Costly signalling theory has become a common explanation for honest communication when interests conflict. In this paper, we provide an alternative explanation for partially honest communication that does not require significant signal costs. We show that this alternative is at least as plausible as traditional costly signalling, and we suggest a number of experiments that might be used to distinguish the two theories.

Two recent overviews of costly signalling theory—Maynard-Smith and Harper ( 2003 ) and Searcy and Nowicki ( 2005 )—both refuse to count signals kept honest by punishment of dishonesty, as costly signals, because (1) honest signals must be costly in cases of costly signalling, and (2) punishment of dishonesty itself requires explanation. I argue that both pairs of researchers are mistaken: (2) is not a reason to discount signals kept honest by punishment of dishonesty (...) as cases of costly signalling, and (1) betrays too narrow a focus on certain versions of costly signalling theory. In the course of so arguing, I propose a new schema for classifying signal costs, which suggests productive research questions for future conceptual and empirical work on costly signalling. (shrink)

The Evolution of Animal Communication is a detailed examination of a wide variety of animal signalling systems. The main focus of the book is explaining how such signalling systems remain reliable when there is apparent evolutionary pressure to deceive. The principle strategy is to appeal to signal costs: signals remain reliable because the potential benefits of deceit are outweighed by the costs of producing the deceptive signal. In this review I show just how difficult this idea is to (...) test, even in the simplest cases. (shrink)

In “Punishment as a Costly Signal of Reform,” Jim Staihar argues that prisons should provide inmates with opportunities to sacrifice in ways that signal their genuine reform to others. I first show why Staihar’s program would be valuable, but only in restricted contexts. I then argue that costly signaling programs will usually be either not sufficiently costly to be taken seriously by the signal’s receivers or not rational for inmates in harsh prison environments to complete. Next, I (...) consider the worry that some inmates will choose to participate in costly signaling programs as mimics, rendering ineffective the signals of truly reformed inmates. What Staihar must say, but does not, is why the non-mimicker’s expected utility gain will be sufficiently higher than the mimicker’s such that only sincere participation is incentivized. I conclude by showing why Staihar’s proposal could nevertheless be a valuable part of a hybrid program of legal punishment. (shrink)

Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis-à-vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. This is because, according to the novel analysis I propose, civil disobedience primarily functions as a costly social signal. It is effective by being reliable, reliable by (...) being costly, and costly primarily by being punished. My analysis will highlight a distinctive feature of civil disobedience: civil disobedients leverage the punitive injustice they suffer to amplify their communicative force. This will lead to two paradoxical implications. First, the instability of the moral status of both civil disobedience and its punishment to the extent where the state may be left with no permissible course of action with regard to punishing civil disobedience. Second, by refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience, the state may render uncivil disobedience—illegal political activities that fall short of the standards of civil disobedience—potentially permissible. (shrink)

Smiling can be interpreted as a costly signal of future benefits from cooperation between the individual smiling and the individual to whom the smile is directed. The target article by Niedenthal et al. gives little attention to the possible mechanisms by which smiling may have evolved. In our view, there are strong reasons to think that smiling has the key characteristics of a costly signal.

Lethal and nonlethal suicidal behaviors are major global public health problems. Much suicidal behavior (SB) occurs after the suicide victim committed a murder or other serious transgression. The present study tested a novel evolutionary model termed the Costly Apology Model (CAM) against the ethnographic record. The bargaining model (BRM) sees nonlethal suicidal behavior as an evolved costly signal of need in the wake of adversity. Relying on this same theoretical framework, the CAM posits that nonlethal suicidal behavior can (...) sometimes serve as an honest signal of apology in the wake of committing a severe transgression, thereby repairing valuable social relationships. To test this hypothesis, the CAM was operationalized into a set of variables, and two independent coders coded 473 text records on suicidal behavior from 53 cultures from the probability sample of the Human Relations Area Files. The results indicated that in ethnographic accounts of suicidal behavior, transgressions, punishment, and shame were relatively common, supporting the CAM, but explicit motives to apologize and evidence of forgiveness were rare, contrary to the CAM. The theoretical variables of the CAM nevertheless formed a cluster distinct from the BRM, and a subset of cases of suicidal behavior were largely related to transgressions and other CAM variables rather than BRM or other variables. Support for the CAM varied widely across cultures, but there was evidence for it in every major geographical region. Exploratory analyses suggested that the CAM is potentially more likely to occur in response to severe conflicts concerning transgressions committed against nonkin. Furthermore, in text records that involved transgressions, male suicidal behavior was most frequently associated with murder, whereas female suicidal behavior was most frequently associated with sexual transgressions. In conclusion, the results provided mixed support for the hypothesis that some instances of suicidal behavior function to send a costly signal of apology to those harmed by a transgression. (shrink)

Reciprocity theory (RT) and costly signaling theory (CST) provide different explanations for the high status of pro-community altruists: RT proposes that altruists are positively and negatively sanctioned by others, whereas CST proposes that altruists are attractive to others. Only RT, however, is beset by first- and higher-order free rider problems, which must be solved in order for RT to explain status allocations. In this paper, several solutions to RT’s free rider problems are proposed, and data about status allocations to (...) Ecuadorian Shuar pro-community altruists are analyzed in light of RT and CST. These data confirm that perceived pro-community altruists are indeed high status and suggest that (1) community residents skillfully monitor the altruism of coresidents, (2) residents who engage in opportunities to broadcast desirable qualities are high status only to the extent that they are considered altruistic, and (3) individuals who sanction coresidents based on coresidents’ contributions to the community are themselves relatively high status. To a greater extent than CST, RT straightforwardly predicts all of these results. (shrink)

The transfer of food among group members is a ubiquitous feature of small-scale forager and forager-agricultural populations. The uniqueness of pervasive sharing among humans, especially among unrelated individuals, has led researchers to evaluate numerous hypotheses about the adaptive functions and patterns of sharing in different ecologies. This article attempts to organize available cross-cultural evidence pertaining to several contentious evolutionary models: kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, and costly signaling. Debates about the relevance of these models focus primarily on the (...) extent to which individuals exert control over the distribution of foods they acquire, and the extent to which donors receive food or other fitness-enhancing benefits in return for shares given away. Each model can explain some of the variance in sharing patterns within groups, and so generalizations that ignore or deny the importance of any one model may be misleading. Careful multivariate analyses and cross-cultural comparisons of food transfer patterns are therefore necessary tools for assessing aspects of the sexual division of labor, human life history evolution, and the evolution of the family. This article also introduces a framework for better understanding variation in sharing behavior across small-scale traditional societies. I discuss the importance of resource ecology and the degree of coordination in acquisition activities as a key feature that influences sharing behavior. (shrink)

In many vertebrates, the enzymatic oxidation of dietary yellow carotenoids generates red keto‐carotenoids giving color to ornaments. The oxidase CYP2J19 is here a key effector. Its purported intracellular location suggests a shared biochemical pathway between trait expression and cell functioning. This might guarantee the reliability of red colorations as individual quality signals independent of production costs. We hypothesize that the ornament type (feathers vs. bare parts) and production costs (probably CYP2J19 activity compromising vital functions) could have promoted tissue‐specific gene relocation. (...) We review current avian tissue‐specific CYP2J19 expression data. Among the ten red‐billed species showing CYP2J19 bill expression, only one showed strong hepatic expression. Moreover, a phylogenetically‐controlled analysis of 25 red‐colored species shows that those producing red bare parts are less likely to have strong hepatic CYP2J19 expression than species with only red plumages. Thus, both production costs and shared pathways might have contributed to the evolution of red signals. (shrink)

Placing our trust wisely is both difficult and important. The challenge of knowing who to trust inheres at least partially in the fact that coinciding interests cannot be taken for granted, and that language, as the principal medium through which would-be interactants make their interests known, doesn’t discriminate between true and feigned proclamations of good intent. Because our patterns of trust partition the world into reliable and unreliable sources, trust is also important: it determines how we distribute our social and (...) epistemic dependencies, which in turn informs much of what we believe and do. The fact that our interactions with the world and each other are increasingly mediated by digital communication technologies affects both these elements of trust: though unabated access to the internet invites us to distribute our dependencies more broadly, the kinds of information environments that we encounter online make misplaced trust a more common occurrence. I argue that a large part of the problem, as well as one possible set of solutions, resides in a deceptively simple dictum: the internet makes talk cheap, and cheap talk can’t be trusted. (shrink)

The Handicap Principle represents a central theory in the biological understanding of signaling. This paper presents a number of alternative theories to the Handicap Principle and argues that some of these theories may provide a better explanation for the evolution and stability of honest communication.

This paper examines and contrasts two closely related evolutionary explanations in human behaviour: signalling theory, and the theory of Credibility Enhancing Displays. Both have been proposed to explain costly, dangerous, or otherwise ‘extravagant’ social behaviours, especially in the context of religious belief and practice, and each have spawned significant lines of empirical research. However, the relationship between these two theoretical frameworks is unclear, and research which engages both of them is largely absent. In this paper we seek to (...) address this gap at the theoretical level, examining the core differences between the two approaches and prospects and conditions for future empirical testing. We clarify the dynamical and mechanistic bases of signalling and CREDs as explanatory models and contrast the previous uses to which they have been put in the human sciences. Because of idiosyncrasies regarding those uses, several commonly supposed differences and comparative advantages are actually misleading and not in fact generalisable. We also show that signalling and CREDs theories as explanatory models are not interchangeable, because of deep structural differences. As we illustrate, the proposed causal networks of each theory are distinct, with important differences in the endogeneity of various phenomena within each model and their explanatory targets. As a result, they can be seen as complementary rather than in competition. We conclude by surveying the current state of the literature and identifying the differential predictions which could underpin more comprehensive empirical comparison in future research. (shrink)

When moral philosophers study ignorance, their efforts are almost exclusively confined to its exculpatory and blameworthy aspects. Unfortunately, though, this trend overlooks that certain kinds of propositional ignorance, namely of the personal costs and benefits of altruistic actions, can indirectly incentivize those actions. Humans require cooperation from others to survive, and that can be facilitated by a good reputation. One avenue to a good reputation is helping others, sticking to moral principles, and so forth, without calculating the personal costs of (...) doing so, e.g., saving someone from a burning building without calculating how personally costly or beneficial it would be. These actions are indirect moral benefits (partly) resulting from that kind of propositional ignorance. (shrink)

Constitutive instrumentalism is the view that responsibility practices arise from and are justified by our being prosocial creatures who need responsibility practices to secure specific kinds of social goods. In particular, responsibility practices shape agency in ways that disposes adherence to norms that enable goods of shared cooperative life. The mechanics of everyday responsibility practices operate, in part, via costly signaling about the suitability of agents for coordination and cooperation under conditions of shared cooperative life. So, there are a (...) range of identifiable conditions where the ordinary operation of responsibility practices—and thus, the usual normative force of the practices—is disrupted. Even so, these conditions are not so widespread as to favor a more thoroughgoing abandonment of responsibility practices. (shrink)

We extend Tomasello's framework by addressing the functional challenge of obligation. If the long-run social consequences of a decision are sufficiently costly, obligation motivates the actor to forgo potential immediate benefits in favor of long-term social interests. Thus, obligation psychology balances the downstream socially-mediated payoffs from a decision. This perspective can predict when and why obligation will be experienced.

Reciprocity theory (RT) and costly signaling theory (CST) provide different explanations for the high status of pro-community altruists: RT proposes that altruists are positively and negatively sanctioned by others, whereas CST proposes that altruists are attractive to others. Only RT, however, is beset by first- and higher-order free rider problems, which must be solved in order for RT to explain status allocations. In this paper, several solutions to RT’s free rider problems are proposed, and data about status allocations to (...) Ecuadorian Shuar pro-community altruists are analyzed in light of RT and CST. These data confirm that perceived pro-community altruists are indeed high status and suggest that (1) community residents skillfully monitor the altruism of coresidents, (2) residents who engage in opportunities to broadcast desirable qualities are high status only to the extent that they are considered altruistic, and (3) individuals who sanction coresidents based on coresidents’ contributions to the community are themselves relatively high status. To a greater extent than CST, RT straightforwardly predicts all of these results. (shrink)

Costly signaling theories of religion contend that religious belief and behaviors function as costly signals of cooperative intent. Such signals are evolvable because they allow likely cooperators to find one another, while excluding potential cheats or free riders that would be unwilling to pay the price associated with sending the signal. As a result, under the right conditions, religious costly signaling can emerge as an evolutionary stable strategy. However, reliability certifying costly signaling can evolve and stabilize (...) only when certain necessary conditions are satisfied. In this paper we argue that current versions of the theory do not adequately demonstrate that these conditions are met. (shrink)

Some collective irrationalities, like epistemically and pragmatically reckless Covid skepticism, are especially dangerous. While we normally have incentives to avoid dangerous beliefs, there are cases in which the danger of a belief is valuable. This is not captured by most accounts of motivated reasoning. I argue that Covid skepticism can function as a costly signal (handicap) so as to more effectively communicate social identity and commitment.

Pre‐play signals that cost nothing are sometimes thought to be of no significance in interactions which are not games of pure common interest. We investigate the effect of pre‐play signals in an evolutionary setting for Assurance, or Stag Hunt, games and for a Bargaining game. The evolutionary game with signals is found to have dramatically different dynamics from the same game without signals. Signals change stability properties of equilibria in the base game, create new polymorphic equilibria, and change the basins (...) of attraction of equilibria in the base game. Signals carry information at equilibrium in the case of the new polymorphic equilibria, but transient information is the basis for large changes in the magnitude of basins of attraction of equilibria in the base game. These phenomena exemplify new and important differences between evolutionary game theory and game theory based on rational choice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sighs and Tears:Biological Signals and John Donne's "Whining Poetry"Michael A. WinkelmanPhebe: Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love. Silvius: It is to be all made of sighs and tears...—Shakespeare, As You Like It (5.2.83–84)ISighs and tears permeate John Donne's poetry, as well they should. Crying in particular functions as a costly signal in biological terms: a blatant, physiologically-demanding, involuntary indicator of hurt feelings. "Tears dim mine (...) eyes," laments Donne's Sappho ("Sappho to Philaenis," l. 56); they are "Fruits of much grief" in "A Valediction of Weeping" (l. 7).1 The theory of costly signaling, related to the handicap principle, was developed fairly recently by Israeli zoologists Amotz and Avishag Zahavi. As the Zahavis explain: "in order to be effective, signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly."2 Initially their idea was resisted, but it has since become widely accepted and it has proven very helpful in making sense of both animal and human behavior. Wasteful conspicuous consumption among upper-class Americans, as noted a century ago by sociologist Thorstein Veblen, exemplifies this handicap principle in action. Like gazelles jumping in place or stotting rather than running away when wolves appear, it indicates fitness by flaunting excess resources.Shedding tears when feeling sad is an evolved human adaptation that broadcasts unhappiness. The wailing of infants demands attention, and crying does something similar for grown-ups: among other things, it tests the commitment of hearers to appease the distressed. For instance, in Chaucer's tragic medieval romance Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus advises [End Page 329] Troilus to provoke a suitable reaction from Criseyde by embellishing his billet-doux: "Towchyng thi lettre... Biblotte it with thi teris ek a lite" (touching thy letter... Be-blot it with thy tears a little).3 Early modern authors also knew their importance. In the words of Robert Herrick, "tears are tongues," while Claudius suspects that "There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves" (Hamlet, 4.1.1).4As a case in point, Donne was overwhelmed by the death of his dear wife Anne in 1617. As his contemporaneous biographer Izaak Walton reported: "his very soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now, grief took so full a possession of his heart, as to leave no place for joy."5 Donne even hoped to be literally entombed with her soon: "as the grave is become her house, so I would hasten to make it mine also; that we two might there make our beds together in the dark" (Walton, p. 51). His miserable mood was revealed in his initial sermon after her demise:His first motion from his house was to preach, where his beloved wife lay buried (in St. Clement's Church, near Temple-Bar, London) and his text was a part of the Prophet Jeremiah's Lamentation: "Lo, I am the man that have seen affliction."And indeed, his very words and looks testified him to be truly such a man; and they, with the addition of his sighs and tears expressed in his Sermon, did so work upon the affections of his hearers as melted and molded them into a companionable sadness; and so they left the Congregation.(Walton, p. 52)Listeners responded in kind to his honest confessions, a textbook illustration of the empathy generated by crying. (A related issue—how and why literature affects audiences so strongly—is currently generating some very interesting work from New Humanists investigating the question from an evolutionary perspective.)These qualities make sighs and tears fundamental to love poetry. In other words, writers deploy them because they reflect universal states of mind, rather than originating as some arbitrary, socially-constructed literary device. The copious opening sonnet of Petrarch's magnificent Rime sparse codifies the theme:6You who can hear in scattered rhymes the soundof all that sighing which once fed my heartin my first youthful error, when in partI was a person of a different kind—my changing manner as I weep and reason, [End Page 330] between vain aspirations and vain grief,leads everyone who has known... (shrink)

Recent research on the evolution of religion has focused on whether religion is an unselected by-product of evolutionary processes or if it is instead an adaptation by natural selection. Adaptive hypotheses for religion include direct fitness benefits from improved health and indirect fitness benefits mediated by costly signals and/or cultural group selection. Herein, I propose that religious denominations achieve indirect fitness gains for members through the use of ecologically arbitrary beliefs, rituals, and moral rules that function as recognition markers (...) of cultural inheritance analogous to kin and species recognition of genetic inheritance in biology. This recognition signal hypotheses could act in concert with either costly signaling or cultural group selection to produce evolutionarily altruistic behaviors within denominations. Using a cultural phylogenetic analysis, I show that a large set of religious behaviors among extant Christian denominations supports the prediction of the recognition signal hypothesis that characters change more frequently near historical schisms. By incorporating demographic data into the model, I show that more-distinctive denominations, as measured through dissimilar characteristics, appear to be protected from intrusion by nonmembers in mixed-denomination households, and that they may be experiencing greater biological growth of their populations even in the present day. (shrink)

Companies disclosing negative aspects in sustainability reports often employ legitimation strategies to present mishaps in a favorable light. In incentivized experiments, we find that nonprofessional investors divest from companies with a negative sustainability-related incident, and that symbolic legitimation (which only evasively explains a negative incident) is not a strong enough signal to counter this divestment behavior. Even substantial legitimation (which reports on measures and behavioral change) mitigates the divestment decisions only if the company reports on concrete remediation actions in morally (...) charged situations, such as social or environmental incidents. We elaborate these results in light of signaling and screening theory, and suggest the conceptual extension of “costly signals” to what we call “valuable signals.” We argue that valuable signals need be not only costly for the sender from an economic perspective but also perceived as appropriate by the receiver from a noneconomic perspective. (shrink)

Anecdotal evidence from many hunter-gatherer societies suggests that successful hunters experience higher prestige and greater reproductive success. Detailed quantitative data on these patterns are now available for five widely dispersed cases (Ache, Hadza, !Kung, Lamalera, and Meriam) and indicate that better hunters exhibit higher age-corrected reproductive success than other men in their social group. Leading explanations to account for this pattern are: (1) direct provisioning of hunters’ wives and offspring, (2) dyadic reciprocity, (3) indirect reciprocity, (4) costly signaling, and (...) (5) phenotypic correlation. I examine the qualitative and quantitative evidence bearing on these explanations and conclude that although none can be definitively rejected, extensive and apparently unconditional sharing of large game somewhat weakens the first three explanations. The costly signaling explanation has support in some cases, although the exact nature of the benefits gained from mating or allying with or deferring to better hunters needs further study. (shrink)

Spite (in the biological or evolutionary sense) is behavior that harms others at a cost to the actor. The presence of spite in human and animal populations presents an evolutionary puzzle. Recent work has suggested small populations and pre-play signaling can have a significant effect on the evolution of spite. Here, we use computational methods to explore these factors in fluctuating populations that may go extinct. We find that the presence of spite can make a population significantly more likely to (...) go extinct, but that this does not preclude the possibility of spite reliably evolving. Additionally, we find that the stochastic effects of small fluctuating populations allow for the evolution and predominance of signal-mediated conditional spite across a wide range of conditions. These results suggest that directed harm, even if costly, can play a significant early role in the evolution of social behaviors and this provides a possible origin for punishment. (shrink)

Emphasis on cross-cultural testing, multiple currencies, multivariate analyses, and levels of explanation makes this an important paper. However, it does not distinguish current function from evolutionary origin; it lacks history. Rather than distinct alternatives, tolerated scrounging (TS), costly signaling (CS), and reciprocal altruism (RA) are likely to be sequentially evolved components of a single integrated system (and kin selection (KS) important only among very close relatives).

I agree with Gurven that costly signaling can explain food-sharing phenomena. However, costly signaling may also explain the role of food sharing in deterring rivals. Details of food-sharing interactions may reveal gains and losses in the social prestige of the interacting parties. The evolutionary models of kin selection and of reciprocal altruism are unstable and should be avoided.

Semiotic objections to market exchange of a good or service maintain that such exchanges signal an inappropriate attitude to the good or to associated individuals, and that this provides a weighty reason against having or participating in such markets. This style of argument has recently come under withering attack from Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (2015a, 2015b). They point out that the significance of any market exchange is explained by a contingent semiotic norm. Given the tremendous value that could be (...) realised by markets in, for instance, bone marrow, or kidneys, deferring to such norms across the board would have very significant opportunity costs. In the absence of any rationale for these norms, they should be ignored completely. We provide one important rationale. Unlike many semiotic objections to markets, we provide a broadly consequentialist semiotic argument. We argue that a range of behaviours play important signalling roles in interpersonal social practices; in particular, in practices involving caring, esteem, and testimony. Markets in these behaviours would distort these signals. Moreover, many of the productive advantages yielded by markets rely in turn on positive market norms that also inhibit the signalling behaviours associated with these nonmarket behaviours. We conclude that there will inevitably be trade-offs between the distributive advantages of new markets and these interpersonal social practices. (shrink)

Four models commonly employed in sharing analyses (reciprocal altruism [RA], tolerated scrounging [TS], costly signaling [CS], and kin selection [KS]) have common features which render rigorous testing of unique predictions difficult. Relaxed versions of these models are discussed in an attempt to understand how the underlying principles of delayed returns, avoiding costs, building reputation, and aiding biological kin interact in systems of sharing. Special attention is given to the interpretation of contingency measures that critically define some form of reciprocal (...) altruism. (shrink)

The emergence of conflicts between environmental safety incidents and protection rights generates sizeable political costs, which endangers the legitimacy of the government as well as political security and stability. This article further examines the role of political costs in environmental issues. First, political costs in relation to environmental issues are defined. An equilibrium strategic analysis is then presented using an evolutionary game model in which the strategic behavioral choices of government, enterprises, and citizens are investigated by embedding political costs in (...) the environmental governance system. Furthermore, the small-signal model was innovatively applied to simulate and analyze the stability of political costs under different equilibrium strategies in the system. The results show the following. Pubic behavior and government are the dominant factors that impact stability and instability, respectively. Public behavior is the core element that affects political cost consumption. When political costs are extremely depleted, the public will neglect economic interests, turn toward environmental interests, and choose the negative participation strategy, which destabilizes the system. The political cost signal at the optimal equilibrium point not only warns the government not to take the desperate action of concealing information asymmetry but also allows the government to let go of its hands to deal with the environmental issues. Corresponding policy recommendations are proposed. (shrink)

Can evolutionary models explain food sharing in traditional human societies? Gurven's analysis cannot rule out any of the models (kin selection, reciprocal altruism, tolerated scrounging, costly signaling, or by-product mutualism), and quantitative partitioning of relative importance is not feasible. For now, the hypotheses seem like the proverbial blind men examining the elephant: each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!

This paper provides strong evidence challenging the self-interest assumption that dominates the behavioral sciences and much evolutionary thinking. The evidence indicates that many people have a tendency to voluntarily cooperate, if treated fairly, and to punish noncooperators. We call this behavioral propensity “strong reciprocity” and show empirically that it can lead to almost universal cooperation in circumstances in which purely self-interested behavior would cause a complete breakdown of cooperation. In addition, we show that people are willing to punish those who (...) behaved unfairly towards a third person or who defected in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game with a third person. This suggests that strong reciprocity is a powerful device for the enforcement of social norms involving, for example, food sharing or collective action. Strong reciprocity cannot be rationalized as an adaptive trait by the leading evolutionary theories of human cooperation (in other words, kin selection, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, and costly signaling theory). However, multilevel selection theories of cultural evolution are consistent with strong reciprocity. (shrink)

The handicap principle stipulates that signal reliability can be maintained if signals are costly to produce. Yet empirical biologists are typically unable to directly measure evolutionary costs, and instead appeal to expenditure as a sensible proxy. However the link between expenditure and cost is not always as straightforward as proponents of HP assume. We consider signaling interactions where whether the expenditure associated with signaling is converted into an evolutionary cost is in some sense dependent on the behavior of the (...) intended recipient of the signal. We illustrate this with a few empirical examples and demonstrate that on this alternative expenditure to cost mapping the traditional predictions of HP no longer hold. Instead of full information transfer, a partially informative communication system like those uncovered by Wagner :163–181, 2013) and Zollman et al. is possible. (shrink)

Selection pressure from health risk is hypothesized to have shaped adaptations motivating individuals to attempt to become valued by other individuals by generously and recurrently providing beneficial goods and/or services to them because this strategy encouraged beneficiaries to provide costly health care to their benefactors when the latter were sick or injured. Additionally, adaptations are hypothesized to have co-evolved that motivate individuals to attend to and value those who recurrently provide them with important benefits so they are willing in (...) turn to provide costly care when a valued person is disabled or in dire need. Individuals in egalitarian foraging bands can provide a number of valuable benefits, such as defense, diplomacy, food, healing, information, technical skill, or trading savvy. We therefore expect that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms motivating the pursuit and cultivation of a difficult-to-replace social role based on the provisioning of a benefit that confers a fitness advantage on its recipients. We call this phenomenon social niche specialization. One such niche that has been well-documented is meat-sharing. Here we present cross-cultural evidence that individuals cultivate two other niches, information and tool production, that serve (among other things) to buffer health risk. (shrink)

There is a common assumption that evolutionary explanations of religion undermine religious beliefs. Do etiological accounts similarly affect the rationality of religious practices? To answer this question, this paper looks at two influential evolutionary accounts of ritual, the hazard-precaution model and costly signaling theory. It examines whether Cuneo’s account of ritual knowledge as knowing to engage God can be maintained in the light of these evolutionary accounts. While the evolutionary accounts under consideration are not metaphysically incompatible with the idea (...) that religious rituals engage God, they cast doubt on whether many, if not all, rituals can do this successfully. (shrink)

Recent analyses of food sharing in small-scale societies indicate that reciprocal altruism maintains interhousehold food transfers, even among close kin. In this study, matrix-based regression methods are used to test the explanatory power of reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and tolerated scrounging. In a network of 35 households in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve, the significant predictors of food sharing include kinship, interhousehold distance, and reciprocity. In particular, resources tend to flow from households with relatively more meat to closely related households with little, (...) as predicted by kin selection. This generalization is especially true of household dyads with mother-offspring relationships, which suggests that studies of food sharing may benefit from distinctions between lineal and collateral kin. Overall, this analysis suggests that exchanges among kin are primarily associated with differences in need, not reciprocity. Finally, although large game is distributed widely, qualitative observations indicate that hunters typically do not relinquish control of the distribution in ways predicted by costly signaling theory. (shrink)

According to the signaling theory of social norms, people comply with social norms in order to signal that they have a low discount rate for future costs and benefits and thereby that they are reliable cooperation partners. But the theory does not take into sufficient account the fact that the signaling value of social norm compliance depends on how many other people that comply, and that the signaling value at high compliance levels is rather low. Therefore, although signaling can explain (...) some compliance with social norms, it is unlikely to be the main explanation. (shrink)

Although an excellent review, the target article displays a bias in favor of reciprocity-based explanations and against alternatives. Tolerated scrounging is more subtle and pervasive than portrayed here. Costly signaling need not be limited to public displays and generalized sharing. The theoretical basis for extensive sharing and other forms of collective action remains unresolved, and standard reciprocity-based explanations are insufficient.

The main goal of the present research is to examine socio-ecological hypothesis on apology and compensation. Specifically, we conducted four studies to test the idea that an apology is an effective means to induce reconciliation in a residentially stable community, whereas compensation is an effective means in a residentially mobile community. In Studies 1, 2a, and 2b, American and Japanese participants (national difference in mobility; Study 1) or non-movers and movers (within-nation difference in mobility; Studies 2a and 2b) imagined the (...) situations in which they were hurt by their friends and rated to what extent they would be willing to maintain their friendships upon receipt of apology or compensation. The results showed that compensation was more effective in appeasing residentially mobile people (i.e., Americans and movers) than stable people (i.e., Japanese and non-movers), while apology was slightly more effective appeasing residentially stable people than residentially mobile people (significant in Study 1; not significant in Studies 2a and 2b). In Study 3, by conducting an economics game experiment, we directly tested the hypothesis that mobility would impair the effectiveness of apology and enhance the effectiveness of compensation. The results again partially supported our hypothesis: In the high mobility condition, compensation increased one’s willingness to continue the relationship with the offender, when compared to willingness in the low mobility condition. The importance of socio-ecological perspective on the forgiveness literature is discussed. (shrink)

Long before the emergence of the modern brand economy, Thorstein Veblen elaborated an economic theory centered on symbolic entities. Based on his thought, this article pursues a view of the brand which escapes both sociological and economic approaches to the phenomenon. Views of the brand as a meaningful object and of the trademark as a signal of product quality omit the simple possibility that the brand, to some extent, is a symbol turned into a commodity. The article develops this possibility (...) using Veblen’s economic theory of display, which can be read as revolving around the notion of a ‘costly symbol’. Things which necessitate waste, and thus materially attest to wealth, enter Veblen’s economy of display insofar as they become valued for their own sake. His theory thus foretells the basic transformation that characterizes the emergence of modern brand economy, where symbols which ostensibly qualified commodities became by themselves economic objects. (shrink)

People often have beliefs that are widely regarded as silly by the experts or by the general population. This leads us to ask why believers believe silly things if they are widely thought to be silly, and then why believers believe the specific things they do. I propose that silly beliefs function as in-group and out-group tribal markers. Such markers act as an honest costly signal; honest and costly because such beliefs are hard to fake. Then I offer (...) a developmentalist account of belief formation, in which beliefs are seen to be the result of a process of acquiring beliefs as cheaply and effectively as possible, leading to a reluctance to abandon early core beliefs later in life. Then I consider whether beliefs even can form a unified worldview, and ask how conversion occurs within the developmental characterization I propose. Finally, I consider how this may play out in terms of crises of faith. (shrink)

This article addresses the question: how do Norwegian Jewish parents reflect on _brit milah_ (circumcision) in a context where this practice is frequently criticised? The data are derived from twenty-five in-depth interviews. Drawing on the perspectives of Catherine Bell and Joseph Bulbulia, the text explores circumcision as part of social life. The parental narratives uncover ongoing negotiations occurring between parents and the minority/majority population. The article argues that circumcision serves as a rite of passage as much for parents as for (...) the infant. For most parents, circumcision is utilised to strengthen a Jewish identity and as a cultural strategy to recreate a Jewish cosmos, even if it entails a costly signal, owing to ambivalence and/or majority opposition. Some individuals find the costs too high and discontinue the practice. However, they all desire to manifest Jewish identity, whether through bodily adaptation or the lack thereof. In this manner, bodies speak louder than words. (shrink)

The question on how the diverse forms of cooperative behavior in humans and nonhuman animals could have evolved under the pressure of natural selection has been a challenge for evolutionary biology ever since Darwin himself. In this chapter, we briefly review and summarize results from the last 50 years of research on human and nonhuman cooperativeness from a theoretical (biology) and an experimental perspective (experimental economics). The first section presents six concepts from theoretical biology able to explain a variety of (...) forms of cooperativeness which evolved in many different species. These are kin selection, mutualism, reciprocity, green-beard altruism, costly signaling, and cultural group selection. These considerations are complemented by two short examples of evolved cooperative behavior, one from microbiology and one from ethology. The second main section focuses on recent experimental research on human cooperativeness. We present a brief review of factors known to impact individual human decision-making in social dilemmas, most prominently communication, punishment, reputation, and assortment. Our conclusion then draws attention to tasks for further research in this area. (shrink)

Limited air strikes present an attractive “middle-ground approach” for policymakers, as they are less costly to coercers than deploying troops on the ground. Policymakers believe that threatening and employing limited air strikes signal their resolve to targets. In this essay, as part of the roundtable on “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” I debunk this fallacy and explain how the same factors that make limited air strikes attractive to coercers are also those that undermine their efficacy as a coercive tool (...) of foreign policy. The limited nature of these air strikes undermines the ability of coercers to effectively signal their resolve. In turn, coercive threats of limited air strikes are less likely to be credible, creating a vicious cycle: policymakers threaten to employ air strikes because they are less costly but then often need to follow through on those threats as target states fail to acquiesce to their demands, precisely because limited air strikes are less costly for the coercer. Limited air strikes, therefore, can actually be a source of conflict escalation and lead policymakers to engage in military action that they would prefer to avoid. I further explain why failing to follow through on such coercive threats can undermine a leader's reputation for resolve and lead to future crisis escalation. Finally, I discuss what this quagmire means for the ethics of the threat and the use of air strikes, particularly for the principles of right intention, likelihood of success, and probability of escalation. (shrink)

After the 2008 financial panic, long-term compensation measures have gained favor as a way to limit managerial opportunism and excessive risk-taking. These measures, which may become mandatory for systemically important institutions, include restriction of stock grants for a period of years, and, in the event of performance reversals, divestment of deferred stock and clawbacks of bonus compensation. These measures are considered uncontroversial enough that some have suggested that all public companies, not just systemically important firms, should adopt them. In this (...) Article, I argue that the benefits of long-term compensation have been overstated while the potential downsides have been largely ignored. Restricted periods for equity grants must be large compared to the executive’s tenure in order to have a significant effect upon behavior overall, and mandatory clawback provisions end up transferring what would have been bonus pay into salary. Furthermore, to the extent that long-term compensation does affect behavior, these consequences are not necessarily good. I show that given fairly reasonable assumptions of executive risk aversion, the information content of long-term and short-term price signals, and managerial control over the timing of project execution and disclosure, a long-term focus can have significant negative effects. (shrink)

Paul Seabright argues that strong reciprocity was crucial in the evolution of large-scale cooperation. He identifies three potential evolutionary explanations for strong reciprocity. Drawing (like Seabright) on experimental economics, I identify and elaborate a fourth explanation for strong reciprocity, which proceeds in terms of partner choice, costly signaling, and competitive altruism.