ArticleScientific reports2018
The Evolution of Covert Signaling.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- The evolution of identity signals for co-ordination in diverse societies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- BERTs of a feather: Studying inter- and intra-group communication via information theory and language models.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Signals of belonging: emergence of signalling norms as facilitators of trust and parochial cooperation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Evidence that cultural groups differ in their abilities to detect fake accents.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Review
- Article
- Social signalling as a framework for second-person neuroscience.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Review
- Laughter and culture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Strategic identity signaling in heterogeneous networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- What is the extent of a frequency-dependent social learning strategy space?Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Ethnic Markers and How to Find Them : An Ethnographic Investigation of Marker Presence, Recognition, and Social Information.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- Can we detect conditioned variation in political speech? two kinds of discussion and types of conversation.PloS one · 2021Article
- Recognizing affiliation in colaughter and cospeech.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- A measure of social coordination and group signaling in the wild.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Human sociality depends upon the benefits of mutual aid and extensive communication. However, diverse norms and preferences complicate mutual aid, and ambiguity in meaning hinders communication. Here we demonstrate that these two problems can work together to enhance cooperation through the strategic use of deliberately ambiguous signals: covert signaling. Covert signaling is the transmission of information that is accurately received by its intended audience but obscured when perceived by others. Such signals may allow coordination and enhanced cooperation while also avoiding the alienation or hostile reactions of individuals with different preferences. Although the empirical literature has identified potential mechanisms of covert signaling, such as encryption in humor, there is to date no formal theory of its dynamics. We introduce a novel mathematical model to assess when a covert signaling strategy will evolve, as well as how receiver attitudes coevolve with covert signals. Covert signaling plausibly serves an important function in facilitating within-group cooperative assortment by allowing individuals to pair up with similar group members when possible and to get along with dissimilar ones when necessary. This mechanism has broad implications for theories of signaling and cooperation, humor, social identity, political psychology, and the evolution of human cultural complexity.
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