ArticleRoyal Society open science2022
Condition-dependent trade-offs maintain honest signalling.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Intuitive and deliberative processes underlying commitment signaling for cooperative assortment.iScience · 2026Article
- Estimated costs and benefits of participation in an extreme ritual in Mauritius.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Cooperation is not rewarded by friendship, but generous and selfish students repel each other in social networks.PloS one · 2025Article
- Cue-driven microbial cooperation and communication: evolving quorum sensing with honest signaling.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Condition-dependent trade-offs maintain honest signalling.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Four Puzzles of Reputation-Based Cooperation : Content, Process, Honesty, and Structure.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Escalated begging does not compromise nestling health.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How and why animals and humans signal reliably is a key issue in biology and social sciences that needs to be understood to explain the evolution of communication. In situations in which the receiver needs to differentiate between low- and high-quality signallers, once a ruling paradigm, the Handicap Principle has claimed that honest signals have to be costly to produce. Subsequent game theoretical models, however, highlighted that honest signals are not necessarily costly. Honesty is maintained by the potential cost of cheating: by the difference in the marginal benefit to marginal cost for low versus high-quality signallers; i.e. by differential trade-offs. Owing to the difficulties of manipulating signal costs and benefits, there is lack of empirical tests of these predictions. We present the results of a laboratory decision-making experiment with human participants to test the role of equilibrium signal cost and signalling trade-offs for the development of honest communication. We found that the trade-off manipulation had a much higher influence on the reliability of communication than the manipulation of the equilibrium cost of signal. Contrary to the predictions of the Handicap Principle, negative production cost promoted honesty at a very high level in the differential trade-off condition.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.