Between cheap and costly signals: the evolution of partially honest communication

Zollman, Kevin J. S.; Bergstrom, Carl T.; Huttegger, Simon M.

doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.1878

Cited by 96 publications

(104 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Smith 1991;Johnstone and Grafen 1992;Huttegger and Zollman 2010;Zollman et al 2013). The overall message from these studies is that changes to the parameter values of sometimes known as the 'Sir Philip Sidney' game, though this was not Maynard Smith's original title.…”

Section: An Illustration: the Philip Sidney Gamementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, they prove that hybrid equilibria and separating equilibria never co-exist in the dynamics: changing the parameter values so as to create a separating equilibrium destroys any hybrid equilibrium, and vice versa. This is because a separating equilibrium exists only if a ≥c +rd ≥b (for the classic separating equilibrium) or a ≥rd −c ≥b (for the unorthodox separating equilibrium), Zollman et al (2013) note, it is intuitive to think that, when the population is at a hybrid equilibrium, the needy individuals are truthfully signalling their need, whereas a fraction α of healthy individuals are falsely signalling that they too are needy: 'in plain English, this means that the [healthy] sender sometimes "lies" and is honest at other times' (Zollman et al 2013, p. 4).…”

Section: The Existence Of Hybrid Equilibria For Certain Combinations mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Propositional content in signalling systems

Birch

2014

Philos Stud

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Skyrms, building on the work of Dretske, has recently developed a novel informationtheoretic account of propositional content in simple signalling systems. Information-theoretic accounts of content traditionally struggle to accommodate the possibility of misrepresentation, and I show that Skyrms's account is no exception. I proceed to argue, however, that a modified version of Skyrms's account can overcome this problem. On my proposed account, the propositional content of a signal is determined not by the information that it actually carries, but by the information that it would carry at the nearest separating equilibrium of the underlying evolutionary dynamics. I show that this amended account yields reasonable ascriptions of false propositional content in a well-known formal model of the evolution of communication (the 'Philip Sidney' game), and close with a discussion of the serious but perhaps not insuperable difficulties we face in applying the account to examples of signalling in the real world.

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Section: An Illustration: the Philip Sidney Gamementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Existence Of Hybrid Equilibria For Certain Combinations mentioning

confidence: 99%

Propositional content in signalling systems

Birch

2014

Philos Stud

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“…If there are sufficiently high differential costs or differential benefits in the signaling interaction, then honest signaling becomes a feature of an evolutionarily stable state despite conflicts of interest. However, the handicap principle faces serious problems from both empirical (Borgia, 1993;Haskell, 1994;Caro et al, 1995;Chappell et al, 1995;Horn et al, 1995;Gaunt et al, 1996;McCarty, 1996;Silk et al, 2000) and theoretical perspectives (Bergstrom and Lachmann, 1997;Huttegger and Zollman, 2010;Zollman et al, 2013). We show how the handicap principle is a limiting case of honest signaling, which can also be sustained by other mechanisms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Handicap Principle Is an Artifact

Huttegger¹,

Bruner²,

Zollman³

2015

Philos. of Sci.

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The handicap principle is one of the most influential ideas in evolutionary biology. It asserts that when there is conflict of interest in a signaling interaction signals must be costly in order to be reliable. While in evolutionary biology it is a common practice to distinguish between indexes and fakable signals, we argue this dichotomy is an artifact of existing popular signaling models. Once this distinction is abandoned, we show one cannot adequately understand signaling behavior by focusing solely on cost. Under our reframing, cost becomes one-and probably not the most important-of a collection of factors preventing deception. * To contact the authors write to: Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; email: kzollman@andrew.cmu.edu.† The authors would like to thank audiences in Irvine and Chicago for helpful comments. This work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant EF 1038456. Copyright Philosophy of Science 2015 Preprint (not copyedited or formatted) Please use DOI when citing or quoting AbstractThe handicap principle is one of the most influential ideas in evolutionary biology. It asserts that when there is conflict of interest in a signaling interaction signals must be costly in order to be reliable. While in evolutionary biology it is a common practice to distinguish between indexes and fakable signals, we argue this dichotomy is an artifact of existing popular signaling models. Once this distinction is abandoned, we show one cannot adequately understand signaling behavior by focusing solely on cost. Under our reframing, cost becomes one-and probably not the most important-of a collection of factors preventing deception.2

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“…The first model to explore this idea was offered in economics by Spence (1973), and applied to the case of job markets. Zahavi, independently, soon after applied the same principle to biology (1975), where the choice of mates by females replaced the choice of employees (see also Grafen 1990a, b;Maynard-Smith and Harper 2003;and Zollman, Bergstrom and Huttegger 2013). Since then, a wide range of models of this kind have been developed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such models are severely idealized in many respects, but there are invaluable gains in the explicitness and rigor of the results obtained by working on them, alongside the familiar approach of engaging in informal discussion of more realistic examples. Some areas of concern to philosophers that this research program has already shed light on are the difference between assertions (indicatives) and directives (imperatives) (Huttegger 2007;Zollman 2011); signaling in social dilemmas (Wagner 2014); deception (Zollman, Bergstrom and Huttegger 2013;Martínez 2015), and vagueness (O'Connor 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Common Interest and Signaling Games: A Dynamic Analysis

Martínez¹,

Godfrey‐Smith²

2016

Philos. of Sci.

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We present a dynamic model of the evolution of communication in a Lewis signaling game while systematically varying the degree of common interest between sender and receiver. We show that the level of common interest between sender and receiver is strongly predictive of the amount of information transferred between them. We also discuss a set of rare but interesting cases in which common interest is almost entirely absent, yet substantial information transfer persists in a cheap talk regime, and offer a diagnosis of how this may arise.1

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Between cheap and costly signals: the evolution of partially honest communication

Cited by 96 publications

References 26 publications

Propositional content in signalling systems

Propositional content in signalling systems

The Handicap Principle Is an Artifact

Common Interest and Signaling Games: A Dynamic Analysis

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