Christopher Faraone's analysis in the 1991 volume Magika Hiera sorted the early Greek binding tablets by the situation that produced them, and found four: litigation, where the writer faces an opponent in court; competition, against athletes, actors and performers; trade, against a commercial rival; and courtship. The categories are not equally represented and the boundaries are not always clean, but the sorting produced an observation that reoriented the field.
In all four settings the writer is about to compete and expects to lose. The tablets are not the weapon of the powerful against the weak. They are what someone reaches for when facing a better speaker, a faster runner, a busier shop or a preferred suitor, and the recurring anxiety they express is of being outmatched in public. On that reading the practice is defensive in motivation even where it is aggressive in form, and it belongs with the ordinary competitive pressures of a small, intensely public city rather than with anything exotic.
The reading has been argued with. Not every tablet fits an agonistic setting, some writers are plainly not underdogs, and treating a genre as an expression of anxiety risks explaining away what the writers said they were doing. But it established the terms of the discussion, and the alternative it displaced, which treated the tablets as evidence of a superstitious underclass, was worse. It is also why the material is now read as social history rather than as a curiosity of religion.