Discernment helps us answer a question we’re often asking ourselves as we navigate the world: “Which way is high status?” Like the female bowerbird, we use art as one of our criteria for choosing mates (and teammates). But without the ability to distinguish “good” art from “bad” art, we run the risk of admiring less fit, lower-status artists. So just as the female bowerbird needs to inspect all the local bowers to improve her discernment, humans also need to consume a lot of art in order to calibrate our judgments, to learn which things are high status.
