coordinate to humiliate newcomers to assert epistemic and coalitional dominance.